by John Updike
“That jerk,” Piet said.
“—and it’s a real mess. Onion rings and gin. The Thornes never go home, apparently. Georgene just sits and drinks, which she never used to do, and Freddy writes an endless pornographic play on his knee.”
“So Janet has to go to a psychiatrist because Georgene drinks?”
“Of course not. Because she thinks she, Janet, is neurotic.”
“Define neurotic.”
Janet had a variety of bikinis and semi-bikinis and Piet pictured her making her confession while lying belly down on the sand, her top untied to give her back an unbroken tan, her cheek pillowed on a folded towel, her breasts showing white when she lifted up on her elbows to explain better or to survey her children.
Angela said, “You know what neurotic is. You do things you know not why. You sleep with women when you’re really trying to murder your mother.”
“Suppose your mother’s already been murdered?”
“Then maybe you’re trying to bring her back to life. The ego tries to mediate between external reality and the id, which is our appetites. The ego carries all this bad news back and forth, but the id refuses to listen, and keeps trying to do whatever it wanted to do, even though the ego has turned its back. I don’t explain it very well, because I don’t understand it, but dreams are a way of letting out these suppressions, which mostly have to do with sex, which mostly has to do with your parents, who have become a superego and keep tormenting the ego from the other side. You know all this, everybody does.”
“Well, do you see anything unnatural about Janet sleeping with Harold now and then? Frank can be a real boor; would you like to go to bed with him for the rest of your life, night after night?”
“It’s not a question of natural or unnatural or right or wrong. It’s understanding why you do things so you can stop doing them. Or enjoy doing them. Certainly Janet does not make herself happy. I don’t think she enjoys her children very much, or sex, or even her money. She could be great, you know. She has everything.”
“But it’s just those people who are unhappy. The people with everything are the ones who panic. The rest of us are too busy scrambling.”
“Piet, that’s a very primitive attitude. You’re saying the rich can’t get through the needle’s eye. The first shall be last.”
“Don’t poke fun of the Bible. What’s your stake in all this hocus-pocus with egos and ids? Why are you so defensive? I suppose you want to go to a psychiatrist too.”
“Yes.”
“The hell you will. Not as long as you’re my wife.”
“Oh? You’re thinking of getting another wife.”
“Of course not. But it’s very insulting. It implies I don’t give you enough sex.”
“There is no such implication.”
“I give you more than you want.”
“Exactly. Maybe a psychiatrist could tell me why I don’t want more. I do and I don’t. I hate myself the way I am. It’s doing awful things to both of us.”
Piet was taken aback; he had inwardly assumed that Angela knew best, that the amount of sex she permitted was the proper amount, and the surplus was his own problem, his own fault. He asked her, “You don’t think our sex life is right?”
“It’s awful. Dreadful. You know that.”
He tried to pin this estimate down. “How would you rate it on a scale of one to ten?”
“Two.”
“Oh come on, it’s not that bad. You can be gorgeous.”
“But so rarely. And I don’t use my hands or mouth or anything. I’m sick. I need help, Piet. I’m turning you into a bully and a cheat and myself into one of those old maids everybody says you wouldn’t believe how beautiful she once was.” Blue-eyed, she began to cry. When she cried, it made her face look fat, like Nancy’s. Piet was touched. They were in the kitchen, she with vermouth and he with gin-and-Bitter-Lemon, after putting the girls to bed. Against the tiny red florets of the kitchen wallpaper Angela’s head, nicely oval, with summer braids and bun, did have a noble neatness that was maidenly. He then realized that in a sociable way she was preparing him for another night without lovemaking. Confessing her frigidity sanctioned it.
He protested, “But everybody loves you. Any man in town would love to go to bed with you. Even Eddie Constantine flirts with you. Even John Ong adores you, if you could understand him.”
“I know. But I don’t enjoy knowing it. I don’t want to go to bed with anybody. I don’t feel I’m a woman really. I’m a kind of cheerful neuter with this sex appeal tacked on as a kind of joke.”
“My poor Angel. Like having Kick Me on your back.”
“Exactly. I really thought, listening to Janet, how much we’re alike. A lot of coziness and being nice to creeps and this disgusted emptiness at heart. We both come from good families and have big bottoms and try to be witty and get pushed around. Do you know she keeps sleeping pills by her bed and some nights doesn’t bother to count how many she takes?”
“Well you don’t do that.”
“But I could. It sounded very familiar, the way she described it. I love sleep, just delicious nothing sleep. I’d love not to wake up.”
“Angela! That’s sinful.”
“The big difference between Janet and me is, I repress and she tries to express. No?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“I’m sure you’ve had an affair with her and know just what I mean. Tell me about us, Piet.”
“You are a scandalous wife. I have never slept with Janet.”
“In a way, I want you to. In a Lesbian way. I felt very drawn, lying beside her on the beach. I think I must be Sapphic. I’d love to have a girls’ school, where we’d all wear chitons and play field hockey and sit around listening to poetry after warm baths.”
“If you have it all analyzed, you don’t need an analyst.”
“I don’t. I’m just guessing. He’d probably say the reverse was true. I can’t stand being touched by other women, for instance. Carol Constantine is always patting, and so does Bea. He might say I’m too heterosexual, for America the way it is now. Why did nobody marry me, for example, until you came along? I must have frightened them away.”
“Or your father frightened them away.”
“Do you want to know something else sick? Can you take it?”
“I’ll try.”
“I masturbate.”
“Sweetie. When?”
“More in the summer than in the winter. I wake up some mornings between four and five, when the birds are just beginning, or a trailer truck goes by on the road, and the sheets feel terribly sensitive on my skin, and I do it to myself.”
“That sounds pretty normal. Do you imagine anybody, any particular man?”
“Not very clearly. It’s mostly sensation. You’re the only man I’ve ever known, so if I picture anyone it’s you. Now why don’t I wake the real you up?”
“You’re too considerate and shy.”
“Oh balls, Piet. Just balls.”
“You must stop talking to Freddy Thorne at parties. Your language is deteriorating.”
“I’m deteriorating. I don’t know how to act in this sexpot.”
“Sexpot?”
“Tarbox.”
“A sexpot is a person, not a place.”
“This one’s a place. Get me out or get me to a doctor.”
“Don’t be silly. The town is like every other town in the country. What you’re saying is you’re too good for this world. You’re too fucking good for any of us.”
“Don’t raise your voice. I hate that high voice you put on.”
“Of course you hate it, you’re supposed to hate it. You hate me, why not hate my voice?”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You must, because I’m beginning to hate you.”
“Ah. Now you’re saying it.”
“Well, I don’t quite mean it. You’re gorgeous. But you’re so self-centered. You have no idea what I’m like inside—”
�
��You mean you’re having an affair and you want me to guess the woman?”
“No I don’t mean that.”
“Foxy Whitman.”
“Don’t be grotesque. She’s pregnant and adores her icy husband and gives me a professional pain in the neck besides.”
“Of course—but why do I imagine it? I know it’s neurotic but every time you go down there and come back so affectionate to me and the children I think you’ve been sleeping with her. I watch her face and feel she has a secret. She’s so tender and gay talking to me. She knows me all too well, they’ve only been in town since March.”
“She likes you. Maybe she’s a Lesbian too.”
“And it’s not just Foxy, it can be Janet or Marcia or even Georgene—I’m madly jealous. And the more jealous I get the less I can bring myself to make love to you. It’s sad. It’s miserable. Your telephone was busy for half an hour yesterday and I made myself a martini at eleven in the morning, imagining it was some woman.”
Her oval face yearned to cry some more but a sophisticated mechanism produced a half-laugh instead. Painfully Piet looked toward the floor, at her bare feet; neither of her little toes touched the linoleum. His dear poor blind betrayed Angel: by what right had he torn her from her omnipotent father? Each afternoon, an hour before quitting, old man Hamilton would walk down his lawn between his tabletop hedges, trailing pipesmoke, bringing a quart bottle of Heineken’s and Dixie cups for the workmen. Piet told her, “I don’t have Appleby’s money. I can’t afford it.”
She asked, “Isn’t there some way I can earn it? I could go into Boston this fall and get enough education credits to teach at least at a private school. Nancy will be away all day in the first grade; I must do something with my time. I can begin therapy, just twice a week, with the education courses. Oh, Piet, I’ll be a wonderful wife; I’ll know everything.”
It grieved Piet to see her beg, to see her plan ahead. She was considering herself as useful, still useful to him, exploring herself bravely toward a new exploitation when to him she was exhausted, a stale labyrinth whose turnings must be negotiated to reach fresh air and Foxy. Foxy asleep, moonlight lying light along her bones and diagonally stroking the down of her brow: at this vision his stomach slipped, his skin moistened, numbness stung his fingertips and tongue. There was a silver path beneath the stars. Obliviously Angela barred his way. “No,” broke from him, panicked as he felt time sliding, houses, trees, lifetimes dumped like rubble, chances lost, nebulae turning, “no; sweetie, don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Let me go!”
At his high voice her face paled; its eager flush and the offer of its eyes withdrew. “Very well,” she said, “go. What are you going to, may I ask?”
Piet opened his mouth to tell her, but the ice shelling his secret held.
Angela diffidently turned her back. “Your routines,” she told him, “are getting less and less funny.”
“Daddy, wake up! Jackie Kenneny’s baby died because it was born too tiny!”
Nancy’s face was a moon risen on the horizon of his sleep. Her eyes were greatly clear, skyey in astonishment. Red tear ducts the tone of a chicken’s wattle. Slaughter. The premature Kennedy had been near death for two days. Nancy must have heard the news over television. “I’m sorry,” he said. His voice was thick, stuffed and cracked. August was Piet’s hay-fever season. Strange, he thought, how pain seeks that couple out. Not wealth nor beauty nor homage shelters them. Suffering tugging at a king’s robe. Our fragile gods.
“Daddy?”
“Mm.”
“Was the baby scared?” Fear, a scent penetrating as cat musk, radiated through the flannel perfume of her infant skin. He had been dreaming. His brother. His brother frozen under glass, a Pope’s remains, Piet apologetic about not having stayed and helped him, been his partner, in the greenhouse. Is het koud, Joop? Frozen by overwork, gathering edelweiss. He turned and explained, to the others, Mijn broeder is dood. Yet also Foxy was in the dream, though not visibly; her presence, like the onflow of grace, like a buried stream singing from well to well, ran beneath the skin of dreaming as beneath reality, a living fragility continually threatened.
“The baby was too little to be scared. The baby never knew anything, Nancy. It had no mind yet.”
“He wants his mommy!” Nancy said, stamping her foot. “He cries and he cries and nobody listens. Everybody is happy he hurt hisself.”
“Nobody is happy,” Piet told her, returning his cheek to the pillow, knowing the child was right, nobody listens. The window against whose panes his upheld hand was silhouetted at night as a monstrous many-horned shape now, at dawn, gave on the plain sweet green of leaves, heart-shaped lilac and feathery, distant elm. Space, it seemed, redeems. Piet reached outwards and pulled Nancy toward him, into the mediating warmth that remained of his sleep. She fought his embrace, feeling its attempt to dissolve and smother the problem. Her wide face studied him angrily, cheated. Freckles small as fly-specks had come to her nose this summer, though they had thought she had inherited her mother’s oily brunette skin. Angela’s serene form pricked by his own uneasy nature. Flecks of lead in the condensed blue smoke of her irises. Sea creatures. Vague light becomes form becomes thought becomes soul and dies. The retina retains nothing. Piet asked, “Where’s Mommy?”
“Up. Get up, Daddy.”
“Go talk to Mommy about the Kennedy baby while Daddy gets dressed.” Last night he had attempted to make love and though Angela had refused him he had slept nude. He did not wish his body to frighten the child. “Go downstairs,” he said. “Daddy feels funny.”
“Are you drunk?” She had learned the word and felt threatened by it; once Frank Appleby had crawled into her playpen and shattered a plastic floating duck, and the next day they had explained to her that he had been drunk.
“No. I was drunk, and now I wish I hadn’t been. My head hurts. I feel sad about the Kennedy baby.”
“Mommy said I would never die until I was an old old lady wearing earrings.”
“That’s absolutely right.”
But—It was unspoken. Impatiently needing to urinate, he threw back the covers; his body filled her eyes and they overflowed into tears. He said, “But the little baby was even smaller than you?”
She nodded helplessly.
Piet kneeled and hugged her and recognized in his arms the mute tepid timbre he had often struck from Angela’s larger form. He said urgently, “But the baby came out too soon, it was a mistake, God never meant it to live, like a big strong chubby girl like you.” His nakedness in air, the stir of her skin in his arms, was gently leading his penis to lift. A cleft or shaft of sun.
Nancy pulled from his arms and shouted from the head of the stairs, “God should have teached the baby not to come out!”
Angela called, “Piet, are you up?”
“Be down in three minutes,” he answered. He half dressed and shaved and finished dressing. Today was to be a deskwork day. From the bedroom windows his square lawn looked parched. A droughty summer. Prevailing winds shifting. Ice-caps melting. The great forests thinning. On Indian Hill clouds of dust coated the constructions, seeped into the unfinished frames cluttered by leaning plywood and loose electric cable. Here and there in the woods a starved maple turning early. The crickets louder at night. But from Foxy Whitman’s windows the marshes, needing no rain, sucking water from the mother sea, spread lush and young, green as spring and carved like plush by the salt creeks’ windings. Some afternoons, the tide high, the marshes were all but submerged, and Piet felt the earth reaching for the moon. Atlantis. Ararat.
The narrow farmhouse stairs descended through two landings and stopped a step from the front door, in a hall so cramped the opening door banged the newel post. On Piet’s right, in a living room which the crowding lilacs left rather dark and where like sentinels in castellar gloom the empty glasses used last night by the little-Smiths and Saltzes and Guerins were still posted on arms and edges of furniture, Nancy and Ruth were watching television. A Brit
ish postal official, relayed by satellite, supercilious and blurred, was discussing yesterday’s seven-million-dollar robbery of a London mail train, the biggest haul in history—“not counting, of course, raids and confiscations which should properly be termed political acts, if you follow me. As far as we can determine, there was nothing political about these chaps.” Television brought them the outer world. The little screen’s icy brilliance implied a universe of profound cold beyond the warm encirclement of Tarbox, friends, and family. Mirrors established in New York and Los Angeles observed the uninhabitable surface between them and beamed reports that bathed the children’s faces in a poisonous, flickering blue. This poison was their national life. Not since Korea had Piet cared about news. News happened to other people.
On his left, in the already sun-flooded kitchen, Angela laid out breakfast plates on four rectangular mats. Dish, glass, spoon, knife. Her nipples darkly tapped her nightie from within. Her hair was down, swung in sun as she moved, blithe. She seemed to Piet to be growing ever more beautiful, to be receding from him into abstract realms of beauty.
He said to her, “Poor Nancy. She’s all shook up.”
Angela said, “She asked me if the Kennedy baby was up in Heaven with the hamster going round and round in the wheel. Honestly I wonder, Piet, if religion’s worth it, if it wouldn’t be healthier to tell them the truth, we go into the ground and don’t know anything and come back as grass.”
“And are eaten by cows. I don’t know why all you stoics think death is so damn healthy. Next thing you’ll get into a warm bath with your wrists slit to prove it.”
“Oh, you do like that idea.”
Nancy came into the kitchen sobbing. “Ruthie says—Ruthie says—”
Ruth followed, flouncing. “I said God is retarded.” She sneered at Nancy, “Baaby.”
