Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Well, without everything being spelled out, that’s more or less Carol’s story too.”

  “Carol and I, we think alike.”

  “Oh, don’t say that!” Foxy urgently begged, touching his lips, recalling them to the incomparable solemnity of their sin.

  Angela brought home new refinements of Irene’s version. “She took me aside after nursery school almost in tears and said Carol’s been spreading around the story that she, Irene, felt ostracized in town because she was Jewish. She wanted me to know this was perfectly untrue, that she and Ben agree they’ve always been very warmly treated, and they’d be very upset to have their friends think they thought otherwise. She says Carol is extremely neurotic, that Kevin is the way he is because of how she’s treated him. Whenever she wants to paint she locks him in his room and some mornings he screams so much the neighbors have complained. Irene also said her point about Bernard’s being in the Christmas play has been deliberately misunderstood. She never said they shouldn’t put on a Christmas pageant; she just thinks to be fair they should have some kind of Hanukkah observance too.”

  “Yeah,” Piet said, “and why not make the kids celebrate Ramadan by not eating their box lunches?”

  Angela, who had been considering Irene’s cause seriously, from the standpoint of an hereditary liberal, told Piet, “I don’t know why you bother to go to church, it seems to do you less and less good.”

  Georgene threw a lurid borrowed light upon the mystery. Over the phone, she told Piet, “Freddy’s been talking to Eddie—”

  “Freddy and Eddie, they’re always ready,” Piet said. Gallagher was off talking to the nuns who were about to buy the mortgaged estate in Lacetown, and Piet was alone in the office.

  “Don’t interrupt. Eddie told him that Ben late at night used to talk about the work he was doing on these rockets—is there a thing called the Titan?—and the ridiculous waste and backbiting between the different departments and government representatives, and some of the ideas they were working on with solid propellants and self-correcting guidance systems, which I guess Ben helped with, and Eddie was shocked, that Ben would be telling him all this. He thinks if he told him he must have told others, and the government got wind of it, and had him released.”

  “Don’t you think Ben would put any spy to sleep that tried to listen to him?”

  “Freddy thinks that Eddie might have been the one to turn Ben in. I mean, he is in aeronautics, so he would know who to report him to.”

  “Why would he want to ruin his wife’s lover? You think Eddie minds?”

  “Of course he minds. That woman has put him through hell. She’s insane. She’s an utter egotist.”

  “More hell than vice versa?”

  “Oh, much more. Eddie’s just a little boy who likes to play with engines.”

  “Huh. I distrust all little-boy theories of male behavior. They rob us of our sinful dignity.”

  “Hey. When are you coming to see me again?”

  “I just did.”

  “That was a month ago.”

  “Time flies.”

  “God this is humiliating. The hell with you, Piet Hanema.”

  “What have I done?”

  “Nothing. Forget it. Good-bye. I’ll see you at parties.”

  “Wait.”

  She had hung up.

  The next day she called again, imitating a secretary. “I just wanted to report, sir, in regard to our conversation as of yesterday a.m., that two men in suits and hats were seen surveying and then entering the Saltz residence on West Prudence Street, Tarbox.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “A patient of Freddy’s told him, very excited. Who would wear hats in Tarbox but FBI agents? Apparently the entire town knows about Ben.”

  “Do you think he’ll be electrocuted like the Greenbergs or traded to Russia for Gary Powers?”

  “Ha ha. Ever since you’ve been sleeping with Foxy you’ve been high as a kite. You’re riding for a fall, Piet. This time I am not going to catch you.”

  “I have not been sleeping with that extremely pregnant and very chaste lady. Hey. I dreamed about you last night.”

  “Oh. A nice dream?”

  “Not bad. It was in a kind of wine cellar. Freddy was running for selectman this fall and you took me down into the cellar to show me the champagne you were going to use if he won. Then down there, surrounded by old wicker furniture, you asked me to smell the new perfume you were wearing behind the ear. You said, very proudly, you had bought it at Cogswell’s Drug Store. I put my face deep into your hair and you gently put your arms around me and I realized you wanted to make love and woke up. Somehow you had much longer hair than yours. You had dyed it red.”

  “It wasn’t me at all. You bastard.”

  “It was, Georgene. You talked just like yourself, in that reedy indifferent voice, about Freddy’s chances of winning.”

  “Come see me, Piet.”

  “Soon,” he promised.

  That evening, Angela said, “Irene was almost funny today. She said that Ben with nothing to do keeps entertaining these two young Mormons. They think they’re a lost tribe of Israel, so it’s really like a family reunion with Ben.”

  “What Mormons?”

  “You must have noticed them walking around town, what do you do all day? Two young men with suits and broad-brimmed Western-style hats on. Apparently it’s part of every Mormon’s life to go out and proselytize some benighted area. That’s us. We’re Hottentots as far as they’re concerned.”

  “I heard they were FBI men.”

  “Irene says that’s what everybody thinks. She says Carol has been spreading it all around that Ben betrayed government secrets.”

  “That woman is losing her marbles. Carol.”

  “I saw her in the A & P today and she couldn’t have been sweeter. She said Eddie wants to take me for another ride on his Vespa.”

  At the center of this storm of gossip, the destroyed man raked leaves, made repairs and painted within his house, took his sons to the beach on clear weekend afternoons. Summer over, the beach was restored to the natives, who ran their dogs along the running surf and tried to raise kites above the sea of dunes. The clouds changed quality, changed from the puffy schooners of hot weather to grayer, longer bodies, with more metal in them. The horse trailers of North Mather stables parked in the Tarbox lot and teen-age girls galloped across the dun-colored flats of low tide. Here one Sunday morning in mid-October, Piet, walking with Ruth—since he had not gone to church today she had not sung in the choir—saw Ben Saltz at a distance, holding little Jeremiah by the hand, stopping with Bernard to examine shells and instructive rubbish in the wrack. Piet wanted to approach Ben, to express fellow-feeling, but he dreaded the man as he dreaded the mortally diseased. His own life felt too precarious to be drawn into proximity with a life that had truly broken through. Angela thought they should have the Saltzes over, just the two couples, for a relaxed dinner. Piet resisted, then consented; but Irene coolly refused. She and Ben had agreed that, since they were not in a financial position to repay hospitality, they would not accept any. By tacit agreement among the other couples the Saltzes were no longer invited to parties, which would have been painful for them and have embarrassed the Constantines. Still Piet yearned to peer into the chasm, to spy out the face of catastrophe. He went out of his way at all hours to drive by their house. The Saltzes’ lights went dark early at night; the Constantines’ defiantly blazed. They were seeing a lot of the Guerins, the Thornes, and the Gallaghers. In the mornings, the older children—Bernard, Laura—of each household set off to school along parallel paths across the much-traversed green; before evening they returned together, talking more seriously than children should have to.

  One windy weekday afternoon Piet, rounding the green in his pick-up truck, saw Ben putting up storm windows. They were stacked, a leaning deck of great glass cards, at the side of the house, and Ben was puzzling over the numbers. Wanting to hail him, yet afraid to s
low down and be caught, Piet gave himself only a glimpse; but it was a glimpse, shockingly, of happiness. Ben was letting his beard grow back. His archaic profile as it bent to the Roman numerals chiseled on the upper edges of the storm windows seemed asleep and smiling. His air was of a man who deserved a holiday like any other, who had done something necessary and was now busy surviving, who—Piet’s impression was—had touched bottom and found himself at rest, safe.

  Piet dreamed, at this same time of his life, that he was in an airplane, a big new jet. The appointments, in beige and aqua, of the immense tubular interior were vivid to his eyes, though he had never ridden in such a plane. Since the army, he had flown rarely; the last time had been two years ago, to visit his brother in Michigan. The plane to Detroit had been a sooty-engined Electra, shivering in flight like an old hound. Now the luxurious plane of his dream was gliding as if motionless through the sky; the backs of heads and hands receded tranquilly down the length of aqua-carpeted aisle. The pilot’s voice, too musical and southern to be Eddie Constantine’s, jubilantly announced over the loudspeaking system, “I think we’ve slipped it, folks!” and through his little rubber-sealed porthole Piet saw a wall of gray cloud, tendrilous and writhing, slowly drift backward, revealing blue sky. They had evaded a storm. Then the plane rocked and jerked in the bumpy air currents; it sank flatly through a gap in atmosphere, grabbed for something, missed, slipped, and tilted. The angle of tilt increased; the plane began to plunge. The huge hull rushed toward the earth. The delicately engineered details—the luminous stenciled seat numbers, the chrome rivets holding the tinted head napkins—stayed weirdly static amid the rising scream of the dive. Far down the aisle, a stewardess, her ginger hair in a high stiff coiffure, gripped the seats for support, and the curtains hiding the first-class section billowed. Otherwise there was no acknowledgment of the horror, no outcry. Piet thought, The waste. Such ingenious fragility utterly betrayed. The cost. The plane streamed straight down. The liquid in Piet’s inner ear surged, froze. He knew there could be no pulling from this dive and awoke in darkness, convinced of his death.

  Angela’s breathing was moist and regular beside him. Her body tilted the mattress toward the middle. Her honeyish pungent female smell monopolized the warm bed. Vague light limned the ridges of the pleated linen shade of the lamp on the bureau by the window. His house. A trim ship motionless on the swell of the night. He raised his hand from beside his cheek. Its black silhouette showed cornute against the cruciform mullions and blue panes. His hand. He made the fingers twiddle. He was alive. Yet, having faced the full plausibility of his death—the screaming air of the dream had been so willing to swallow him, so voraciously passive—he was unable to reënter the illusion of security that is life’s antechamber. Heavy as lead he lay on the thinnest of ice. He began to sweat. A ponderous creeping moisture coated his skin and, like a loose chain dangling from his stomach, nausea, the clumsy adrenal nausea of panic, threatened to wrench him inside out. Nimbly he turned and lay on his back.

  He had experienced this panic before. Antidotes existed. Picture snow. Picture a curved tent secure against the rain. Pretend the blankets are shelter. Think of skin. Piet tried to lull himself with bodies of women he knew. Foxy’s powdery armpits and petaled cleft simpler than a rose. The freckled boniness below Georgene’s throat. Her factual nakedness and feather-cut hair full of gray, dulled his lust to see it, perhaps lovelessness let them come always together. Unlike Angela’s ambrosial unsearchable. Carol’s lissome waist and nerved-up dancer’s legs. Bea Guerin’s swarmy drunken breasts, nectar sweat between. The rank elastic crotch of the step-ins of Annabelle Vojt who, though both were virgins, would allow him, in that rain-pattered cavity of a car parked amid nodding weedy hay, to kiss there, and exploringly tongue, applying mind to matter, his face upside-down between her thighs, his broad back aching, crickets trilling, her tranced fingers combing his uncombable hair. Of pious family, in the hamburger heat, the radio down but glowing, she would sometimes wordlessly remove the secret wall of silk, heaving with a motion that disturbed him by being expert her pelvis up free from the car seat and tugging her pants down from behind; to that mute silver flicking and heave, leaping arched from memory like a fish, he held tight a second, then it too, with the other pale bodies, proved too slippery to ride into sleep. He was too agitated to sink. Nerves and atoms whirled and scintillated within him. Hollow-boned like a bird, he would forever hover, retasting the same sourness.

  Angela’s even breathing broke pace; she turned with a slithering turmoil of sheets, and the stride of her unconscious sighing resumed.

  Horribly awake, Piet tried to pray. His up-pouring thoughts touched nothing. An onyx dust of gas above his face. Something once solid had been atomized. Thou shalt not covet. Whosoever lusteth in his heart. Pedrick’s foolish twisting. A dour desert tribe: Dead Sea. Pots broken by a shepherd boy. Orange dust. One more dismal sect. Mormons. Salt Lake. Hymnals unopened all week stink of moldy paper: unwrapping a fish. Forgive me. Reach down and touch. He had patronized his faith and lost it. God will not be used. Death stretched endless under him. Life a scum, consciousness its scum. Piet lay as a shimmering upon an unfounded mineral imperviousness. His parents were twin flecks of mica squeezed in granite. No light touched them into light. The eternal loss of light: in the plane’s plunge, not knowing he was dreaming, honest to his bones, he had phrased it so to himself, like any unchurched commuter whose day takes a bad turn. Why tease God longer? Busy old fellow has widows and orphans to interview, grieving Tehranese, still benighted. Bite down on death. Bite down. No screaming within the plane. All still in falling. Stoic grace learned from movies. Hope of heaven drains the sky. No Hottentot he. Away with the blindfold. Matter mostly nothing, a titter skinning a vacuum. Angela sleeps in the cradle of the stars, her uncle’s web. Nothing sacred. Triune like cock and balls: Freddy Thorne. Oh Lord, this steepness of sickness, this sliding. Patient parents thumbing home seeds in peat had planted a tree whose fruit he had fed to women. The voracious despair of women had swallowed God.

  From his height of fear Piet saw his life dwindled small, distinct. The three new houses, sold, on Indian Hill as from a helicopter. Now Gallagher wanted acres more, saw himself a developer, a builder of cities. Gallagherville. Terrytown. Hanema Plaza. Angela Place. Maps, prospecti, underground garages, a grateful Commonwealth votes its thanks. Sir Matthew Galleyslave, having given employment to thousands, true prince of the Church, dinner at the White House starring Pablo Casals and Ruby Newman. And Mr. President, this is my partner. That flinty Irish smile, stiff-backed, wall-eyed. Jack: This cunning little fellow? May I pet him? Another voice, more musical: Does he bite?

  Feeling his thoughts expand into nonsense, Piet went tense with gratitude, with eager anticipation of sleeping, and snapped wide awake again, his heart churning. He needed to touch something. He could never rise with Gallagher because he needed to touch a tool. Grab the earth. The plane had plunged and he had been without resources, unchurched, unmanned. He needed to touch Foxy, her nipples, her belly, in oblique moonlight. Her head was full of braid and crosses. She believed. She adored his prick. With billowing gauzy width she had flung herself onto him, was his, his woman given to him.

  Angela obliviously stirred, faintly moaned. Piet got out of bed and went downstairs for a glass of milk. Whenever he was most lovesick for Foxy, that summer, he would go to the refrigerator, the cool pale box full of illuminated food, and feed something to the void within. He leaned his cheek against the machine’s cold cheek and thought of her voice, its southern shadows, its playful dryness, its musical remembrance of his genitals. He spelled her name with the magnetized alphabet the girls played with on the tall blank door. FOXY. PIET L VES FOXY. He scrambled the letters and traveled to bed again through a house whose familiar furniture and wallpaper were runes charged with malevolent magic. Beside Angela, he thought that if he were beside Foxy he could fall asleep on broken glass. Insomnia a failure of alignment. A rumbling truck passed, vanishing.r />
  The weight of this stagnant night. Fear scurried inside him, seeking a place to stop. How Annabelle would spread her legs as if imperiously to seize his entire face in the lips of her young swamp. Foxy’s delicately questioning sideways glint: a dry mind that sized him up through veils of rapture. His daughters’ anxious great eyes: in a sense what a mercy to die and no longer torment his children with the apparition of their father. The death of another always a secret relief. Tides of life swing up to God for slaughter. Slum clearance. Dearest Lord do shelter Foxy my shyest candleflame from this holocaust Thy breath. Amen. Revolving terror scooped the shell of him thin. A translucent husk emptied of seed, Piet waited to be shattered.

  The Chinese knife across the eye. The electric chair dustless in the tiled room. The earthquake that snaps cathedral rafters. The engorged mineral ocean. The knotted silk cord. The commando’s piano wire. The crab in the intestine. The chicken bone in the windpipe. The slippery winter road. The misread altimeter. The firing squad crushing out its Spanish cigarettes in the baked clay courtyard, another dull dawn, exhaling philosophically. The boy from Ionia. The limp-limbed infant smothered in his crib. The rotting kidney turning the skin golden. The shotgun blast purging the skull of brains. The massive coronary. The guillotine. The frayed elevator cable. The booming crack and quick collapse of ice: in Michigan on the lakes the fishermen would ride their jalopies to the bottom in the air bubble and with held breaths ascend to the jagged light. The threshing machine. The random shark. Puffy-tongued dehydration. Black-faced asphyxia. Gentle leprosy. Crucifixion. Disembowelment. Fire. Gas in the shower room. The scalper’s hurried adze. The torturer’s intent watchmaker’s face. The pull of the rack. The suck of the sea. The lion’s kittenish gnawing. The loose rock, the slipping boot, the dreamlike fall. The anger of kings. The bullet, the bomb, the plague, the wreck, the neglected infection, the mistaken reaction. The splintered windshield. The drunken doctor’s blunder shrugged away. The shadow of fragility on the ice, beneath the implacably frozen stars: the muffled collapse, the opaque gasp, the unresisted plunge.