Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Angela?” His voice sounded alien, dragged from a distance. “Could you wake up a little and put your arm round me? I’ve had a nightmare.”

  She half-woke and half-obeyed, turning toward him but sinking into sleep again on her stomach; her arm tried to reach him but lapsed at her side. He listened for the glinting of the hamster’s wheel and instead heard the refrigerator shudder and break into purring.

  Dear Piet—

  The tide is coming in high and so blue it seems ink. A little boy in a red shirt has been anchored in a rowboat off the island ever since my second cup of coffee. I have been thinking about us and there seems a lot to say until I sit down and try to write it. When we were together yesterday I tried to explain about Ken and me and “coming” but you chose to be haughty and hurt—my lover, don’t be. How timid I feel writing that odd word “lover.” And ridiculous too. But you must have a name and what else are you of mine?

  Ken is my husband. I love him as such. I feel right, is what I tried to say, making love to him. There is no barrier between us except boredom which is not so serious since life is such a daily thing anyway. With you there are many barriers—my guilt of course, a true shyness and fear of seeming inadequate compared with the other women you’ve had, our fear of being discovered, a sometimes (I suggest) needless impatience and hurry in you, your annoying habit of mocking yourself and waiting to be contradicted, and even your extreme lovingness toward me, which I find sometimes dismaying, let me confess. To all this add the libidinous vagaries of the pregnant state. These barriers are piled high, so my not coming, dear Piet, does not mean I do not go high with you. I go very high. Do not ask me to say more. Do not ask me to deny my pledge to Ken—which I felt at the time and still feel is sacred above and beyond all discomfort and discontent—or try to compete. There is no competition. I do not understand why I have taken you into my life at this time of all times but the place you occupy is one you have created and you must not be insecure in it.

  I have brought this letter outside to the sun, me in my underwear, casually enough, since none of my bathing suits fit. I trust the plumbers not to suddenly arrive. The boy in red has gone away. I don’t think he caught anything. Rereading this, it seems so poorly expressed, so self-protective and hedgy, I wonder if I will give it to you. Your sleepy but fond

  Foxy

  Undated and not always signed, Foxy’s letters accumulated in the back of a Gallagher & Hanema office filing cabinet, under the carbon paper, where Gallagher would never look. They were of varying shapes and sizes. Some consisted of as many as four sheets smoothly covered on both sides with a swift upright script. Others, holding a few hurried words, were mere scraps passed wadded into Piet’s hand at parties. Orderly, superstitious, Piet saved them all, and fitfully read them through in the numb days following his night of dread. He read them as an insignificant person seeks himself in a fable whose hero is a remote ancestor.

  My lover!—

  My whole house breathes of you—the smell of planed wood is you, and the salt wind is you, and the rumpled sheets whose scent is sweetest and subtlest—of us—is you. I have been all open windows and blowing curtains and blue view these last hours—so much yours I must write and tell you, though Ken is downstairs waiting to go to the little-Smiths. In a few minutes I will see you. But surrounded by others. Accept this kiss.

  Other letters were more expansive and discursive, even didactic. Piet felt in them an itch to shape him, to rectify and justify.

  Holy Firecracker Day

  My dear lover—

  I have gone far down the beach, the public end, past the holiday crowds (Italian grandmothers with aluminum chairs sitting right in the surf, skirts up to their knees and knitting in their laps) to where none of our mutual friends might ambush me. It is curiously different down here, cliffy and pebbly, and windier and the water choppier than the sheltered stretch where our lovely Tarbox matrons and their offspring dabble. Lacetown lighthouse seems very close in the haze. Now and then a pair of Boston or Cape fairies go by in their skimpy trunks—Freddy calls them ball-huggers—holding hands. Otherwise I am alone, a pregnant and therefore pass-proof lass with a crinkled New Yorker on her knees for a writing pad, coining funny phrases for her lover, who thinks he is a Jew.

  I explained badly about Peter. You are not he, the coincidence of your names notwithstanding. For years he has ceased to be a name for me, just a shadow, a shadow between me and my parents, between me and Ken. He didn’t love me—I amused him, awkward and innocent shiksa as I was. I was a toy for him (toy/goy), and the frightening thing I discovered, I liked it. I loved being used/abused. There was nothing he could do that did not intensify my love for him, even his terrible mood of coldness, the scorn that wished me away. He needed to be alone more than I could let him be alone. It was all very young and uncontrolled and must have been influenced for each of us by how our parents had behaved. My father’s absences had been cruel for my mother and as long as Peter was not absent from me, even if his language was foul, I was grateful. Or perhaps I was attracted to just that pride, a kind of mechanical selfishness, in which he resembled my father. Do you know, he has become famous? His picture was in Time a year or so ago, with a junk sculpture he had welded. He still lives in Detroit. With his mother, unmarried. So I had years when I could have flown to him, years of being childless with Ken, and I didn’t. It would have been like eating chocolate sundaes again.

  You and I are different, surely. With you I feel for the first time what it is like not to be young. With you I feel that I at last have exercised my right of choice—free of habit or command or compulsion. In a sense you are my first companion. Our sweet sin is strangely mixed with the sweetness of pregnancy—perhaps Ken waited too long to make me pregnant and now that it is here I have turned toward someone else with the gratitude. I trust you and fear you. I feared Peter, and trust Ken. The conjunction is uniquely yours.

  Am I proposing marriage? Scheming woman!! Nothing of the kind—I am so securely tied to Ken I dare open myself to you as I might to a stranger in a dream, knowing I was all the time securely asleep beside my husband. Please do not fear I will try to take you from Angela. I know even better than you how precious she is to you, she and the home you have made together, how well, truly, you are wed. Isn’t it our utter captivity that makes us, in our few stolen afternoons together, so free? My hand is tired and shakes. Please don’t leave me yet. My flying Dutchman—contradiction in terms?

  Later.

  I went down to swim—delicious, like being inside a diamond, the water at Woods Hole was much warmer—and examined the pebbles. Did you know, I once took a term of geology? I recognized basalt and quartz, the easy ones, black and white, God and the Devil, and then a lot of speckly candyish stones I mentally lumped as “granite.” So much variety! And what a wealth of time we hold in our hands in the smoothness of these stones! I wanted to kiss them. Remembering your smoothness. I do love the beach. I wonder if I was ever myself until Ken moved me into sight of the sea.

  Then, to my horror, who should come along but Janet and Harold! Damn!! It was I who was embarrassed, and they who should have been. They were brazen as always—they had left Frank and Marcia back with the children and what was I doing way up here in Fairyland? I told them the walk was necessary exercise and that I wanted to sketch the Lacetown lighthouse. They noticed that I had been writing a letter and were very twinkly and jolly and I think genuinely like me but seemed depressingly corrupt. Who am I to pass judgment? Yet I seem very righteous within myself still and virtually cried, as you saw, when I turned out to be Christine Keeler.

  Still later.

  I fell asleep. So strange to wake in floods of light, mouth bloated and hair full of sand. I must go home. Ken is tennising with Gallagher and Guerin and I don’t know who the fourth is. You? Answer to a riddle: the fourth of July.

  Piet, have I explained anything? I think I wanted somehow to untangle us from those others, to spare you that woeful wild look that come
s into your eye when it’s time to be back on the job or you imagine the phone in your office ringing. In a way, because you suspect a Heaven somewhere else (like Harold’s French: a constant appeal to above), you live in Hell, and I have become one of the demons. I don’t want this, I want to be healing—to be white and anonymous and wisecracking for you, the nurse I suppose my father said I was too good to be. I worry that you’ll do something extravagant and wasteful to please your funny prickly conscience. Don’t. Have me without remorse. Remorse is boring to women. Your seducing me is fine. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Better you than Freddy Thorne.

  Which is a way of concealing that falling asleep on the sand has sexed me up. I crave your strength and length, and remain,

  Your mistress

  Oh blessed, blessed Piet—

  How tactless, how worse than tactless wrong I was to use you today as an audience for my feelings about Ken. How comic your anger was—you seemed amazed that I had feelings about him—and how sad, in the end, your effort to turn your anger into a joke. It is one of your charms that you make both too much and too little of yourself, with a swiftness of alternation that is quite hypnotic. But your departure left me depressed and with a need to try again.

  When I said that he and I had been married seven years whereas you and I had known each other a few months it was not a criticism—clearly your newness in many ways works to your advantage. But in the mysterious (as much to me as to anyone) matter of my sexual response, it is an advantage in Stage I, a dis- in Stage II. Maybe men like new women while women perform best with men they know. There is something of trust in this—there really is, whenever you spread your legs, the flitting fear you are going to be hurt—and something of the sad (why do I find it sad?) fact that with women personality counts for less in sex than with men. In actual sex as opposed to all the preamble. A dull familiar trustworthy tool is all we ask. Female genitalia are extremely stupid, which gets us into many a fix our heads would get us out of.

  Why must I apologize to you for continuing to enjoy my husband? You have woken me from my seven years’ sleep and Ken benefits. Isn’t it enough for your ego to promise you that you exist in dimensions where Ken is blank? And that his ignorance of our affair, of what consumes my inner life, makes him seem a child, a child behind glass, a child willfully behind glass. He has never been very curious about life, above the molecular level. He is a masked man who climbs a balcony to be with me at night. I discover in myself a deep coldness toward him. In this coldness I manipulate our bodies and release the tension you have built in me.

  Yet do let me love him as I can. He is my man, after all. Whereas you are only a man. Maybe the man. But not mine.

  I suppose I am confused. Having decided, long before we slept together, to have you, I determined to keep you each in place, in watertight compartments. Instead, the two of you are using my body to hold a conversation in. I want to tell you each about the other. I live in fear of calling out the wrong name. I want to confide you to Ken, and Ken to you—he is unhappy about his career, and apprehensive about our unborn child, and turns to me more often now than since our first year of marriage. Of course, I am so safe. He pierces me saying, You can’t impregnate the pregnant. You can’t kill the dead. Compared to you it is mechanical but then Ken’s career is to demonstrate how mechanical life is.

  Yours is to build and blessed lover you have built wonderfully in me. I breathe your name and in writing this I miss your voice, your helpful face. Do you really think we bore God? You once told me God was bored with America. Sometimes I think you underestimate God—which is to say, you despise the faith your fear of death thrusts upon you. You have struck a bad bargain and keep whittling away at your half. You should be a woman. The woman in the newspaper holding a dead child in her arms knows God has struck her. I feel Him as above me and around me and in you and in spite of you and because of you. Life is a game of lost and found. I must start Ken’s supper. Unapologetic love. Love.

  Piet turned with relief from these narcissistic long letters to a small scrap asking: Are you still sleeping with Georgene?

  After she had told him about the Jew, he had told her about Georgene. In September her instinct, or gossip, informed her that he had resumed. In truth, there had been the unplanned lapse on the day the Kennedy infant died, and in the month and a half since, only three visits, and these largely spent in tentative exploration of the new way out. He found Georgene sulky, passive, flat-stomached, and sexually unadventurous. Whether in Freddy’s bed or outdoors under the sun, Piet was so nervous and watchful he had difficulty maintaining an erection. Foxy’s note seemed a warning, a loud snap in the dark. He saw Georgene once more, early in October: the shedding larch needles pattered steadily on the tarpaper, the sun was wan, her chin trembled, her eyes in tears refused to confront his. He left her with no doubt that he would not come soon again, blaming Angela’s suspiciously gemütlich intimacy with Freddy, Freddy’s threatening manner lately, Piet’s strained relations with Gallagher and increased work load, Georgene’s own well-being—surely the essence of an affair was mutual independence, and Georgene had sinned, endangering herself, by becoming dependent. Her firm chin nodded but still her green eyes, though he seized her naked shoulders in his hands, refused to gaze into his. To Foxy’s question he answered No, he had not slept with Georgene since soon after the Whitmans came to town and he had first glimpsed Foxy slamming her car door after church. He retrospectively dated his love from this glimpse. He admitted that Georgene remained his friend, and—with such a husband, who could blame her?—now and then called him at his office; Piet admitted this on the chance that Foxy already knew, via Matt and Terry. Thus, in being deceived, Foxy closer approached the condition of a wife.

  RIDDLES

  1. What is five feet nine, Episcopalian, and about to burst?

  2. What is smaller than a boxcar but bigger than mortality?

  3. What is five feet?, clever with its hands, has red hair, big feet, and foreign origins?

  4. What is smaller than a breadbox but gives satisfaction anyway?

  As they aged in their affair her notes became briefer and more playful; as fall progressed he was able to see her less. The renovations within her home were completed, and Gallagher had obtained a lucrative rush contract, the enlargement of a local restaurant in antique style. So Piet was compelled to spend long days rough-hewing factory-planed beams and fabricating seventeenth-century effects in green lumber. The owners of the Tarbox Inne, a pair of pushing Greek brothers, wanted the new wing ready for operation by November. The trips were tedious and frequent to Mather for old bricks, to Brockton for hand-wrought iron, to Plymouth for research into details of colonial carpentry: the side bearers for the second story being to be loaden with corne, &tc., must not be pinned on, but rather eyther lett in to the studds, or borne up with false studds, & soe tenented in at the ends. In this story over the first, I would have a particion, whether in the middest or over the particion under, I leave it to the carpenters. I desire to have the sparrs reach downe pretty deep at the eves to preserve the walls the better from the wether. I would have the howse strong in timber, though plaine & well brased. I would have it covered with very good oake-hart inch board … Trying to turn these ethical old specifications into modern quaintness demoralized Piet. The fraudulent antiquation of the job seemed prophetic of the architectural embalming destined for his beloved unself-conscious town, whose beauty had been a by-product of neglect. Maddeningly, he could not get to Foxy, and absurdly he hoped for her unmistakable silhouette to bloom on the streets of strange towns, in the drab alleyways leading to construction-supply yards. Every blue station wagon stopped his heart; every blond blur in a window became a broken promise. Now and then they did meet in spots away from Tarbox—in a Mather bar where fluorescent beer advertisements described repetitive parabolas, in a forest preserve west of Lacetown where huge mosquitoes clustered thick as hair on her arms whenever they paused in walking to embrace, on a wild be
ach north of Duxbury where the unsoftened Atlantic surf pounded wrathfully and the high dunes were littered with rusting cans, shards of green glass, and abandoned underpants. The danger of being discovered seemed greater out of town than in it, within the maze of routines and visiting patterns they could predict; and as Foxy’s time drew near she became reluctant to drive far. Outside of Tarbox they seemed to themselves merely another furtive illicit couple, compelled toward shabby seclusion, her pregnancy grotesque. Within her breezy home they seemed glorious nudes, symphonic vessels of passion. Their dream was of a night together.

  Piet—Ken has to go to a conference—in New York, Columbia—this Tuesday/Thursday. Could you possibly get free to see me, or shall I go to Cambridge and stay with friends—with Ned and Gretchen—for these days? Ken wants the latter—doesn’t want me left alone—but I can argue him down if there’s a reason—is there? I ache and need to be praised by you. My bigness is either horrible or a new form of beauty—which?

  He could not get free. The restaurant wing was in the finish stage and he and Adams and Comeau had to be there ten hours a day. And now that the foliage was down, the beach road seemed transparent. He was timid of driving his truck past the Thornes’ watching hill to the Whitmans’ house, visible in fall from the little-Smiths’. At night, also, he was barred from seeing her, by a new turn in their social life: Angela in her fascination with psychiatry had taken up with the Applebys and Freddy Thorne, which involved both the Thornes. Georgene’s brittle, slightly hyperthyroid eyes, when it emerged in conversation that Ken Whitman was going to be away, flicked toward Piet with the narrowing that appeared on her face when set point was deuced. Piet told Foxy to go to Cambridge, to place herself above gossip and to remove his temptation to do something desperate, revealing, and fatal.