Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Damn! My mother has decided to come hold my hand through “the adventure” so she will be in the house from Monday on. Could you go to church tomorrow?

  After church, on the hill, beneath the penny eye of the weathercock, Piet walked down the gray path past the iron pavilion toward the reddish rocks by which Foxy had parked. Standing waiting with an alert appearance of politeness, she was vast, a full sail in pale wool, one of the high tight turbans fashionable that fall covering her hair and making her face appear stripped and sleek. He felt pulled into her orbit; he yearned to embrace, to possess forever, this luxurious ball, this swollen woman whose apparition here recalled his first impression, of wealth and an arrogant return home.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi. Why the solemn face?”

  “You look so good. You look grand.”

  “So do you, Mr. Hanema. Is that a new suit?”

  “New last fall. You didn’t know me then. Is that a new hat?”

  “It’s called ‘a hat to meet your mother at the airport in, to show her you’re doing all right.’ ”

  “It’s very successful.”

  “Is it too severe? I’d take it off but it’s pinned.”

  “It’s great. It brings out the pampered pink of your face.”

  “God, you’re hostile.”

  “I may be hostile, but I adore you. Let’s go to bed.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a relief? Do you know how many days it’s been since we made love?”

  “Many.”

  “Nineteen. Two Tuesdays ago.”

  “Can we elude your mother?” Piet’s palms and the area of his lips had gone cold; he felt here at the town’s center that he was leaning inwards like a man on the edge of a carrousel.

  Foxy said, “I can if you can get away from Angela and Gallagher.”

  “They’re a vigilant pair these days. Jesus, I hate not seeing you. I find myself—”

  “Say it.” Perhaps she thought he was going to confess another woman.

  “Terrified of death lately.”

  “Oh, Piet. Why? Are you sick?”

  “It’s not practical death I’m worried about, it’s death anytime, at all, ever.”

  She asked, “Does it have to do with me?”

  He had not thought so, but now he said, “Maybe. Maybe I’m frightened of you having your baby and everything changing.”

  “Why should it?”

  He shrugged. “You’ll be a mother. It won’t be my child. It just won’t work, you’ll be too torn.”

  She was blank, still. Sunday was gathered around them, the sky a rung bell, cars in all colors hurrying home. Against her silence he suddenly pleaded, “I need to see you, woman. I need to see your belly.”

  They were exposed in sunlight and traffic, and she decided to turn to her car. “Call me,” she said. “Can you call tomorrow before nine? Mother’s plane comes in at ten-thirty.” She thought. “No. You can’t. Ken is going into Boston with me, so he’ll be at the house.” She thought again. “I’ll try to call your office when I go shopping in the afternoon. But you’ll be at the Inne.” She paused a third time, having been listening to herself. “Damn, this is shitty,” she said. “I want you to see me. I want to be with you all the time. I want to own you.”

  As if this last admission had confirmed and justified him in his sense of certain loss, Piet waved his hand generously, meaning it couldn’t be helped. “Your wanting it,” he told her, “is what matters to me. We’ll keep in touch. Be nice to your Mom.”

  Her white-gloved hand appeared to flinch on the car-door handle. “I must go,” broke from her. In full view of the town, he comically bowed, and saw she was wearing, for the good of her legs, elastic stockings dusty rose in color.

  “Charrming,” he said, “to be seeing ye sae fair on so fair a morrning, Mrs. Whitman.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure, Mr. Hanema,” she replied, her brown eyes alive in the trap of their plight.

  The brilliant October days brimmed for him with her absence. On the evenings when there was no party, no gathering, Piet and Angela sat at home in the stifling atmosphere of his longing. “Stop sighing.”

  Piet looked up surprised from a page of Life: saffron-robed monks protesting. “I’m not, am I?”

  “Well, your breathing is unpleasant.”

  “Sorry. I’ll try to stop breathing.”

  “What’s bothering you? The Tarbox Inne?”

  “Nothing. I just feel restless. What’s in the refrigerator?”

  “You’ve already looked. You’ll get fat, the way you nibble. Why don’t you go out and look at the stars? I can’t stand that sighing.”

  “Will you come out with me?”

  “In a minute.” She was absorbed in her book, the new Salinger, with an endless title and a mustard jacket whose front and back were identical. “They’re about to have a revelation.” At what point in their courtship was it, years ago, on the Nun’s Bay cliffs, that she had astonished him by knowing the stars, her uncle having been an astronomer? Her cheek to his so he could follow her pointing hand, she had taught him. Find the bright stars first. Then travel between them. Imagine straight lines. The dew touching them through the blanket. Her father’s windowlights marching across the grass but dying among the shrubs trimmed like table tops. Her warm breath telling of legends above them.

  He left her beneath the lamp and ventured across the crunching driveway into the yard’s darkness, green-veined like black marble. The high-pitched thrum of cicadas encircled him. The clear night threatened frost. The rigid cascade of stars had been dealt a sideways blow: Vega the queen of the summer sky no longer reigned at the zenith, having yielded to paler Deneb and to a faint house-shaped constellation. Cepheus. In Andromeda Piet searched for the very dim stir of light that Angela had once pointed out to him as another galaxy altogether, two million light years distant. Through oceans of onyx its light had traveled to him. Mirrorwise his gaze, followed shortly by his death, would travel outward in an eternal straight line. Vertigo afflicted him. Amid these impervious shining multitudes he felt a gigantic slipping; sinking upwards, he gripped the dim earth with his eyes. The leaves of a broken lilac branch, dead and unable to girdle their stems and fall, hung unstirring in windowlight. He pictured Foxy, a vapor, a fur, a memory of powdery armpits, lips dry then wet, the downy small of her back where his thumbs would massage the ache of carrying a child, her erect coral nipples teased by his fingernails, the guarded blur of her gaze. She became formless and undefended beneath the sorrowful confiding of his seed. I abuse you.

  No. Don’t stop.

  I’ll come.

  Do. I can’t this time. Do, Piet.

  Truly? You like it? She nodded, silent, her mouth full. Her tongue fluttered him into heat; her hand helped. Oh. Sweet. Swallow me. She swallowed him.

  The leaves of the broken lilac branch, dead and unable to girdle their stems and fall, hung unstirring in windowlight. Behind glass Angela calmly turned a page. Above his square yard the burning dome seemed splintered by a violent fleeing. Give me now her by whom You have fled.

  Piet that night fell asleep promptly, but awoke in the early morning, hours before dawn, feeling cheated, having been unable to dream. Angela lay oblivious beside him. He brought her hand to his penis but it slipped away. With his own skilled hand he lightened himself of desire; yet still he could not relax and sink. He remembered from childhood a curling warm darkness he could snuggle backwards into, at the touch of a soft blanket, of a furry toy, of rain overhead, of voices below. Now, at midpoint of his life’s arc, this first darkness had receded beyond recovery and the second, the one awaiting him, was not yet comfortable. Sudden faces, totally unknown, malevolent, flicked through his mind as it sought to erase itself into sleep. Detailed drawings of unbuilt buildings, clear in every pinion and cornice, were momentarily laid flat upon his unsteady inner surface. Again and again his racing heart checked his mind’s intended dissolution. He itched to thump Angela awake; the desire to confess, to con
fess his misery, his fornication with Foxy, rose burning in his throat like the premonition of vomit. After many turnings and futile re-settlings he crept downstairs, outdoors.

  The stars had wheeled out of all recognition. They were as if seen from another earth, beyond the Milky Way, rich in silence and strangeness. Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion. The giant of winter, surprised in his bed. So the future is in the sky after all. Everything already exists. Piet returned to his snug house satisfied that a crisis in his love for Foxy had passed, that henceforth he would love her less.

  IV.

  BREAKTHROUGH

  FOXY felt that her mother’s presence in the house formed a dreadful, heavensent opportunity to confess that she had a lover. No practical benefit could follow from such a confession, and her mother, in the blithe, efficient complacence bestowed upon her by remarriage and middle age, exerted no pressure to confess; rather, she assumed that the marriage she had chosen for her daughter was going all the smoother now that its one blemish, childlessness, was about to be removed. This assumption annoyed Foxy; the world’s downward skid seemed to her greased by such assumptions. Confession to the contrary ballooned against the roof of her mouth. Foxy had carried her secret alone too long. Her two hidden burdens had grown parallel, and now the guilty one also demanded to emerge, to show itself, to be satisfied by a wider environment, a sunlit hemisphere of consultation and sympathy.

  Yet her mother was in the house two weeks, and Foxy proved awkwardly retentive. Her delicate flush masked an inconvenient toughness. The baby was late. There were jokes, too many, about the possibility of quintuplets like those born in South Dakota the previous month. Ken and Foxy’s mother—Constance Price Fox Roth, she begged them to call her Connie—got along all too nicely. They dressed in the same way: in costumes rather than clothes. Ken had outfits for every occasion, for going to work, for being at work, for being at home casually, for being at home less casually, for walking on the beach, for playing tennis, for playing touch football with the other young husbands of Tarbox on fall Sunday afternoons; he owned a closet of suits graded by sobriety, madras and linen and tweedy sports jackets, sweaters of many weights, chinos and jeans in all degrees of wear, several types of sneakers, even a foulard and a smoking jacket for the at-home occasion pitched to just this formality. In the same style, Foxy’s mother, now wealthy, changed at every turn of the day. Between five-thirty and six, when the two women could make themselves a drink and settle to waiting for Ken’s arrival from Boston, Connie would slip into one of her quieter cocktail dresses and Foxy in her exhausted maternity tent would be obliged to covet her mother’s figure; though thickening at the waist and shrinking at the hips, it was still more compact and orthodoxly sexy than Foxy’s languorous, flat-footed, overtall own. Too keenly Connie would await Ken. He had grown handsomer in the years since Foxy’s parents had approved him, the same years in which Foxy had grown numb to his handsomeness. The elegant height held so uprightly, the shapely long skull now becomingly touched at the temples with gray, the gray gaze bold as a child’s. Connie was impressed by Ken’s professional distinction, which Foxy had come to see as an anticlimax to their long student wait, a cheat. Mrs. Roth was intrigued by what Foxy dismissed as aspects of Ken’s essential coldness—the dash and abruptness with which he performed some actions, such as driving his car, ending a conversation, or acquiring this house. “I love the house, Liz,” she told her daughter. “The view is so New England.” Her accent sounded exaggeratedly southern to Foxy; her ceaseless emphases suggested a climacteric society where politeness has absorbed the deeper passions and become a charade. Yet beneath this flossy alien creature with teased and skillfully tinted hair, this second wife chosen to reign over mountains of laundromat quarters, there was the prior woman, the war wife and young mother, with her straggling dull bun, her serge dresses and low-heeled shoes, her scorched ironing board and her varnished Philco crackling with news from both oceans, her air of brave fatigue, her way of suddenly dropping her hands and revealing dread. Foxy thought she could find this woman if she needed her.

  Mrs. Roth continued with proprietary enthusiasm: “It’s a castle. How sweet and ambitious of Ken to have wanted it just for the two of you.”

  “And the baby.”

  “Oh, of course, for the baby, how could I forget the baby? The cherub is why I’m here!”

  Foxy said, of the house, “It was a wreck of an old summer place when we moved in. We got a rather cute local contractor to make it livable. The walls, the porch, the kitchen and the little wing beyond are all new. We had to excavate a cellar.”

  Foxy’s mother, squinting through the smoke of the red-filtered cigarette, the aged skin of her throat betrayed by the lifting of her head, surveyed Piet’s work. Foxy’s heart felt displaced upward by an inward kicking. “I don’t know, Liz. It seems a bit fussy. All this old-fashioned blank plaster just isn’t you and Ken.”

  “You need something solid on the marshes,” Foxy said defensively, “to keep out the wind.”

  Wishing to be tactful, and sensing a sudden need for tact, Mrs. Roth said, “I’m sure as you live here you’ll make it more cozy,” and changed the subject. “Speaking of the wind, Libby, do you know—it’s fresh on my mind, my book circle has been reading Greek mythology, it seems to be the literary rage this year—the ancient Greeks and all those people apparently thought women were fertilized by it? The wind!”

  Foxy laughed. “Do you remember, Mother, in Bethesda, old Miss Ravenel always sitting rocking in her breezeway?” Every day, she steered the conversation to reminiscence of Bethesda.

  “Do I?” Connie cried. “Of course, That’s what she was waiting for, to be fertilized!” The laughter in the big bare-walled room sounded thin; each woman had proved fertile but once.

  Ken liked his mother-in-law’s presence in the house because it kept Foxy entertained at home, away from the gatherings of the couples he had taken to describing to her as “your friends.” When they did go out, it was the three of them together, and Foxy’s mother, in crackling purples, with a white silk stole she kept flicking and adjusting, was a social success, half-chaperon, half-fool. Freddy Thorne and she hit it off especially well. After the little-Smiths’ Halloween party, held the night after the holiday and without masks, she said to Foxy, “I must say, he seems terribly up on things, to be only a dentist. He was fascinating on modern psychology and myths. Don’t you, among your gay friends, find him one of the most sympatico?”

  “Frankly, Mother, no. I find him insidious and odious.”

  “Truly? Of course, his mouth is unfortunate, but then no man will truly seem handsome set against Ken.” She spoke gropingly, for in two weeks she had begun to sense Ken’s curious absence, the deadening in Foxy that his presence caused. He was off this morning playing tennis, having served breakfast to himself and set his dishes nicely rinsed, as a kind of rebuke, in the slate sink. “Whom do you like?” she asked.

  “Well,” Foxy said, “mostly the women, sad to say. Terry Gallagher, she’s the tall one with straight dark hair who couldn’t be coaxed into playing her lute even though she brought it, and in a way Janet Appleby. She’s the plump one who toward the end got quite drunk and did the impersonation of her psychiatrist.”

  “I thought she should be happier than she is.”

  “She thinks that too. And of the couples, I quite like the Hanemas and don’t mind the Guerins. I can’t communicate with Roger but Bea, even though she’s a show-off about it, I think is genuinely affectionate. Their tragedy is, they can’t have any children.”

  “The Hanemas. Not that horrid little redheaded man who ran around slapping everyone’s behind and doing handstands?”

  “That is Piet, yes. His wife is lovely. Very kind and serene and amused.”

  “I didn’t notice her. But I must say, as a group, you all seemed
very sympatico with each other. You’re fortunate to have found friends you can have fun with. Your father and I had no such circle. We were alone; alone with you. It’s good, to be able to let off steam.”

  “Ken thinks we make steam. Ken thinks we know each other too well. It’s true, one man of a couple we know has lost his job because of their involvement with another couple.”

  “Which was he?”

  “They don’t come any more. His name was Ben Saltz. They were Jewish.” Helplessly, incriminatingly, Foxy blushed.

  Her mother gave no sign of remembering, with her, Peter. Rather, she said, tidily dousing her cigarette in her slopped coffee saucer, “It must have been a combination of circumstances.”

  “The woman he was in love with was there last night. Carol Constantine. Piled red hair with dark roots and a very thin waist. She paints. I’ve been thinking of buying a painting from her, after your chilling remarks about our bare walls.”

  “I noticed her. Stunning now, but she’ll soon go brassy. She knows it, too. And she can expect precious little mercy from that dandy little husband of hers.”

  “Eddie? We don’t take him very seriously.”

  “You should. He is a very vain and ruthless young Italian. I told him to his face, I’d be happy to ride in any airplane he was piloting; he was too conceited to crash.”

  “Mother! Aren’t you wicked, flirting with these men young enough to be your sons?”

  “I wasn’t flirting, I was alarmed. And so is his poor emaciated wife.”

  “Speaking of couples,” Foxy asked, homesick for Washington, “how are the Kennedys?”

  “People say, better than they used to be. He used to be notorious, of course.”

  “She looks less anxious in the newspapers lately. At her Greek beach.”

  “A dreadful misfortune, their premature child. But I suppose being Catholics they have some way of turning it all to the good. One more angel up there, tra la.”