Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  He asked her, “How can you want me? You have this marvelous little package. You have Ken who gave it to you.”

  “He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like the baby.”

  “Impossible.”

  Foxy began to cry. Her hair, lusterless in the dull late light, hung forward over the child. “It frightens him,” she said. “I frighten him. I’ve always frightened him. I don’t blame him, I’m a mess, Piet.”

  “Nonsense.” His inner gnawing was transmuted into a drastic sunk feeling; he had no choice but to go to her, put his arms around her and the child, and say, “You’re lovely.”

  Her sobbing would not stop. Her situation, including his concession and his sheltering arms, seemed to anger her increasingly. “Don’t you like talking to me?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Don’t you like talking to me at all? Don’t you ever want to do anything with me except go to bed? Can’t you wait a few more weeks to have me?”

  “Please. Fox. Don’t be so silly.”

  “I was afraid to take ether for fear I’d cry out your name. I go around the house saying ‘Piet, Piet’ to this innocent baby. I dragged poor Ken to that hideous party just to see you and you risked killing yourself rather than be found with me.”

  “You exaggerate. There was very little risk. I did it as much to protect you as myself.”

  “You’re still limping from it.”

  “It was all that football.”

  “Oh, Piet. I’m beginning to nag. Don’t leave me absolutely yet. You’re the only thing real I have. Ken is unreal. This marsh is unreal. I’m unreal to myself, I just exist to keep this baby alive, that’s all I was put here for, and it makes me mad.”

  “Don’t be mad,” he begged; but he himself felt anger, to be so pressed and sunk he could not spare breath to explain that for them to keep seeing each other now would be evil, all the more in that it had been good. They had been let into God’s playroom, and been happy together on the floor all afternoon, but the time had come to return the toys to their boxes, and put the chairs back against the wall.

  Ken came home from work looking more tired than she had seen him since graduate-student days. He carried a sheaf of mimeographed pre-prints and flopped them down on the hall table. “There’s been a breakthrough in photosynthesis,” he told her. “They’ve figured out something involving ferredoxin—it seems to be the point of transition between the light and dark reactions.”

  “What’s ferredoxin?”

  “A protein. An electron carrier with a very low redox potential.”

  “Who’s figured it out?” He almost never talked to her about his work, so she was anxious to respond fruitfully. For his return she had put on a lemony cocktail dress, celebrative. Their child was six weeks old today.

  “Oh,” he sighed, “a couple of Japs. Actually, they’re good men. Better than me. I’ve had it.” He dropped himself into the armchair, the leather armchair they had steered up and down apartment-house stairs all over Cambridge. Feeling their life slip backwards, she panicked.

  “Let me see,” Foxy said, and went, all wifely bustle and peremptoriness, to the hall table to prove him wrong. The pamphlet on top was titled Neurophysiological Mechanisms Underlying Behavior: Emotions and the Amygdala. The one underneath was Experimental Phenylketonuria: Pharmacogenetics of Seizures in Mice. She looked no further.

  To our Tarbox doppelgängers the “little” Smiths—

  Another Yuletide finds us personally well and prosperous yet naturally saddened by the tragic and shocking events of this November. Man is truly “but as grass.” A different sort of sadness entered our household when this September we saw young Tim, our precocious and precious baby of a few short years ago, off for his freshman year at St. Mark’s. He has been home for weekends, very much the “young man,” but it will be joyous to have him under the manse roof these holidays—even if he has, to our decibel’s dismay, taken up the electric guitar. Meanwhile Pat, Audrey, and Gracelyn continue happily in the excellent Newton public schools. Pat, indeed, has been honored with (and that sound you hear is our buttons “popping” with pride).

  “God,” Marcia said, “the way she crawls right over poor Kennedy to tell us they can afford St. Mark’s.”

  “To our decibel’s dismay,” Janet said, and both went helpless with laughter.

  The evenings before Christmas are gloomy and exciting in downtown Tarbox: the tinfoil stars and wreaths hung from slack wires shivering audibly in the wind, the silent crèche figures kneeling in the iron pavilion, the schoolchildren shrieking home from school in darkness, the after-supper shoppers hurrying head-down as if out on illicit errands and fearful of being seen, the Woolworth’s and Western Auto and hardware stores wide-awake with strained hopeful windows and doors that can’t help yawning. This year the civic flags were at half-mast and some stores—the old jeweler’s, the Swedish bakery—had forsaken the usual displays. In the brilliantly lit and remorselessly caroling five and ten, Piet, shopping with his daughters for their present to Angela, met Bea Guerin at the candle counter. At the sight of her small tipped head, considering, her hair stretched to shining, his heart quickened and his hands, heavily hanging, tingled. She turned and noticed him; her instinctive smile tightened as she gauged his disproportionate gladness at seeing her.

  Ruth and Nancy wandered on uncertainly down an aisle of kitchen gadgets. Their faces looked dirty in the crass light; his daughters seemed waifs lost and sickened in this wilderness of trash. Their puzzled greed exasperated Piet. He let them go down the aisle and knew that they would settle on a package of cute Pop-pattern dish towels and a red-handled sharpener that would be lost by New Year’s.

  Innocent of children, Bea seemed strangely young, unsullied. She wore a green wool cape and elfish suède shoes. She held a box of long chartreuse tapers. More than young, she seemed unattached, a puckish interloper meditating theft. Piet approached her warily, accusing, “Candles?”

  “Roger likes them,” she said. “I find them eerie, really. I’m afraid of fire.”

  “Because you live in a wooden house? We all do.”

  “He even likes real candles on the tree, because his family had them. He’s such an old fogey.” Her face, upturned toward him in the claustrophobic brightness, was grave, tense, homely, frightened. Her hairdo pulled her forehead glossily tight. His parents’ house had held prints of Dutch paintings of girls with such high shining brows.

  “Speaking of your house—”

  Nancy had returned to him and pulled at his thumb with an irritating hand tacky from candy. “Daddy, come look with us.”

  “In a second, sweet.”

  “Come look with us now. Ruthie’s teasing me, she won’t let me say anything.” Her face, round as a cookie, was flyspecked with freckles.

  “I’ll be right there,” he told her. “You go back and tell Ruthie I said not to act like a big shot. You each are supposed to find your own present for Mommy. Maybe you can find some pretty dish towels.”

  Against her better judgment Nancy obeyed and wandered back to her sister. Piet said to Bea, “Poor child, she should be in bed. Christmas is cruel.”

  Having no children, she was blind to their domination, and her eyes expressed admiration of his patience, when in truth he had slighted an exhausted child. Bea prompted him, “Speaking of my house—”

  “Yes,” Piet said, and felt himself begin to blush, to become enormously red in this bath of plastic glare, “I’ve been wondering, would you mind, some morning or afternoon, if I came around and inspected the restoring job I did for you four years ago? I experimented, hanging the summer beam from an A-brace in the attic, and I’d like to see if it settled. Has your plaster cracked anywhere?”

  Something by the side of his nose, some cruelly illuminated imperfection, held her gaze; she said slowly, “I haven’t noticed any cracking, but you’re welcome to come and look.”

  “But would you like me to?”

  Bea’s face, its almost lash
less lids puffily framing her eyes at a slight slant, became even more of a child’s, a child’s piqued by Christmas greed yet hesitant, distrustful of gifts.

  “Once,” he prompted, “you would have liked me to.”

  “No, I would like you to; it’s just”—she groped, and her eyes, a paler blue than Angela’s, lifted to his—“a house, you know.”

  “I know it’s a house. A lovely house. Tell me what would be a good morning?”

  “Today’s Thursday. Let’s do it after the weekend. Monday?”

  “Tuesday would be better for me. Monday’s my catch-up day. Around ten?”

  “Not before. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I can’t seem to get dressed in the mornings any more.”

  “Daddy. She is being a pesty crybaby and I am not being a big shot.” Ruth had stormed up to them, trailing tearful Nancy, and Piet was shocked to see that his elder daughter was, though not yet as tall as Bea, of a size that was comparable. While her father had been looking elsewhere she had abandoned the realm of the miniature. In this too strong light he also saw that her heated face, though still a child’s, contained the smoky something, the guarded inwardness, of womanhood.

  Bea beside him, as if licensed now to know his thoughts, said proprietarily, “She’ll be large, like Angela.”

  At the New Year’s Eve party the Hanemas gave, Foxy asked Piet, “Who is she?”

  “Who is who?” They were dancing in the trim colonial living room, which was too small for the purpose. In pushing back the chairs and tables Frank Appleby and Eddie Constantine had scarred the eggshell-white wainscoting. The old pine floorboards creaked under the unaccustomed weight of the swaying couples, and Piet feared they would all be plunged into his cellar. Giving the party had been more Angela’s idea than his; lately she, who used to be more aloof from their friends than he, seemed to enjoy them more. She had even persuaded poor Bernadette Ong to come, alone. John was still in the hospital.

  “The woman who’s taken my place,” Foxy said. “Your present mistress.”

  “Sweet Fox, there isn’t any.”

  “Come off it. I know you. Or has Angela turned into a hot ticket?”

  “She is more amiable lately. Do you think she has a lover?”

  “It’s possible, but I’m not interested. The only person in Tarbox who interests me is you. Why don’t you call me any more?”

  “It’s been Christmas. The children have all been home from school.”

  “Phooey to the children. They didn’t bother you all summer.”

  “There’s one more now.” He feared he had hurt her, hit out roughly. He petted her wooden back and said teasingly, “Don’t you really like any of our friends? You used to love Angela.”

  “That was on the way to loving you. Now I can’t stand her. Why should she own you? She doesn’t make you happy.”

  “You’re a hard woman.”

  “Yes.”

  Demurely she lowered her lids and danced. Her body, its placid flats and awkward stiffness, was obscurely his, a possession difficult to value now that the bulge, the big jewel, of her belly was gone.

  He said at last, “I think we should talk. It would be nice to see you.” Betrayal upon betrayal. Dovetailing, rising like staging.

  “I’m home all the time.”

  “Is Ken going back to work Monday?”

  “He never stops working. He went to Boston every day of his vacation except Christmas.”

  “Maybe he’s seeing a woman.”

  “I wish he would. I deserve it. But I’m afraid he’s seeing a cell. He’s beginning modestly.”

  He laughed and without bringing her visibly closer to him tightened the muscles of his arms for her to feel as an embrace. If Piet had a weakness, it was for feminine irony. “I’m dying to see you,” he said, “but I’m afraid of being disappointing. Don’t expect too much. We’ll just talk.”

  “Of course, what else? You can’t fuck a young mother.”

  “I think you enjoy misunderstanding me about that. I love your baby.”

  “I don’t doubt it. It’s me you don’t love.”

  “But I do, I do, too much I do. I was in you so deep, loved you so terribly, I’m scared of getting back in. I think we were given it once and to do it all over again would be tempting fate. I think we’ve used up our luck. It’s because I love you, because I don’t want you to be hurt.”

  “All right, shut up for now. Freddy and Georgene are both looking.”

  The music, Della Reese, stopped. Piet pushed away from Foxy, relieved to be off, though she did look, standing deserted in a bouffant knee-length dress the milky green of cut flower stems, like the awkward proper girl from Maryland, leggy and young, she had often described to him, and he had never quite believed in.

  He heard from the kitchen Bea’s clear plaintive voice rising and falling within some anecdote, calling him. But in the narrow front hallway Bernadette Ong’s broad shoulders blocked him. “Piet,” she said plangently. “When do I get my duty dance?”

  He took a grave tone. “Bernadette. How is John doing? When is he coming home?”

  She was tipsy, for she took a step and her pelvis bumped him. Her breath smelled brassy. “Who knows? The doctors can’t agree. One says soon, the other says maybe. With the government insurance covering, they may keep him there forever.”

  “How does he feel?”

  “He doesn’t care. He has his books. He talks to Cambridge on the phone now.”

  “That’s good news, isn’t it?” Piet edged toward the stairs.

  She stepped again and barred him from touching the newel. “Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t want him back in the house the way he was, up all night fighting for breath and scaring the boys half to death.”

  “Jesus. Is that how it was?”

  Bernadette, her body wrapped in silk, a toy gold cross pasted between her breasts, heard a frug record put on the phonograph and held wide her arms; Piet saw her dying husband in her like a larva in a cocoon. Nervously acrobatic, he slid past her and up a step of the stairs. “I’ll be down in two seconds,” he said, and needlessly lied, since she would assume he must go to the toilet, “I thought I heard a child cry.”

  Upstairs, captive to his lie, he turned away from the lit bathroom into the breathing darkness where his daughters lay asleep. Downstairs the voices of Angela and Bea alternated and chimed together. His wife and his mistress. In bed Bea had enraptured him, her skin sugary, granular, the soles of her feet cold, the grip of her vagina liquid and slim, a sly narrowness giving on a vastness where his drumming seed quite sank from sight. Her puffy eyelids shut, she sucked his fingers blindly, and was thus entered twice. She seemed to float on her bed at a level of bliss little altered by his coming and going and thus worked upon him a challenge; at last she confessed he was hurting her and curled one finger around the back of his ear to thank him. She was his smallest woman, his most passive, and his most remote, in these mournful throes, from speech or any question. He had felt himself as all answer. When the time for him to leave at last was acknowledged she wrapped herself quickly in a bathrobe showing, in the split second of standing, that her breasts and buttocks hung like liquid caught in too thin a skin. Ectoplasm.

  He crouched where his two daughters’ breathing intersected. Nancy’s was moist and scarcely audible. Might fall through into silence. The frail web of atoms spinning. The hamster in his heavenly wheel. There. It. Is. Ruth’s deeper, renewed itself with assurance, approached the powerful onward drag of an adult. The hauling of a boat upriver. Full steam. Boys soon. Bathroom jokes, Nancy Drew, drawings attempting bosoms: teen-age. The time she was Helen Keller for a school project, bumping through the bright house blindfold, couldn’t get her to take it off. Frightening herself. Must do. So brave in choir, bored. Her breathing stuttered, doubled tempo. A dream. His leaving. He crouched deeper between their beds and held her damp square hand. Her breathing eased. Her head changed position. Sleeping beauty. Poison apple. I am your only lover. All
who follow echo me. Shadows. Sleep. The music downstairs stopped. Frug, nobody could do it yet, too old to learn. Nancy’s breathing eluded his listening. Instead a most gentle of presences tapped at the window whose mullions were crosses. Snow. A few dry flakes, a flurry. This winter’s shy first. The greenhouse at home banked deep in snow. A rusty warmth of happiness suffused him, joy in being rectangularly enclosed, alive with flowers growing, captive together, his mother at the far end tying ribbons tight with needling fingers, school vacation on, all need to adventure suspended.

  Distantly, a gun was fired. Downstairs, his friends, voice by voice, launched “Auld Lang Syne.” Though his place as host was with them, Piet remained where he was, crouching above the ascending din until it subsided, and he could again pick up the fragile thread of Nancy’s breathing, and the witnessing whisper of the snow.

  The visit to Foxy proved disappointing. It was a blowy ear-achy winter Monday; the truck rattled bitterly as he drove down the beach road and the radio through its static told of Pope Paul being nearly trampled in Jerusalem. The house was cold; Foxy was wearing a heavy sweater and a flannel nightie and furry slippers. She moved and spoke briskly, angrily, as if to keep warm. The offending marshes, which permitted the wind to sweep through the walls he had woven for her, were scarred by lines of salty gray ice rubble rimming the tidal channels. Gusts visibly walked on the water. She asked, “Would you like some hot coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’m freezing, aren’t you?”

  “Is the thermostat up?”

  “The furnace is on all the time. Can’t you hear it roaring? I’m scared it’s going to explode.”