Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  She asked, “Will you call me? Please. You won’t have to do anything, I’ll take care of it myself somehow—absolutely; no, don’t say anything. But it is lonely. Lonely, Piet.”

  He promised her, “I’ll call you tomorrow.” A last word felt needed, a blessing to unclamp the receiver from his hand and ear. He stammered in fear of sounding pompous as he unlocked to her all the wisdom he possessed. “Foxy. After years of thought, I have come to this conclusion: there are two kinds of situation in the world, those we can do something about and those we can’t, like the stars and death. And I decided it’s a great waste, a sin in fact, to worry about what we can’t help. So take a hot bath and relax. We’re in the hands of Allah.”

  His not daring saying “God” disgusted him. But Foxy, lulled as if she had not listened, said singsong, “Call me tomorrow, Piet, and I bet it will have gone away like a silly dream, and we can go back to our nice comfortable estrangement.”

  So “estrangement” was the last word. He hung up and saw that the men had extricated the car from the white gutter, and all of Charity Street, alive with the rasping of shovels, seemed a sacred space, where one could build and run and choose, from which he was estranged.

  Now began a nightmare of daily phoning, of small false hopes (the burning sensation seemed less distinct today, she had felt a uterine strangeness after this morning’s scalding bath, a medical reference book at the Tarbox Library admitted of many post-partum menstrual irregularities) and of cumbersomely advancing certainty. The first rabbit test came back from the lab negative; but the Cambridge doctor explained that this early in the game there was only a ninety per cent accuracy, and implied disapproval of her haste. A curt, hawk-faced man with golfing trophies in his consulting room, he may have diagnosed at a glance her symptoms and recognized the plague, this not uncommon infection of decent society’s computations with blind life’s long odds, that to Foxy and Piet seemed so isolating. For a whole night of sleeplessness she lay trembling with the good news that she could not deliver to Piet until morning. But the one-in-ten chance dilated fascinatingly as Foxy refused to let go of her microscopic captive and surrender and bleed. Piet battered her over the phone, begged at her with his patience, his refusal to blame her: he had resigned from being her lover, he had lain with her to say good-bye, he was happy with his rare and remote wife, he had been gulled by Foxy’s naïveté, she had no claim upon him—none of this he needed to say, it was assumed. She apologized, she ridiculed herself, she offered to take her child, her existing child, and vanish from the town; but for the time being he and he only knew her secret, only he could share with her the ordeal of these days. The sound of his voice was the one thing on earth not alien to her. They agreed to meet, out of pity for each other and a desire, like that of boxers clinching, to draw near to the presence, each to the other, that was giving them pain. In Lacetown there was an IGA whose large parking lot the plows would have cleared; behind the building, where the trucks unloaded, few cars parked. Of their friends only Janet sometimes shopped here. They would be safe.

  Friday. A heavy mauve sky. A few dry flakes. His heart leaped at the sight, alone on the asphalt, beneath the close clouds, of the Whitmans’ black MG. He parked his truck near the store incinerator barrel and walked across empty parking spaces. Foxy rolled down her window. A flake caught in her left eyebrow. He said, “I thought Ken took this car to Boston.”

  “He took the train today, because they forecast a storm. Get in.”

  Inside, having slammed the door, he said, “He’s always thinking, Ken.”

  “Why do you dislike him? This isn’t his fault.”

  “I don’t dislike him. I admire him. I envy him. He has a college degree.”

  “I thought you were going to say he has me.” They laughed, at her, at themselves, at them all. In leaving the limits of Tarbox they had acquired a perspective; their friends and their houses seemed small behind them. Only they, Foxy and Piet, were lifesize. Only they had ceased flirting with life and had permitted themselves to be brought, through biology, to this intensity of definition. Their crisis flattered them like velvet backdrop. She sat awkwardly sideways in the bucket seat behind the wheel, her knees touching the gearshift, her legs long in yellow wool slacks, her hair loose over the shoulders of her Russian general’s coat.

  He said, “You look pretty good,” and patted her thigh. “After our frantic phone conversations I thought you’d look more of a wreck.”

  She grinned; her nose and chin seemed whittled by the pressure of the coming storm. Snowflakes were making a thin white line along the rubber window sealer. On the loading platform of the IGA a solitary boy in a clerk’s apron was stacking cardboard boxes, his breath a commotion of vapor. “Oh,” she said, feinting. “We women can keep up appearances.”

  “I take it there’s not much doubt left.”

  She nodded, as delicately as if a corsage were fastened near her chin. Dances. Girls in cars after dances. It had been a generation since he had sat like this. Foxy said, “Not in my mind. I’m driving in this afternoon to have another rabbit test. I was supposed to. The storm may cancel it.”

  “Not with you at the wheel.” As if rationalizing his laugh, he added, “Funny how that one-in-ten chance didn’t go away.”

  “You always said we’d press our luck too far.”

  “I’m sorry that the time that did it wasn’t better for you.”

  “I remember it very clearly. How we moved from room to room, the cat jumping on the bed. It’s all so silly, isn’t it? Adultery. It’s so much trouble.”

  He shrugged, reluctant to agree. “It’s a way of giving yourself adventures. Of getting out in the world and seeking knowledge.”

  She asked, “What do we know now, Piet?”

  He felt her, in the use of his name, drawing near, making of this desperate meeting an occasion of their being together, a date. He hardened his voice: “We know God is not mocked.”

  “I was never mocking God.”

  “No. Your God is right there, between your legs, all shapeless and shy and waiting to be touched. It’s all right, Fox. I don’t mean to complain. It’s partly I suppose that I find you so attractive; I didn’t expect to, it makes me crabby. It seems so much beside the point for me to still want you.”

  She adjusted her legs more comfortably; a knee touched his, and quickly pulled away. “You expected to hate me?”

  “A bit. This has been hell, these ten days. Compared to your voice on the phone, you seem happy.”

  “That’s the worst of it. I am happy. I’m happy to be carrying your child. My whole system wants to go ahead and have it.”

  “You may not have it. May not, may not.”

  “Oh of course. Absolutely. I agree.”

  But her face had withdrawn into sharpness. A moan caught in his throat; he lurched at her, fumbling, afraid of her face. Her breath was hot, her cheek cold with tears; her body within her massive coat sought to conform to his, but the bucket seats and floor shift prevented them. He backed off and read hastily in her distorted face absolution, permission to scour from her insides all traces of their love. “But how?” he asked. “Sweden? Japan? How do people do these things?” Beyond her mussed hair a lane of leafless maples made an embroidered edge upon the snowing sky.

  “It’s sad, isn’t it?” she asked. “We don’t seem to know the right people. I know there are abortionists everywhere, waiting for customers, and here am I, and there’s no way to get us in touch.”

  “What about Ken? He knows doctors.”

  “I can’t tell Ken.”

  “Are you sure? It would make things possible. You could fly to Japan even. He could give a guest lecture.”

  “He’s not that good.”

  “I was joking.”

  “I know. Piet, I’ll do anything to get rid of this except tell my husband about us. He couldn’t handle it. He’s too—complacent. And in a way I’m too complacent too. I knuckled under once and I won’t again. I won’t beg, or a
pologize for us when we were so right. I’d rather risk death. That sounds more arrogant than it is. You could tell Angela you slept with me and the two of you would absorb it, be better for it after a while, but our marriage just isn’t built that way. We’re not that close. We made a very distinct bargain, one that doesn’t allow for either of us making mistakes this big. It would shatter Ken. Am I making any sense?”

  He saw that she would not tell her husband, just as months ago she would not install closed cabinets. She was the customer; he must work with her whims. “Well, what about telling him it’s his and going ahead and having another little Whitman? It might have red hair but there must be a red-haired gene in one of you.”

  She spoke with care, after biting the tip of her tongue. Women whose tongues won’t stay in their mouths are the sexiest. “It’s possible. But it seems to me, if you picture the little child, getting bigger day by day, me watching him as he looks less and less like Ken and more and more like Piet Hanema, as he starts swinging from banisters and nailing pieces of wood together, we’d be giving ourselves a lifetime of hell. I’d rather take the hell in a stronger dose and get it over with.”

  “My poor Fox.” He leaned and kissed her nose. Her red hands lay inert in the lap of her greatcoat; possibly she shrugged.

  A maroon Mercury coupe like Janet Appleby’s slowly wheeled through the lot. But the driver was unknown, an elderly Lacetown citizen with grizzled jaws and a checked hunter’s cap. He stared at them—white-ringed raccoon eyes—and continued his circling arc through the lot and out the other side. The apparition had given them both heart-stop, and contaminated their hiding place. The boy stacking boxes was gone from the platform. “We better go,” Piet said, “or they’ll find us frozen in each other’s arms.”

  At home, sheltered from the blizzard amid the sounds of Angela’s cooking and his daughters’ quarrelsome play, Piet struggled to see his predicament as relative, in any light but the absolute one that showed it to be a disaster identical with death. Pregnancy was life. Nature dangles sex to keep us walking toward the cliff. Slip-ups are genially regarded. Great men have bastards: Grover Cleveland, Charlemagne. Nobody cares, a merry joke, brown beer, the Lord of Norfolk salutes his natural son. One more soul: three billion plus one. Anyway she would probably move to Berkeley or Los Alamos and he’d never see it. Down the drain. Piet Hanema, father of a new nation. To your health. He sipped the double martini and a boiling soughing dread like pigswill welled up to meet the gin. Ken. His dread had to do with Ken’s face, the strange trust its faintly rude blankness imposed, the righteousness of the vengeance it would seek. Sickened, slipping, Piet saw that he lived in a moral world of only men, that only men demanded justice, that like a baby held in a nest of pillows from falling he had fallen asleep amid women. He had been dumbstruck to hear Foxy speak slightingly of Ken. In Piet’s mind there was no end of Ken, no limit to the ramifying offense of inflicting a child upon Ken’s paternity. Paternity a man’s cunt. Vulnerable. Gently. His father potting geraniums with stained thumbs, the perspective of the greenhouse implying an infinity of straight lines. He had preferred as a child the dead-ended warm room at the end where his mother sat broad-lapped among looping ribbons. There was a mandate in his father’s silences he had shied from. Straight man, his mouth strange from dentures. Ah God, how glad he was that they were gone, all things considered.

  All things are relative. As a boy in trouble he would think of something worse. It would be worse than not making the football squad to get polio. It would be worse than not getting invited to Annabelle Vojt’s party to accidentally shoot Joop in the eye and have him blind forever. It would be worse to be dead than to be in this box. Would it? In a manner analogous to dying he had trespassed into a large darkness. In Foxy’s silken salty loins he had planted seed that bore his face and now he wished to be small and crawl through her slippery corridors and, a murderer, strike. God forgive. No: God do. God who kills so often, with so lordly a lightness, from diatoms to whales, kill once more, obliterate from above, a whip’s flick, a finger down her throat, erase this monstrous growth. For Thine is the kingdom.

  Ken’s face, barely polite. Pale from ambition and study. Piet’s guts groveled again; he sipped silver to kill them. The bullet. The sleepy firing squad. The terrible realm where life leaps up from impeccable darkness. God’s premeditated deed. Clay mixed with spit. Foxy’s sly cunt, coral the petals, more purple within, her eyes like twin bells hung on a tree, tinkled by every wind. Yet she suffered, beneath the woman there was an animal, a man like him, an aged child rather, judging, guessing, hoping, itching. How monstrous to have a thing attach and fester upon you like a fungus. His balls sympathetically crawled. Poor soft Foxy. Erase. Pluck, Lord. Pluck me free.

  He drank. The final sweetness of truly falling. Bea. Scared to call, she might guess. She knew some things. Had seen him leap from the window, Foxy’s head golden in the bathroom light. In her bed he had left unconfessed only that last drab Monday visit when, trespassing unwittingly upon Ken’s paternity, conjuring into the world another responsible soul, he had made himself legally liable. Disgrace, jail, death, incineration, extinction, eternal namelessness. The laughter of their friends. The maledictions of newspapers. He saw Bea smiling, her breasts melted, her body a still pool, his prick suspended in her like a sleeping eel, and knew why he loved her: she was sterile. His semen could dive forever in that white chasm and never snag.

  His solitude became desolate. The blizzard crooned mournfully, a thing without existence, a stirring. He emptied his glass and went into the kitchen. His daughters and wife were arranging valentines. He had failed to get Angela one. Ruth and Nancy at school had received fuzzy hearts, mooning cows, giraffes with intertwined necks. Ruth was arranging the best on top of the refrigerator. Reaching up, her figure was strikingly lithe. His coming into the kitchen for more gin intruded upon a triangular female rapport especially precious to little Nancy. She turned her face, shaped like a rounded cartoon heart, upwards toward him, giggled at the approach of her own impudence, and said, “Daddy’s ugly.”

  “No, Daddy not ugly,” Ruth said, putting her arm about his waist. “Daddy pwetty.”

  “He has awful nostrils,” Nancy said, moving closer and looking up.

  Ruth continued the baby talk in which her impulse of love sought disguise. “Daddy has the beeyeutifullest nostwils,” she said, “because he came from Howwand long ago.”

  Piet had to laugh. “What about my feet?” he asked Nancy.

  “Acky feet,” she said.

  Ruth hugged him tighter and stroked his furry arm. “Loberly feet,” she said. “Mommy has silly feet, her little toes don’t touch the ground.”

  “That’s considered,” Angela said, “a sign of great beauty.”

  “You know something, Mommy?” Ruth said, abandoning Piet’s side and the baby voice. “Mrs. Whitman has flat feet, because at the beach this summer Frankie Appleby and Jonathan Smith were being detectives and following people and her footprints had no dent on the inside, you know, where the curvy place, whatever it’s called—”

  “Arch,” Angela said.

  “—where the arch is. It was like she was wearing sneakers only with toes.” The child glanced over at her father. True, even so unkind an evocation of Foxy gave him pleasure. Slouching flat-footed broad, big with his baby. His tall cockpit.

  “How fascinating,” Angela said. Her hands busily sparkled amid the leaves of their supper salad. “What else have you noticed about feet?”

  “Mr. Thorne has a green toenail,” Ruth said.

  “Daddy’s toes,” Nancy said, gazing up impudently from beneath Angela’s protection, “are like Halloween teeth,” and Piet saw that he represented death to this child: that what menaced and assaulted the fragility of life was being concentrated for her in his towering rank maleness; that this process would bring her in time to Ruth’s stage, of daring to admire and tame this strangeness; and at last to Angela’s, of seeking to salvage something of herself
, her pure self, from the encounter with it. He loved them, his women, spaced around him like the stakes of a trap.

  Ruth said, “Mommy, make Nancy stop insulting Daddy. Daddy’s handsome, isn’t he?”

  Piet stooped and picked Nancy up; she shrieked and kicked in mixed pleasure and fear. A peppery whiff of red candy hearts was on her breath. Rotting her fine teeth. Angry, he squeezed her harder; she squealed and tried to fight down, all fear now.

  “I don’t know if Daddy’s exactly handsome,” Angela was saying. “He’s what people call attractive.” She added, “And nice, and good.” He set Nancy down, pinching her unseen. She stared upward at him, now knowing something she would never forget, and could never express.

  Perhaps as a sequitur of the tenderness of their being together with their children and their valentines, perhaps simply excited by their snugness within the blizzard, Angela led him to bed early and, like a warm cloud descending, made love to him sitting astride, in the classic position of Andromache consoling Hector.

  Saturday morning their phone rang; Foxy spoke breathily, with her lips against the mouthpiece. “Is Angela right there?”

  “No,” Piet said, “she’s out shoveling with the kids. What would you have said if she had answered?”

  “I would have asked her if she was wearing a short or a long dress to the Heart Fund dance.”

  “It’s really risky, you know. She’s just beginning to be less suspicious of you.”

  “I had to talk to you, I’m sorry. I thought you’d be at the Gallaghers’ last night. Why didn’t you come?”

  “We weren’t invited. Who was there?”

  “Everybody. Except you and the Saltzes and the Ongs. There was a new couple who seemed stuffy and young.”

  “Matt didn’t say anything to me. Anyway. What’s up with you?”

  “The test. It was positive. There’s no doubt, Piet.”

  “Oof.” He was fascinated, as he sank into this fact, by the delicacy of his furniture, the maple telephone table with tapering legs, the mirror in its acanthus frame of chipped gilt. These things had been fashioned by men without care, with no weight on their hands. He marveled at himself, that he had ever found the energy, the space, to set two sticks together.