Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “I love this one. It’s very severe and elegant. He says we, all animals, carry our deaths in us—that the organic wants to be returned to the inorganic state. It wants to rest.”

  “It’s been years since I read it. I think I doubted it at the time.” Paralyzed, he felt her unbuttoning his shirt. He was immobilized by the vision of a drink—amber, clouded with ice—and the belief that its smoky golden distillation would banish his inner kinks. He let her part the halves of his shirt and fumble at his fly until, irritated at her own inexpertness, she turned away. She went to the window, glanced out quickly, peeled off her nightgown, and jackknifed herself, breasts bobbling, into the tightly made bed. “Oh, it’s icy,” she cried, and pulled the covers over her face. “Hurry, Freddy”: the call came muffled.

  He imagined Piet downstairs with the whiskey bottle, in the long room golden from the fire, and undressed down to his underwear, and got into the bed.

  “Hey,” Angela said. “You’re cheating.”

  “You scared me by saying the bed was so cold.”

  “Well. Let’s warm it up.” She touched him in front. “Oh. You’re not excited.”

  “I’m in shock,” Freddy told her, stalling, adjusting the covers. The tightly made sheets had virginally resisted his entry, and then tangled, exposing him behind.

  “Piet never—” Angela stopped. Had she been going to say, “—is not excited”? She instead said, “I don’t move you.”

  “You stun me. I’ve always loved you.”

  “You don’t have to say that. I’m nothing special. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror Piet gave Ruth and I see this knotty veiny fat peasant woman’s body with tiny red feet and a dear little oval head that doesn’t go with the rest. Piet calls me a dolphin.” She remembered that he called her this in bed, when she turned her rump upon her husband and, holding him in herself, exposed her curved back to his smoothing rough hands.

  “How are you and Piet getting along?”

  She realized Freddy wanted to talk, and foresaw that talk would make her sleepy. She tickled the gap between his undershirt and pants elastic while answering, “Better, really. He’s been bothered about something lately, but I think basically we’re more fun for each other than we’ve been for years. I think it’s taken me a year to forgive him for not letting me have the Robinson place. The Whitman place, I should say. Those people haven’t made much of an impression on me.” She lifted his shirt and snuggled against his bare chest.

  “But—how do you reconcile this?” Freddy asked.

  “With what?” His dumbstruck silence led her to laugh; fatty warm points, her breasts, shimmered against him, and the jiggled bed complained. “You and me in bed? He told me I should do it. The Hamiltons are always obedient wives. Anyway, I was curious what it would be like. And I must say, Freddy, you’re being passive. Take off these insulting clothes.”

  She managed to lower his elastic waistband—unlike Piet’s Paisley, he wore little-boy Jockey briefs. When he was naked, she explored with pinches his sides and the tops of his arms. “Freddy Thorne,” she said, “you are pudgy.” Her fingers went lower. “And still little,” she accused. Delicate and tepid, his genitals lay in her hand like three eggs, boiled and peeled and cooled, she was carrying to the table. The sensation made Angela languorous. She hadn’t dreamed men could be this calm with women. She could never have held Piet so long. Even asleep. Their sweetest phase. Not tucked safe inside like women. Committed to venture. More injurable.

  Testingly Freddy placed his hand on her back, as if they were dancing. Her skin felt dark to him, oily and Negroid: flat wide muscles glidingly wedged into one another, massive buttocks like moons heaved from an ancient earth. Her body’s bland power dismayed him. That Angela, the most aloof of women, whose shy sensitive listening had aroused in his talking tongue the eager art of a drill probing near pulp, should harbor in her clothes the same voracious spread of flesh as other women afflicted Freddy, touching his way across the smooth skin black as lava, with the nausea of disillusion. Her hand under his balls seemed about to claw. He begged, “Let’s talk.” He longed for her voice to descend from silence, to forgive him.

  She asked, “Is there anything you’d like me to do? Anything special?”

  “Just talk. Aren’t you curious about what the bargain is?”

  “No. It feels too scary to me, I don’t want to hear it. I feel we’ve all gone too far to know everything. It’s awful of me, but I’ve never wanted to know about Piet and his women. For me it’s no more part of him than his going to the bathroom. You can’t realize this, but he’s terribly pleasant around the house.”

  “Tell me about it. I never can picture you and Piet fucking.”

  “How funny of you, Freddy. You’ve idealized me or mixed me up with somebody else. Piet and I don’t”—she couldn’t manage the word, out of consideration, it seemed, for him—“as often as he’d like, but of course we do. More and more, in fact.”

  “Have you ever slept with anyone except Piet?”

  “Never. I thought maybe I should.”

  “Why?”

  “So I’d be better at it.”

  “For him. Shit. Let’s face it, Angela. You married a bastard. A bully boy. He’s pimping for you. He’s got you so intimidated you’ll shack up with anybody he tells you to.”

  “You’re not anybody, Freddy. I more or less trust you. You’re like me. You want to teach.”

  “I used to. Then I learned the final thing to teach and I didn’t want to learn any more.”

  “What final thing?”

  “We die. We don’t die for one second out there in the future, we die all the time, in every direction. Every meal we eat breaks down the enamel.”

  “Hey. You’ve gotten bigger.”

  “Death excites me. Death is being screwed by God. It’ll be delicious.”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “I believe in that one, Big Man Death. I smell Him between people’s teeth every day.”

  He was hoping to keep her at a distance with such violence of vision but she nudged closer again, crowding him with formless warmth. Her toes engaged his toes; her chin dug into his chest, the hard bone to the right of the heart. “Piet’s terrified of death,” she said, snuggling.

  Freddy told her, “It’s become his style. He uses it now as self-justification. He’s mad at the world for killing his parents.”

  “Men are so romantic,” Angela said, after waiting for him to tell her more. “Piet spends all his energy defying death, and you spend all yours accepting it.”

  “That’s the difference between us. Male versus female.”

  “You think of yourself as female?”

  “Of course. Clearly I’m homosexual. But then, of the men in town, who isn’t, except poor old Piet?”

  “Freddy. You’re just leading me on, to see what I’ll say. Be sincere.”

  “I am sincere. Anybody with a little psychology can see I’m right. Think. Frank and Harold. They screw each other’s wives because they’re too snobbish to screw each other. Janet senses it; she’s just their excuse. Take Guerin and Constantine. They’re made for each other.”

  “Of course, Roger—”

  “Eddie’s worse. He’s a successful sadist. Or Gallagher and Whitman. Spoiled priests. Saltz and Ong, maybe not, but one’s moving and the other’s dying. Anyway, they don’t count, they’re not Christian. Me, I’m worst of all, I want to be everybody’s mother. I want to have breasts so everybody can have a suck. Why do you think I drink so much? To make milk.”

  Angela said, “You’ve really thought about this, haven’t you?”

  “No, I’m making it all up, to distract your attention from my limp prick; but it works, doesn’t it? Piet stands alone. No wonder the women in town are tearing him to pieces.”

  “Is that why you’ve always hated him?”

  “Hated him, hell. I love him. We both love him.”

  “Freddy, you are not a homosexual and I’m g
oing to prove it.” She pushed herself higher in bed, so her breasts swam into starlight and her pelvis was above his. She lifted a thigh so it rested on his hipbone. “Come on. Put it in me.”

  He had kept a half-measure of firmness, but the slick warmth of her vagina singed him like a finger too slowly passed through a candleflame.

  Feeling him grow little again, she asked again, “What can I do?”

  He suggested, “Blow me?”

  “Do what? I don’t know how.”

  Pitying her, seeing through this confession into a mansion of innocence that the Hanemas, twin closed portals, had concealed, Freddy said, “Skip it. Let’s gossip. Tell me if you think Janet still goes to bed with Harold.”

  “She made a big deal of getting cottages at opposite ends of the row.”

  “Merely thirty or so yards, not very far even in bare feet, if your heart’s in it. My thought about Janet is, being her father’s daughter, she really believes in cures. She had the baby, then she took a lover, then she went into analysis; and still she wears that headachy expression.”

  “I want to go into analysis,” Angela told him. Her voice was slow and her weight now rested all on the bed, depressing it in the middle so that Freddy had to resist rolling closer toward her. His voice stroking, his hand on her halo of hair, he talked to her about analysis, about himself, about Marcia and Frank, Irene and Eddie, about John Ong’s cancer, about the fate of them all, suspended in this one of those dark ages that visits mankind between millennia, between the death and rebirth of gods, when there is nothing to steer by but sex and stoicism and the stars. Angela, reminded by his tone and rhythm of her parents and uncle talking, of the tireless Gibbs pedantry, the sterile mild preachiness descended from the pilgrims, in which she had been enwombed, and from which Piet had seemed to rescue her, dozed, reawoke, heard Freddy still discoursing, and fell irrevocably asleep. He, having held her at bay and deepened his shame and completed his vengeance, felt himself grow strong and adamant and masturbated toward her belly, taking care not to defile her. Then both, parallel, floated toward dawn, their faces slacker than children’s.

  Downstairs, Piet, having poured himself one more bourbon, had grown cold beside the dying fire, and bored, and outraged. He tried to use his parka as a blanket but it was too small. He tiptoed up the stairs, listened at his own door, and tapped at Georgene’s. He tested the lock. It gave. Georgene, though at first overwhelmingly indignant about being discarded by her lover, betrayed by her husband, and treated like an insignificant counter in this game, accepted Piet into her bed, because there was really nowhere to sit, and it was cold. She vowed to him she would not make love. Piet agreed. But, as he lay meekly beside her, his proximity and the danger of insomnia conspired to render her resolve unreal. He offered to rub her back. She invited him into her body. As always, though many distorting months had intervened, they came together; her face snapped sideways as if slapped, a welling softness merged with his clangor, her thighs flared to take him more fully, and he knew that he had exaggerated his trouble, that fate could be appeased.

  V.

  IT’S SPRING AGAIN

  IN BOSTON COMMON there is a somber little pavilion surrounded by uneven brick paving and cement-and-slat benches for band concerts. Here Piet waited for Foxy to come down from a dentist’s office in a mustard-colored six-story office building on Tremont Street. By this the middle of March few other idlers were present in the park. Some children in snowsuits were snuffing caps on the lip of the dry wading pool; a gray squirrel raced staccato across the dead grass, at intervals pausing as if to be photographed or to gauge the danger expressed by the muted gunshot sound of the caps. Piet’s own scuffing footsteps sounded loud. There was a mist in which the neon signs along Tremont and Boylston distinctly burned. Sooty wet pigeons veered arrogantly close to the heads of hurrying passersthrough. Trees overhead, serene fountains of life labeled Ulmis hollandicis, dangled into the vaporous air drooping branchlets dotted with unbroken buds, having survived the blight to greet another year. The wheel turned. Time seemed to Piet as he waited a magnificent silence: the second hand of his watch circling the dial daintily, the minute hand advancing with imperceptible precision. He almost adored the heartlessness that stretched him here for hours, untouched by any news. RUBY GUILTY, TO DIE, said a discarded tabloid being mulched by footsteps into the mud and ice bordering the path. The palm of Piet’s left hand tingled thunderously whenever he read the headline, or heard a child shout.

  Freddy and Foxy had arranged the matter between them so efficiently Piet felt excluded. Neither wished to explain the arrangements to him. Foxy, pale on Charity Street, her nostrils pinched by wind, a tearing bag of groceries bulky in her arms, told him, “You don’t have to do a thing. I’d rather you didn’t ever know when it happens. Just tell me one thing now. Is it what you want? You want this child destroyed?”

  “Yes.” His simplicity shocked her; she turned paler still. He asked, “What are the alternatives?”

  “You’re right,” she said coldly, “there are none,” and turned away, the bag tearing a bit more in her arms.

  She explained the plan to him later, reluctantly, over the phone. Ken had to go to Chicago three days for a biochemical symposium, in the middle of March, beginning on a Wednesday, the eighteenth. Wednesday was also Freddy’s day off, so he could take her up to Boston to the idealist who for three hundred fifty dollars would perform the abortion. Freddy would stay with her and drive her back home to Tarbox. Alone in her home at the far end of the beach road, she would need only to feed herself and Tobias, who slept twelve hours a day. Georgene would come by in the mornings and evenings, and Foxy would be free to call her any time. If complications ensued, she could be admitted to the Tarbox hospital as a natural abortion, and Ken would be told the child had been his.

  Piet objected to Georgene’s knowing.

  Foxy said, “She already knows there was some kind of hideous bargain. It’s Freddy’s decision, and he’s entitled to it. If anything were to happen to me, you must realize, he’d be an accessory to murder.”

  “Nothing will happen to you.”

  “Let’s assume not. Georgene can drop around in a way neither you or Freddy can. Marcia goes up and down that road all day. It is especially important that you stay away. Forget I exist.” She would not tell him the address of the abortionist until she had talked to Freddy again. “Freddy’s afraid you’ll do something dramatic and crazy.”

  “And are you?”

  “No.” Her tone was not kind.

  Freddy called him that afternoon, gave him the address on Tremont, absolutely forbade his coming in with them, and tried to discourage his keeping watch from the Common. “What can you do?” Freddy asked. He answered himself scornfully: “Pray. If she’s had it, son, she’s had it.” The ambiguity of “had it,” the suggestion of a finite treasurable “it” that Foxy could enclose and possess, as one says “had him” of sleeping with a man, the faint impression that Foxy was competing for a valuable prize, sent ghosts tumbling and swirling through Piet, the ghosts of all those creatures and celebrities who had already attained the prize. He longed to call it off, to release Freddy from his bargain and let Foxy swell, but that wouldn’t do; he told himself it had gone beyond him, that Freddy and Foxy would push it through regardless: they had become gods moving in the supernature where life is created and destroyed. He replaced the receiver physically sick, his hand swollen like a drowned man’s, the brittle Bakelite more alive than he.

  Yet last night, playing Concentration with his two daughters, knowing he had set a death in motion, he cared enough to concentrate and win. Piling up cards under Nancy’s eyes filling with tears. She had thought the game hers. A little beginner’s luck had told her she owned a magic power of selecting pairs. Piet had disillusioned her. A father’s duty. But so jubilantly. Ruth had watched his vigorous victory wonderingly.

  A snuffly bum approached him, hand out, whiskers like quills. Piet shied from being knifed. The other
man confusedly flinched, palm empty. Piet settled to listening; he was being asked for something. Dime. Derelict wanted a dime. His voice retreated behind the whiskers toward the mumbled roots of language. Piet gave him a quarter. “Gah-blessyafella.” Angel in disguise. Never turn away. Men coming to the door during the Depression. His mother’s pies. Bread upon the waters. Takes your coat, give him your cloak. Asks a mile, go twain. Nobody believes. Philanthropy a hoax to avoid Communism. As a child he wondered who would eat wet bread. Tired old tales. Loaves and fishes, litter. Keep your Boston clean. He found himself hungry. A lightness in his limbs, strange sensation, how does it know food? Strange angels, desires. Come from beyond us, inhabit our machines. Piet refused his hunger. If he ran to the cafeteria burning at the corner, Foxy would die. He did without. His mother’s beautiful phrase. Well sen, do wissout. Her floury arms upreaching to the pantry shelf. Glory. An engine of love ran through him, flattened his gut. Never again. Moeder is dood.

  Cruel hours passed. The pavilion, the frost-buckled bricks, the squirrels posing for snapshots, the hurtling gangs of hoodlum pigeons, the downhanging twigs glazed with mist to the point of dripping became the one world Piet knew: all the others—the greenhouse, the army, the houses and parties of his friends in Tarbox—seemed phantom precedents, roads skimmed to get here. Hunger questioned his vaporous head, but he went without. Might miss Foxy’s moment. The knife. Ask for a dime, give a quarter. Fifteen-cent profit. He was protecting his investment. His being expanded upward in the shape of a cone tapering toward prayer. Undo it. Rid me of her and her of it and us of Freddy. Give me back my quiet place. At an oblique angle she had intersected the plane of his life where daily routines accumulated like dust. Lamplight, breakfast. She had intruded a drastic dimension. He had been innocent amid trees. She had demanded that he know. Straight string of his life, knotted. The knot surely was sin. Piet prayed for it to be undone.