Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  “Angela.”

  “Hi,” Angela called, to prove it.

  Piet called to the others over the glistening car roof, “How was the party?”

  Harold guiltily answered, “It wasn’t a party, just a beer. Un peu de bière. Carol looked for you but you’d gone out the other exit.”

  “We couldn’t have come, thanks anyway,” Piet said, and asked, “Who’s that with you?”

  “Marcia. Of course.”

  “Why of course?”

  Marcia’s voice piped through the fog. “Cut it out, Piet. You’re a dirty old man.”

  “You’re a doll. Good night, all.”

  “Good night, Hanemas.” The pair of red tail lights dwindled, dissolved. In the silence then was the sighing of the sea rising in the marsh channels, causing the salt grass to unbend and rustle and suck. Her shrieks had been animal, less than animal, the noise of a deranged mechanism. Piet could hardly believe that the world—the one-o’clock mist, the familiar geography of Tarbox—could reconstitute itself after such a shattering. But Merissa, as Angela thanked her and told a lie about their going out again (“Their baby was having colic and they panicked; it’s their first, you know.”), noncommitally gathered together her books, having been reading in the light of television. As Piet drove her home she exuded a perfume of tangerines and talked about the dreadful earthquake in Anchorage. Returning, he found his downstairs lights off and Angela upstairs in the bathtub. The veins in her breasts turquoise, the ghost of a tan distinct on her shoulders and thighs, she was lying all but immersed, idly soaping her pudenda. She scrubbed circularly and then stroked the oozy hair into random peaks and then shifted her body so that the water washed over her and erased the soap. Her breasts slopped and slid with the pearly-dirty water; her hair was pinned up in a psyche knot, exposing tenderly the nape of her neck.

  Piet said, “Pardon me, but I must sit down. My stomach is a ball of acid.”

  “Help yourself. Don’t mind me.”

  He opened himself to the toilet and a burning gush of relief mixed with the fascinating sight of her toes—scalded, rosy, kittenish nubs. Foxy had long prehensile toes; he had seen her one night at the Constantines’ hold a pencil in her foot and write Elizabeth on the wall. He asked Angela, “How do you feel?”

  “Desperate. If you’ll pass me the razor, I’ll slash my wrists.”

  “Don’t say things like that.” A second diarrheic rush, making him gasp, had postponed his answer an instant. Where could so much poison have come from? Did gin kill enzymes?

  “Why not?” Angela rolled a quarter-turn. The water sloshed tidally. “That would save you all the nuisance of a divorce. I don’t think my father’s going to let me be very generous.”

  “Do you think”—a third, reduced rush—“there’s going to be such a thing? I’m scared to death of that woman.”

  “I heard you propose to her.”

  “She made it seem that way. Frankly, I’d rather stay married to you.”

  “Maybe I’d rather not stay married to you.”

  “But who do you have to go to?”

  “Nobody. Myself. Somehow you haven’t let me be myself. All these parties you’ve made me go to and give so you could seduce the wives of all those dreary men.”

  He loved hearing her talk with such casual even truth; he loved agreeing with her, being her student. “They are dreary. I’ve figured out there are two kinds of jerks in this town, upper-middle-class jerks and lower-middle-class jerks. The upper went to college. My problem is, I’m sort of in the middle.”

  She asked, “What did you think of Ken?”

  “I hated him. A real computer. Put in some data and out comes the verdict.”

  “I don’t know,” Angela said, moving her legs gently apart and together and apart in the water. “I think he showed more courage than any of us have.”

  “Talking about divorce? But he has no intention of divorcing her. All he cares about is frightening her and me and you and protecting his schoolboy honor.”

  “She didn’t seem frightened to me. It’s just what she wants. Why else would she tell him so much, all night?”

  Now a coldness cut into his voided bowels. He wiped himself and flushed; the odor in the little room, of rotten cinnamon, embarrassed him before his wife. She held a washcloth to her face and moaned through it, “Oh God, oh my God.”

  He asked her, “Sweet, why?”

  “I’ll be so alone,” she said. “You were the only person who ever tried to batter their way in to me.”

  “Roll over and I’ll scrub your back.” Her buttocks were red islands goose-bumped from heat. A slim bit of water between. Her back an animal brown horizontally nicked by the bra strap and starred by three dim scars where moles had been removed. “It won’t happen,” he told her, smoothly soaping, “it won’t happen.”

  “I shouldn’t even let you stay the night.”

  “Nothing will happen,” he told her, making circles around and around her constellation of scars.

  “But maybe something should happen,” she told him, her voice small in submission to his lulling laving. But when he quit, and she stood in the tub, Angela was colossal: buckets of water fell from the troughs among her breasts and limbs and collapsed back into the tub. Her blue eyes seemed wild, her bare arms flailed with an odd uncoördination. Tears glazed her cheeks while steam fled her skin in the coolness of their eggshell bedroom. “Something should happen, Piet. You’ve abused me horribly. I’ve asked for it, sure, but that’s my weakness and I’ve been indulging it.”

  “You’re beginning to talk like your own psychiatrist.”

  “He says I have no self-respect and it’s true. And neither do you. We were with two people tonight who have some and they rolled right through us.”

  “It was his inning. I’ve had mine.”

  “Oh, I can’t stand you when your face gets that stretched look. That’s the thing you don’t know. How your face looked tonight. When you said you’d have to marry her, there was this incredible, I was stunned, happiness, as if every question ever had been answered for you.”

  “That can’t be true. I don’t want to marry her. I’d rather marry Bea Guerin. I’d rather marry Bernadette Ong.”

  “You’ve slept with Bernadette.”

  “Never. But she’s bumped me and her husband’s dying.” He laughed. “Stop it, angel. This is grotesque. I have no desire to marry Foxy, I love you. Compared to you, she’s such a bitch.”

  Her neck had elongated; though exactly her height, he felt he was looking up at her—her thoughtful pout so tense her nostrils were flared, the breasts over which she had defensively flung an arm. “You like bitches,” she said. Another thought struck her: “Everybody we know must think I’m an absolute fool.”

  He calculated he must do something acrobatic. Having removed all his clothes but his Paisley shorts, Piet threw himself on his knees and wrapped his arms around her thighs. The hearth-bricks were cold, her body still steamy; she protestingly pushed down on his head, blocking an amorous rise. Her vulva a roseate brown. Parchment. Egypt. Lotus. “Don’t make me leave you,” he begged. “You’re what guards my soul. I’ll be damned eternally.”

  “It’ll do you good,” she said, still pushing down on his head. “It’ll do Foxy good too. You’re right, Ken is not sexually appealing. I tried to get the hots for him tonight and there was nothing, not a spark.”

  “God, don’t joke,” he said. “Think of the girls.”

  “They’ll be fine with me.”

  “They’ll suffer.”

  “You used to say they should suffer. How else can they learn to be good? Stop nibbling me.”

  Embarrassed, he got to his feet. Standing two feet from her, he removed his undershorts. He was tumescent. “God,” he said, “I’d love to clobber you.”

  She dropped her arm; her breasts swung free, livid and delicate as wounds. “Of course you would,” she said, confirmed.

  His fist jerked; she flinched and aloofl
y waited.

  Through the April that followed this night, Piet had many conversations, as if the town, sensing he was doomed, were hurrying to have its last say in his ear. Freddy Thorne stopped him one rainy day on Divinity Street, as Piet with hammer and level was leaving the Tarbox Professional Apartments, once Gertrude Tarbox’s shuttered hermitage. “Hey,” Freddy said, “what have you done to me? I just got a paranoid letter from Ken Whitman about the, you know, the little pelvic orthodonture we performed. He said he had decided not to take legal action at the present time, but, cough, cough, reserved the intention to do so. The whole thing was psychopathically formal. He cited four laws I had broken chapter and verse, with the maximum penalties all neatly typed out. He’s anal as hell. Wha’ hoppen, Handlebar?”

  Piet, who lived now day and night behind glassy walls of fear, clinging each evening to the silence of the telephone and to Angela’s stony sufferance, while his children watched wide-eyed and whimpered in their sleep, was pleased to feel that at least he had been redeemed from Freddy Thorne’s spell; the old loathing and fascination were gone. Freddy’s atheism, his evangelical humanism, no longer threatened Piet; the dentist materialized in the drizzle as a plump fuzzy-minded man with a squint and an old woman’s sly mouth. A backwards jacket peeked white under his raincoat. If any emotion, Piet felt fondness, the fondness a woman might feel toward her priest or gynecologist or lover—someone who has accepted her worst. Piet decided not to tell him that Georgene had betrayed them to Ken; he owed the Thornes that much. He said instead, “Foxy broke under the tension and blurted it all out to him the night of town meeting.”

  And he described briefly the subsequent confrontation of the two couples.

  “The old mousetrap play,” Freddy said. “She wants you bad, boy.”

  “Come on, she was hysterical. She couldn’t stop crying.”

  Freddy’s lips bit inward wisely. “When that golden-haired swinger has hysterics,” he said, “it’s because she’s punched the release button herself. You’ve been had, friend. Good luck.”

  “How worried about Whitman are you?”

  “Semi-semi. He’s not going to press anything, with Little Miss Vulpes pulling the strings.”

  “Freddy,” Piet said, “you live in a fantasy world of powerful women. I haven’t heard from her since. In fact, I’m worried. Could you possibly send Georgene down to see how things are?”

  “I think Georgene’s errand days are over,” Freddy said. “She really blew up after finding you and Foxtrot together; I had a vicious creature on my hands for a few days. The less you and she see each other, the better we’ll all be. Keerect?”

  “Is that why we’re not being invited to parties any more?”

  “What parties?”

  Georgene phoned him Friday afternoon, while he was leafing through Sweet’s Light Construction Catalogue File, looking for flanged sheathing. Two of the houses on Indian Hill had complained about leaks last winter, and Piet wanted to improve the new houses, whose foundations were already being excavated. Gallagher sat listening in his cubbyhole, but Piet let Georgene talk. Her clubwoman’s quick enunciation, and the weather outside hinting of tennis and sun-porches again, made him sentimental and regretful. He could see larches leaning, remembered the way the inside tendons of her thighs cupped and her pupils contracted as her eyelids widened and how afterwards she would tell him he gave her her shape. “Piet,” she said, in syllables from which all roughnesses of love and innuendo had been burred, leaving a smooth brisk sister, “I drove down to the Whitmans’ today, Freddy mentioned you were worried, and there’s nobody there. It doesn’t look as if anybody has been there for a while. Four newspapers are bunched up inside the storm door.”

  “Does Marcia know anything?”

  “She says there hasn’t been a car in the drive since Tuesday.”

  “Did you look inside a window?” The open oven. The gobbled sleeping pills. The hallway where a light bulb has died above a pair of ankles.

  “Everything looked neat, as if they had tidied up before going away. I didn’t see the bassinet.”

  “Have you talked to Carol or Terry? Somebody must have the answer. People just don’t vanish.”

  “Easy, dollink, don’t panic, you’re not God. You can’t protect the Whitmans from what they want to do to each other.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for the pep talk. And thanks a bushel for telling Whitman in the first place.”

  “I told him almost nothing. I admit I did, more or less maliciously, ask him why your truck was parked down there, but then he jumped all over me with questions, he was really hungry for it. Clearly he had half guessed. I am sorry, though. But, Piet—are you listening?—it made me mad the way I came in there that Monday all anxious to be Sue Barton and somehow I was turned into the cleaning lady who invites herself to tea.”

  He sighed. “OK, forget it. Truth will out, it may be best. You’re a good woman. A loyal wife and dutiful mother.”

  “Piet—I wasn’t right for you, was I? I thought we were so good, but we weren’t?”

  “You were a gorgeous piece of ass,” he told her patiently. “You were too good. You made it seem too easy and right for my warped nature. Please forgive me,” he added, “if I ever hurt you. I never meant to.”

  It was Gallagher, of all people, who had the answer. Having overheard this conversation, he called Piet into his inner office, and there, as the late light died in measured segments, without turning on a lamp, so his broad-jawed pentagonal face became a murmuring blur, told Piet of a strange scene. Early Tuesday morning, earlier than the milk, Ken Whitman had appeared at their house. He was soaked and rumpled and sandy; he had spent the night walking the beach in the mist and had taken a cramped nap in his MG. Silent, Piet guiltily remembered how Monday night he had slept warm beside Angela, as soundly as the just, amid irrelevant dreams about flying. Ken explained himself. He had come to the Gallaghers because Matt was the one man in Tarbox he could respect, the only one “uninvolved.” Also Terry, he tried to say, could understand Foxy, perhaps. What did he mean? Were they alike? They were both “proud.” Here Matt hesitated, caught in private considerations, or debating with himself how much Piet should be told. But having commenced, his Irish blood demanded the tale should continue fully. Piet pictured that early-morning kitchen, the postcard print of Dürer’s praying hands framed above the stainless-steel sink, Terry’s rough bright tablecloth and the bowls she had clumsily turned, three drowsy mouths sipping coffee, and heard himself being discussed, deplored, blamed. Ken asked them what he should do. Both of course told him to go back to Foxy; he loved her, they had a son now to think of, they were a handsome couple. Everybody, Terry said, lapses—or is tempted to. Piet suspected Matt had added the qualification in his own mind. But they found Ken adamant. Not vindictive. He spoke of the people concerned as of chemical elements, without passion. He had thought it through by the side of the ocean and could make no deduction but divorce. Terry began to cry. Ken ignored her. What he was curious to know from them was whether or not they thought Piet would divorce Angela to marry Foxy. If they thought yes, then the sooner the better. If they thought Piet would be “bastard enough”—Matt tactfully paused before releasing the expressions—to “let her stew,” then maybe they at least should wait, merely separate. He was going to go back to Cambridge, she should stay in the house. Would they keep an eye on her? Of course they would. Terry then gave him a long lecture. She said that he and Foxy had been different from the rest of them because they had no children, and that because of this they were freer. That, despite what the Church said, she did not think a marriage sacred and irrevocable until the couple produced a third soul, a child. That until then marriage was of no different order than kissing your first boy; it was an experiment. But when a child was created, it ceased to be an experiment, it became a fact; like papal infallibility or the chromatic scale. You must have such facts to build a world on, even if they appeared arbitrary. Now Ken might still feel free, he seemed very
slow to realize that he had a son—

  Piet asked, “She told him that?”

  “Yes. She’s never liked Whitman much.”

  “How nice of Terry.”

  Terry had gone on, Ken might imagine he was free to make decisions, but Piet certainly wasn’t. He loved his children, he needed Angela, and it would be very wrong of Ken to try to force him, out of some absurd sense of honor that hasn’t applied to anybody for centuries, to give up everything and marry Foxy. Piet just wasn’t free.

  “And how did Ken take all this?”

  “Not badly. He nodded and thanked us and left. Later in the morning Terry went over to see Foxy, since Ken has somehow chosen us, and she was packing. She was perfectly calm, not a hair out of place. She was going to take the baby and go to her mother in Washington, and I assume that’s where she is.”

  “Thank God. I mean, what a relief she’s all right. And that she’s out of town.”

  “You honestly haven’t heard from her?”

  “Not a whisper.”

  “And you haven’t tried to reach her?”

  “Should I have? No matter what I said, that would only have meant to her that I was still in the game and confused things. What’s your advice?”

  Matt spoke carefully, picking his words in such a way that Piet saw he was no friend; one did not have to speak so carefully to friends. Matt had grown to dislike him, and why not?—he had grown to dislike Matt, since he had first seen him, in a pressed private’s uniform, his black button eyes as shiny as his shoes: an eager beaver. “Terry and I of course have discussed this since, and there is one thing, Piet, we agree you should do. Call his bluff. Let them know, the Whitmans, either by phone to Ken or by letter to Foxy, you surely can find her mother’s address, that you will not marry her in any case. I think if they know that, they’ll get back together.”

  “But is that necessarily good? Them coming back together to make you and Terry and the Pope comfortable? Georgene just told me I shouldn’t try to play God with the Whitmans.”

  The other man’s skull, half-lit, lifted in the gloom, one tightly folded ear and the knot of muscle at the point of the jaw and the concavity of his temple all bluish-white, for beyond the office window the carbon-arc streetlight on Hope Street had come on. Piet knew what had happened and what would: Matt had misjudged the coercive power of his moral superiority and would retreat, threatened by Piet’s imperfect docility, into his own impregnable rightness. Matt slammed shut a steel desk drawer. “I don’t like involving myself with your affairs. I’ve given my advice. Take it if you want this mess to have a decent outcome. I don’t pretend to know what you’re really after.”