Couples: A Novel

by John Updike

  Piet tried to make peace; the man was his partner and had transmitted precious information. “Matt, frankly, I don’t think I’m calling any of the shots any more. All I can do is let things happen, and pray.”

  “That’s all you ever do.” Matt spoke without hesitation, as a reflex; it was one of those glimpses, as bizarre as the sight in a three-way clothing-store mirror of your own profile, into how you appear to other people. The Red-haired Avenger.

  At home Angela had received a phone call. She told him about it during their after-supper coffee while the girls were watching Gunsmoke. “I got a long-distance call today, from Washington,” she said, beginning.

  “Foxy?”

  “Yes, how did you know?” She answered herself, “She’s been calling you, though she told me she hadn’t.”

  “She hasn’t. Gallagher told me today where they both were. Ken apparently went over there Tuesday and told his sad story.”

  “I thought you knew that. Terry told me days ago.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “We haven’t been speaking.” This was true.

  “What did the lovely Elizabeth have to say for herself?”

  Angela’s cool face, slightly thinner these days, tensed, and he knew he had taken the wrong tone. She was becoming a disciplinarian. She said, “She was very self-possessed. She said that she was with her mother and had been thinking, and the more she thought”—Angela crossed her hands on the tabletop to control their trembling—“the more she felt that she and Ken should get a divorce now, while the child was still an infant. That she did not want to bring Toby up in the kind of suppressed unhappiness she had known as a child.”

  “Heaven help us,” Piet said. Softly, amid motionless artifacts, he was sinking.

  Angela lifted a finger from the oiled surface of the cherrywood dining table. “No. Wait. She said she called not to tell me that, but to tell me, and for me to tell you, that she absolutely didn’t expect you to leave me. That she”—the finger returned, weakening the next word—“loves you, but the divorce is all between her and Ken and isn’t because of you really and puts you under no obligation. She said that at least twice.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “What could I? ‘Yes, yes, no, thank you,’ and hung up. I asked her if there was anything we could do about the house, lock it or check it now and then, and she said no need, Ken would be coming out weekends.”

  Piet put his palms on the tabletop to push himself up, sighing. “What a mercy,” he said. “This has been a nightmare.”

  “Don’t you feel guilty about their divorce?”

  “A little. Not much. They were dead on each other and didn’t know it. In a way I was a blessing for bringing it to a head.”

  “Don’t wander off, Piet. I didn’t have anything to say to Foxy but I do have something to say to you. Could we have some brandy?”

  “Aren’t you full? That was a lovely dinner, by the way. I don’t know why I adore lima beans so. I love bland food.”

  “Let’s have some brandy. Please, quick. Gunsmoke is nearly over. I wanted to wait until the children were in bed but I’m all keyed up and I can’t. I must have brandy.”

  He brought it and even as he was pouring her glass she had begun. “I think Foxy’s faced her situation and we should face ours. I think you should get out, Piet. Tonight. I don’t want to live with you any more.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “This does need brandy, then. Now tell me why. You know it’s all over with Foxy.”

  “I’m not so sure, but that doesn’t matter. I think you still love her, but even if you don’t, they mentioned Bea, and if it’s not Bea it’s going to be somebody else; and I just don’t think it’s worth it.”

  “And the girls? It’s not worth it for them either?”

  “Stop hiding behind the girls. No, actually, I don’t think it’s worth it for them. They’re sensitive, they know when we fight, or, even worse I suppose, don’t fight. Poor Nancy is plainly disturbed, and I’m not so sure that Ruth, even though she inherited my placid face, is any better.”

  “I hear your psychiatrist talking.”

  “Not really. He doesn’t approve or disapprove. I try to say what I think, which isn’t easy for me, since my father always knew what I should think, and if it bounces back off this other man’s silence—I hardly know what he looks like, I’m so scared to look at him—and if it still sounds true, I try to live with it.”

  “Goddammit, this is all because of that jackass Freddy Thorne.”

  “Let me finish. And what I think is true is, you do not love me, Piet Hanema. You do not. You do not.”

  “But I do. Obviously I do.”

  “Stop it, you don’t. You didn’t even get me the house I wanted. You fixed it up for her instead.”

  “I was paid to. I adore you.”

  “Yes, that says it. You adore me as a way of getting out of loving me. Oh, you like my bosom and bottom well enough, and you think it’s neat the way I’m a professor’s niece, and taught you which fork to use, and take you back after every little slumming expedition, and you enjoy making me feel frigid so you’ll be free—”

  “I adore you. I need you.”

  “Well then you need the wrong thing. I want out. I’m tired of being bullied.”

  The brandy hurt, as if his insides were tenderly budding. He asked, “Have I bullied you? I suppose in a way. But only lately. I wanted in to you, sweet, and you didn’t give it to me.”

  “You didn’t know how to ask.”

  “Maybe I know now.”

  “Too late. You know what I think? I think she’s just your cup of tea.”

  “That’s meaningless. That’s superstition.” But saying this was to ask himself what he contrariwise believed, and he believed that there was, behind the screen of couples and houses and days, a Calvinist God Who lifts us up and casts us down in utter freedom, without recourse to our prayers or consultation with our wills. Angela had become the messenger of this God. He fought against her as a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed. He said to her, “I’m your husband and always will be. I promise, my philandering is done, not that there was awfully much of it. You imagine there’s been gossip, and you’re acting out of wounded pride; pride, and the selfishness these fucking psychiatrists give everybody they handle. What does he care about the children, or about your loneliness once I’m gone? The more miserable you are, the deeper he’ll get his clutches in. It’s a racket, Angel, it’s witchcraft, and a hundred years from now people will be amazed that we took it seriously. It’ll be like leeches and bleeding.”

  She said, “Don’t expose your ignorance to me any more. I’d like to remember you with some respect.”

  “I’m not leaving.”

  “Then I am. Tomorrow morning, Ruthie has dancing class and she was going to have lunch with Betsy Saltz. Nancy’s blue dress should be washed and ironed for Martha Thorne’s birthday party. Maybe you can get Georgene to come over and do it for you.”

  “Where could you go?”

  “Oh, many places. I could go home and play chess with Daddy. I could go to New York and see the Matisse exhibit. I could fly to Aspen and ski and sleep with an instructor. There’s a lot I can do, Piet, once I get away from you.” In her excitement she stood, her ripe body swinging.

  The upsurge of music in the dark living room indicated the end of the program. Cactuses. Sunset. Right triumphant. He said, “If you’re serious, of course, I’m the one to go. But on an experimental basis. And if I’m asked politely.”

  Politeness was the final atmosphere. Together they settled the girls in bed, and packed a suitcase for Piet, and shared a final brandy in the kitchen. As he very slowly, so as not to wake the sleeping girls, backed the pick-up truck down the crunching driveway, Angela made a noise from the porch that he thought was to call him back. He braked and she rushed to the side of his cab with a little silver sloshin
g bottle, a pint of gin. “In case you get insomnia,” she explained, and put the bottle dewy in his palm, and put a cool kiss on his cheek, with a faint silver edge that must be her tears. He offered to open the door, but she held the handle from the other side. “Darling Piet, be brave,” she said, and raced, with one step loud on the gravel, back into the house, and doused the golden hallway light.

  He spent the first weekend in the Gallagher & Hanema office, sleeping under an old army blanket on the imitation-leather sofa, lulling his terror with gin-and-water, the water drawn from the dripping tap in their booth-sized lavatory. The drip, the tick of his wristwatch left lying on the resounding wood desk, the sullen plodding of his heart, the sash-rattling vibration of trucks changing gears as they passed at all hours through downtown Tarbox, and a relentless immanence within the telephone all kept him awake. Sunday he huddled in his underwear as the footsteps of churchgoers shuffled on the sidewalk beside his ear. His skull lined like a thermos bottle with the fragile glass of a hangover, he felt himself sardonically eavesdropping from within his tomb. The commonplace greetings he overheard boomed with a sinister magnificence, intimate and proud as naked bodies. On Monday morning, though Piet had tidied up, Gallagher was shocked to find the office smelling of habitation. That week, as it became clear that Angela was not going to call him back, he moved to the third floor of the professional apartment building he himself had refashioned from the mansion of the last Tarbox. The third floor had been left much as it was, part attic, part servants’ quarters. The floorboards of his room, unsanded, bore leak stains shaped like wet leaves and patches of old linoleum and pale squares where linoleum had been; the oatmeal-colored walls, deformed by the slant of the mansard roof outside, were still hung with careful pastels of wildflowers Gertrude Tarbox had done, as a young single lady of “accomplishments,” before the First World War. When it rained, one wall, where the paper had long since curled away, became wet, and in the mornings the heat was slow to come on, via a single radiator ornate as lace and thick as armor. To reach his room Piet had to pass through the plum-carpeted foyer, between the frosted-glass doors of the insurance agency and the chiropractor, up the wide stairs with an aluminum strip edging each tread, around past the doors of an oculist and a lawyer new in town, and then up the secret stair, entered by an unmarked door a slide bolt could lock, to his cave. A man who worked nights, with a stutter so terrible he could hardly manage “Good morning” when he and Piet met on the stairs, lived across the stair landing from Piet; besides these two rooms there was a large empty attic Gallagher still hoped to transform and rent as a ballroom to the dancing school that now rented the Episcopal parish hall, where Ruth took her Saturday morning lessons.

  Though work on Indian Hill had begun again, with hopes for six twenty-thousand-dollar houses by Labor Day, Jazinski could manage most problems by himself now. “Everything’s under control,” Piet was repeatedly told, and more than once he called the lumberyard or the foundation contractors to find that Gallagher or Leon had already spoken with them. So Piet was often downtown with not much to do. On Good Friday, with the stock market closed, Harold little-Smith stopped him on Charity Street, in front of the barber shop.

  “Piet, this is terrible. C’est terrible. What did the Whitmans pull on you?”

  “The Whitmans? Nothing much. It was Angela’s idea I move out.”

  “La bel ange? I can’t buy that. You’ve always been the perfect couple. The Whitmans now, the first time I met them I could see they were in trouble. Stiff as boards, both of them. But it makes me and Marcia damn mad they’ve screwed you up too. Why can’t tout le monde mind their own business?”

  “Well, it’s not as if I had been totally—”

  “Oh, I know, I know, but that’s never really the issue, is it? People use it when they need to, because of our moronic Puritan laws.”

  “Who used who, do you think, in my case?”

  “Why, clairement, Foxy used you. How else could she get rid of that zombie? Don’t be used, Piet. Go back to your kids and forget that bitch.”

  “Don’t call her a bitch. You don’t know the story at all.”

  “Listen, Piet, I wouldn’t be telling you this just on my own account, out of my own reliably untrustworthy neofascist opinion. But Marcia and I stayed up till past three last night with the Applebys talking this over and we all agreed: we don’t like seeing a couple we love hurt. If I weren’t so hung, I’d probably put it more tactfully. Pas d’offense, of course.”

  “Janet agreed too, that Foxy was a bitch and I’d been had?”

  “She was the devil’s advocate for a while, but we wore her out. Anyway, it doesn’t mean a fart in Paradise what we think. The thing is, what are you going to do? Come on, I’m your friend. Ton frère. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not doing anything. Angela hasn’t called and doesn’t seem to need me back.”

  “You’re waiting for her to call? Don’t wait, go to her. Women have to be taken, you know that. I thought you were a great lover.”

  “Who told you? Marcia?” Harold’s twin-tipped nose lifted as he scented a remote possibility. Piet laughed, and went on, “Or maybe Janet? A splendid woman. Why I remember when she was a prostitute in St. Louis, the line went clear down the hall into the billiard room. Have you ever noticed, at the moment of truth, how her whole insides kind of pull? One time I remember—”

  Harold cut in. “Well I’m glad to see your spirits haven’t been crushed. Nothing sacred, eh Piet?”

  “Nothing sacred. Pas d’offense.”

  “Marcia and I wanted to have you over for a drink sometime, and be serious for a change. She’s all in a flap about it. She went over to your house, and Angela was perfectly polite, not a hair out of place, but she wouldn’t unbend.”

  “Is that what Marcia likes, to bend people?”

  “Listen, I feel I’ve expressed myself badly. We care, is the point. Piet, we care.”

  “Je comprends. Merci. Bonjour.”

  “OK, let’s leave it at that,” Harold said, miffed, sniffing. “I have to get a haircut.” His hair looked perfectly well-trimmed to Piet.

  The invitation to a drink at the little-Smiths’ never came. Few of the friends he and Angela had shared sought him out. The Saltzes, probably at Angela’s urging, had him to dinner by himself, but their furniture was being readied for moving, and the evening depressed Piet. Now that they were leaving, the Saltzes could not stop talking about themselves as Jews, as if during their years in Tarbox they had suppressed their race, and now it could out. Irene’s battle with the school authorities over Christmas pageantry was lengthily recounted, her eyebrows palpitating. The fact of local anti-Semitism, even in their tiny enlightened circle of couples, was urgently confided to Piet. The worst offenders were the Constantines. Carol had been raised, you know, in a very Presbyterian small-town atmosphere, and Eddie was, of course, an ignorant man. Night after night they had sat over there arguing the most absurd things, like the preponderance of Jewish Communists, and psychoanalysts, and violinists, as if it all were part of a single conspiracy. Terrible to admit, after a couple of drinks they would sit around trading Jewish jokes; and of course the Saltzes knew many more than Eddie and Carol, which was interpreted as their being ashamed of their race, which she, Irene, certainly, certainly was not. Piet tried to tell them how he felt, especially in the society of Tarbox, as a sort of Jew at heart; but Irene, as if he had furtively petitioned for membership in the chosen race, shushed him with a torrent of analysis as to why Frank Appleby, that arch-Wasp, always argued with her, yet couldn’t resist arguing with her, and sought her out at parties. In fairness, there were two people among their “friends” with whom she had never felt a trace of condescension or fear; and one was Angela. The other was Freddy Thorne. “That miserable bastard,” Piet groaned, out of habit, to please; people expected him to hate Freddy. The Saltzes understood his exclamation as a sign that, as all the couples suspected, Freddy and Angela had for ages been lovers.<
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  Piet left early; he missed the silence of his shabby room, the undemandingness of the four walls. Ben put his hand on his shoulder and smiled his slow archaic smile. “You’re down now,” he told Piet, “and it’s a pity you’re not a Jew, because the fact is, every Jew expects to be down sometime in his life, and he has a philosophy for it. God is testing him. Nisayon Elohim.”

  “But I clearly brought this on myself,” Piet said.

  “Who’s to say? If you believe in omnipotence, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is to taste your own ashes. Chew ’em. Up or down doesn’t matter; ain ben David ba elle bador shekulo zakkai oh kulo chayyav. The son of David will not come except to a generation that’s wholly good or all bad.”

  Piet tried to tell them how much he had liked them, how Angela had once said, and he had agreed, that the Saltzes of all the couples they knew were the most free from, well, crap.

  Ben kept grinning and persisted with his advice. “Let go, Piet. You’ll be OK. It was a helluva lot of fun knowing you.”

  Irene darted forward and kissed him good-bye, a quick singeing kiss from lips dark red in her pale face, rekindling his desire for women.

  Later in the week, after cruising past her house several times a day, he called Bea. He had seen her once downtown, and she had waved from across the street, and disappeared into the jeweler’s shop, still decorated with a nodding rabbit, though Easter was over. Her voice on the phone sounded startled, guilty.