Couples by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64572-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

capac. for self-decep.

Foxy said sharply, “I won’t believe it. Everything people have ever built up, Freddy, you’d let slide and fall apart.”

“I do my job,” he answered. “It’s not the job I would have chosen, but every day I put on that white coat and do it.”

White coat. The antiseptic truth. He has learned to live in it. I have not. Better man than I. Piet felt himself falling in a frozen ridged abyss, Freddy’s mind. Foxy silently held out her hand toward him; Terry turned to him and recited, “Hope isn’t something you reason yourself into. It’s a virtue, like obedience. It’s given. We’re free only to accept or reject.”

Angela stood and said, “I think we’re all pretty much alike, no matter what we think we believe. Husband, I’m drunk. Take me home.”

In the hall, with its elephantine scent of umbrellas, Piet playfully poked Freddy in the stomach and said, “Tell Georgene we missed her.”

Freddy’s response was not playful; his blurred face menacingly bloated beneath the glare of his subaqueous mask. “She chose not to come. You have any message for her?” The cold fact of his knowing seemed to flow across Piet’s face.

“No, just give her all our loves,” Piet said nimbly, able to skim and dodge at this level, where actions counted, and no submission to death was asked. He doubted that Freddy knew anything. Georgene had wept after sleeping with him again after her long hiatus of innocence, but Piet had tested her strength before and knew she could withstand all pressure of grief, all temptation to confess. Freddy’s tone of menace was a bluff, a typical groping gesture in the murk. His element. Piet jabbed again: “Shouldn’t you be going home to her now?” Freddy was making no show of leaving with the four others.

“She’s asleep,” he said. A woman asleep. As ominous as wonderful. Rather than come to a gathering where her lover might be, she had chosen to sleep. Nursing her misery. Piet felt her captive within the murk of this man, her husband, and regretted having visited her again.

Carol had fallen silent, listening for Eddie’s return. Now she roused herself to say good night. She and Freddy, both dressed to swim, waved together from the sallowly lit side porch. Down the side street the Saltzes’ narrow house was dark but for a bulb left burning at the rear of the downstairs. Tarbox was settled to sleep. The waterfall by the toy factory faintly roared. A car screeched its tires by the rocks at the base of the green. A jet rattled invisibly among the stars. Its sound was a scratch on glass. A final flurry of good nights. Terry and Foxy, limping shadows on the blue September street, went to the Gallaghers’ Mercedes. Without glancing backward she twiddled the fingers of her left hand: farewell until I touch you. Angela said softly, “Poor Foxy, why didn’t Terry have the sense to take her home hours ago?”

Insulted, Piet asked, “You thought she wanted to go?”

“Of course, she was exhausted.

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