Authors: John Updike
“The wrecker’s ball,” he resumed. “It should be the name of a song. We’re gonna dance off both our shoes,” he began to sing. The pressure on his back repeated, and it occurred to him he should ask Georgene to dance. Once you sleep with them, however many years go by, they fit smoothly into your arms.
But others also wished to break up the conversation between Pat and Ed; Jason and Carol suddenly loomed over them like parents above children playing on the floor. “We think you two should dance with us,” Carol announced primly, and obliging Ed pushed himself up from the floor, which seemed with the bourbon to have taken on an elastic life of its own, and to bounce under his feet. Carol, rather miraculously, always felt slightly strange in his arms, as though their many years of marriage had never been. They had never quite worked out the steps, and this awkwardness made her interesting, especially now that he knew that somewhere, with somebody else, she
was
working out the steps. Her plump body felt solid with her secret, and unusually flexible to him; reaching behind her gracefully, she adjusted the position of his hand on her back. Ed had experimentally placed it an inch or two lower than usual. “Jason looks like a smooth dancer,” he said.
“Not that I noticed,” she answered.
“He is with Pat. Look at them go. Twirls, and everything.”
“They went to the same sort of cotillions.”
“But there’s more to life than cotillions, huh?”
“Ed, you really shouldn’t drink so much. It’s what gives you insomnia—all that sugar in the blood.”
“Next you’ll be telling me I should take up jogging.”
“Or something. It’s not just you. We’re
both
horribly out of shape.”
He moved his hand lower again on her back and patted her solid fanny. He had his husband’s prerogatives still. “To me you feel just right,” he said.
Ed was an engineer, specializing in stress analysis of tall steel-frame buildings. His plan for dismantling his marriage demanded that his wife’s affair remain in place, as a temporary support; otherwise, at the moment of pullout, his burden of guilt and strangeness would be too much. The children were heaviest, but the house, the town, and all the old connubial habits would weigh upon him in his moment of flight. He feared that Jason and Carol might break up out of their own dynamics, or in response to discovery from the other side; yet he wanted to allow some months to steel himself, as it were. Seeing, in the raw spring evenings, tall Jason moving with his jogger’s stagger along the shadowy roads, Ed felt a pang of alarm that the precious man would be hit by a car, and the whole structure collapse.
Warm weather arrived, with its quickening of the blood, and then summer, with its promiscuous looseness, its airy weave of coming and going, of lingering light and warm darkness, of screened porches and reactivated swimming pools and pickup drinks on the patio. Everyone got browner in the summer, more frolicsome and louder; the suburban women in their bathing suits and sundresses took on the
sultry hardness of high-class whores—their eyes hidden behind sunglasses, their toenails lacquered. Jason and Carol became more blatant; more than once, Ed spotted them holding hands in a corner of a cocktail party, and when asked where she had been during some unaccountable absence, she would give a teen-ager’s lame, evasive answer—“Oh, out.” She might add, “It’s so hot I had to take a walk toward the river,” or else display a half-gallon carton of skimmed milk and a packet of wheat-germ cookies as if the purchase of these had naturally consumed two hours. And Jason was always coming around to the house on more or less plausible errands, having to do with zoning or tennis or an exchange of gardening equipment. Ed, to make his tennis-court fence ten years ago, had invested forty dollars in one of those two-handled post-hole diggers, and it was surprising how many posts Jason seemed to be planting in his modest back yard, or how often, for a man who owned only a half-acre, he had to borrow Ed’s chainsaw. Every errand, of course, won from Carol a hospitable offer of coffee or tea or a drink, depending on the time of day.
Pat sometimes came along on these hollow excursions, and made flawless, wooden small talk with Ed out on the screened porch while the other two were coincidentally absent within the house: Carol had had to rush into the kitchen, Jason to the bathroom or to make a phone call. The house, that summer, seemed much used. Carol kept setting up, around the excuses of the tennis court and the swimming pool, informal little parties that almost always included the Reynoldses. One day in early August, returning to the house from an emergency run to the liquor store downtown, Ed swung into the driveway as Carol and Jason were greeting another couple. They looked so natural, posed side by side in the golden late-afternoon
light, so
presiding
, standing together one flagstone step up from the driveway, he with his gray hair and gaunt stoop and she with her matronly round arms and shoulders, that Ed felt abolished, already gone; he secretly shared their joy in each other, and yet primitive indignation contributed to his energy as he marched toward them with the rattling bags of liquor. Carol looked toward him; she seemed un-feignedly happy to see him. Or was it the liquor she was happy to see? She was wearing only a wraparound denim skirt over her black bathing suit, and in the chill of approaching evening was hugging herself; the homeyness of this ageless gesture, and the familiar small sight, as she stepped down and reached forward to take one of the bags from him, of the downy hairs standing erect with goosebumps on her bare forearms, wounded him unexpectedly—activated random stress within a situation he had considered thoroughly analyzed.
The season was ebbing. Ed had to make his move. The children were conveniently scattered to summer jobs and to friends’ houses, but for the youngest, who after dinner wrapped himself in the mumble of television in his room upstairs. Ed invited Carol to take a walk with him. Her eyes widened, into their china-doll look, and she hurried to get a jacket from the closet; the tone of his voice, without his willing it, had spoken to her guilt. They walked along the broad grassy path, favored by joggers and snowmobilers, kept open above the Croton Aqueduct, which poured water south in a line parallel to the river and the railroad tracks. The city’s gravity pulled everything toward it. The Marstons walked uphill, between clumps and groves of maples and beeches, and past school grounds seen through wire fencing; back yards abutted on the right-of-way, and Ed and Carol felt themselves moving like ghosts through family cookouts and badminton
games and the domestic music of chugging dishwashers and the evening news.
He described to her the night he had discovered the valentine, and what he had observed since. She listened and did not interrupt; in the corner of his vision, against the moving background of leaves and fence slats, her pale face seemed a motionless image projected from a slide upon a skidding, flickering screen. He proposed this to her: he would leave, take an apartment in the city, and take her secret with him. In return for his silence, she would present the separation to their children and friends as a mutual decision. He would provide financial support, and in a year they would see how things stood.
She spoke at last. “I’ll give him up.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Why not?” Her eyes had grown watery, seeking his.
“You love him.”
“Maybe I love you, too.”
“You think that now, but in the long run …” The sentence trailed off. He summoned up a little indignation. “Anyway, I don’t want to be loved
too
. Come on, Carol,” he said. “We’ve given it a good try, had some nice kids and nice times; you wouldn’t have taken up with Jason if things were what they should be. You and he, you really seem to have it.”
She could have denied it. But she simply said, “He has Pat.”
Ed sighed. “Yes, well. I can’t take care of everybody.”
This was a Saturday. The next day, with the sickening new condition of their marriage drying everywhere like an invisible paste, and the children and the pets and the furniture all still unknowing, Carol surprised Ed by still wanting to be taken to a Sunday-afternoon concert at a local church. The Reynoldses were also there, in a pew on the far side of the
nave; they all mingled over punch afterwards, in the ladies’ parlor. It was thrilling, for a connoisseur of stress, to see Carol lightly bantering with Jason and making valiant small talk with Pat. As Ed drove her home, she began to cry, and he asked her why she had wanted to come. “It was my only chance to see Jason,” she confessed, as bluntly as if to a counsellor, and not bothering to hide the reverent way her voice fell in pronouncing her lover’s name. So quickly, Ed had become her accomplice. He felt his heart shiver and harden. “He knows I know?”
“Not the details, just the fact.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I slipped a note to him. Didn’t you see?”
Ed felt trapped and betrayed. With the other man knowing, there was less chance of backing out. “No.”
“I thought you’d become such a great observer.”
He asked her, sarcastic in turn, “Aren’t you two afraid of Pat catching you out in some of these shenanigans?”
“She doesn’t want to catch us out,” Carol told him. He glanced over, and her eyes, though red-rimmed, had a twinkle. She seemed to be adjusting to his departure faster than he was.
That fall, Ed entered into the strange new status of half-husband. He found a small apartment in the West Eighties and went home weekends to rake and put up storm windows and entertain the kids. Some nights, he slept over in the guest room, where the children didn’t like to find him. They wanted him back in Mommy’s bed. That creepy Mr. Reynolds was always coming around, red-faced and panting, in his jogging shoes. They called him Big Foot. “Big Foot’s just clumped
up!” one of the children would shout from downstairs, and Ed, involved in a game of Trivial Pursuit in his oldest daughter’s room, would see Carol sail past the door, her quick step silent, her whole body lightened by expectation.
In this cozy atmosphere, with their conspiracy now widened to include the children, Ed asked Carol, in curiosity as much as envy, what Jason did for her that he had not. “It’s very peculiar,” she admitted, spacing her words. “He just thinks I’m amazingly wonderful.” And she had the grace, this valuation being so clearly excessive, to look down into her drink and blush.
“Well, who doesn’t?” he asked, himself blushing. Since leaving her, Ed was all flattery.
She looked up sharply. Did he imagine it, or had her blue eyes become darker, snappier in her months of living alone, of being her own woman? Certainly her hair, its oak color loaded with gray, had become wigglier. “
You
didn’t,” she told him. “You never did. I was just
there
for you, like an I-beam or something. Any other beam would have done just as well. I’m sure you’ve laid some in place already.”
“No,” he said slowly, almost truthfully. For in fact Ed was enjoying the shabby austerity, the modest purity, of bachelor life. He had married so young he had never had to cook for himself before, or make his own bed. These skills had seemed arcane to him, and now they proved learnable, and he understood why women were healthier, with all that reaching and stirring and industrious attention to the texture of things. His crowded, clamorous, only slightly dangerous block near upper Broadway spoke to him more intimately, of small decisions and services, groceries and laundry, than the suburbs ever had. Keeping himself fed and tidy and half-running Carol’s household forty minutes to the north took most of his
energy. Living alone makes one methodical; his drinking had eased off, and the weekend slices of his old social life tasted sour and flat.
He had rarely seen their friends except on weekends anyway, and in these days of domestic confusion his defection and part-time reappearance were casually accepted. The Reynoldses, of the couples they had known together, were kindest and most attentive to Carol in her singleness, and came by the house oftenest. Pat and she shared garden-club trips, aerobics classes, a night course in the English Romantic poets at the local community college. The Marston children gave Pat the logical nickname of Little Foot, as if by verbal magic to knit the Reynoldses closer together. “The Feet are here again,” one would shout, and Ed, if he was caught in the house, would sometimes have to make a fourth at tennis.
He always insisted that he and Pat be partners. That way, the sides were most even. Jason was a well-schooled but lumbering player, and Carol’s insouciance, her good-humored indifference to the exact outcome, undermined her natural grace at the game. Ed had a weak backhand but killer instinct at the net, and little Pat played, it seemed to him, like a weakly wound-up machine. She moved back and forth as if on tiptoe and her movements minced in the sides of his vision. Across the net from her, Ed would have gobbled up her ladylike forehands and pounded them back at her. As it was, he would growl, “Let’s go get ’em, Pat,” and count on her to cover the back line as he lunged from side to side, looking for the winning volley. The matches were fun, especially when fussy, no-fat-on-me Jason began to tut and mutter to himself, and Carol grew rosy in the face as she tried to play to please her lover while both acknowledging Ed’s ironic glances and keeping her expression blank for Pat’s benefit.
In a way, it was the three of them against Pat. Or was it the three of them keeping her safe in her bubble of ignorance? Ed felt alternately that they were a deceit machine, chewing her up, and a kind of cradle, holding her above the abyss. For what, really, he asked himself, would telling her the truth have done but force her to act and perhaps plunge them all into disaster? How much did Pat suspect? Nothing, it appeared, which seemed incredible to Ed; just looking at Jason and Carol across the net, hearing their mutual encouragements, feeling the easy warmth their partnership gave off should have told Pat the tale. Once he joked to her, “You know what they look like, those two? Mr. and Mrs. Jack Sprat.” It was true: in the stress of their long affair, Jason had become even thinner and Carol plumper. Pat laughed politely but emptily, intent on her serve. Though her strokes lacked fire, she did like to win; this much was human about her, and intelligible, and likable.