Couples (67 page)

The old church proved not only badly gutted but structurally unsound: a miracle it had not collapsed of itself a decade ago. Before the bulldozers and backhoes could munch through the building, the rooster was rescued by a young man riding a steel ball hoisted to the tip of an enormous crane. The elementary-school children were dismissed early to see the sight. Up, up, the young rider went, until he glimmered in the sun like the golden bird, and Piet Hanema, who in his unemployment was watching, and who knew what mistakes crane operators could make, held his breath, afraid. Gently the ball was hoisted and nudged into place; with surprising ease the young man lifted the gilded silhouette from its pivoted socket and, holding it in his lap, was swiftly lowered to the earth, as cheers from the schoolchildren rose. The weathercock measured five feet from beak to tailfeathers; the copper penny of his eye was tiny. As the workman walked across the green to present it to Pedrick and the two deacons waiting with him, the clustering children made a parade, a dancing flickering field of color as they jostled and leaped to see better the eye their parents had told them existed. From Piet’s distance their mingled cry seemed a jubilant jeering. The grass
of the domed green was vernally lush. The three stiff delegates of the church accepted the old emblem and posed for photographs absurdly, cradling the piece of tin between them; the man on Pedrick’s right had hairy ears, the one on his left was a jeweler. The swarming children encircled them and touched the dull metal. The sky above was empty but for two parallel jet trails.

Affected by this scene of joy, seeing that his life in a sense had ended, Piet turned and realized he was standing where he had first glimpsed Foxy getting into her car after church, the spot where later they had met in the shadow of her mother’s arrival, her tall body full, she in her pale turban; and he was glad that he would marry her, and frightened that he would not.

Is it too severe? I’d take it off but it’s pinned
.

It’s great. It brings out the pampered pink of your face
.

God, you’re hostile
.

I may be hostile, but I adore you. Let’s go to bed
.

Wouldn’t that be a relief? Do you know how many days it’s been since we made love?

Many
.

Now, though it has not been many years, the town scarcely remembers Piet, with his rattly pick-up truck full of odd lumber, with his red hair and corduroy hat and eye-catching apricot windbreaker, he who sat so often and contentedly in Cogswell’s Drug Store nursing a cup of coffee, the stub of a pencil sticking down from under the sweatband of his hat, his windbreaker unzippered to reveal an expensive cashmere sweater ruined by wood dust and shavings, his quick eyes looking as if they had been rubbed too hard the night before, the skin beneath them pouched in a little tucked fold, as if his maker in the last instant had pinched the clay. Angela, who
teaches at a girls’ school in Braintree, is still seen around, talking with Freddy Thorne on the street corner, or walking on the beach with a well-tailored wise-smiling small man, her father. She flew to Juárez in July and was divorced in a day. Piet and Foxy were married in September. Her father, pulling strings all the way from San Diego, found a government job for his new son-in-law, as a construction inspector for federal jobs, mostly military barracks, in the Boston-Worcester area. Piet likes the official order and the regular hours. The Hanemas live in Lexington, where, gradually, among people like themselves, they have been accepted, as another couple.

Books by John Updike

POEMS

The Carpentered Hen
(1958) •
Telephone Poles
(1963) •
Midpoint
(1969)
• Tossing and Turning
(1977) •
Facing Nature
(1985) •
Collected Poems 1953–1993
(1993)
• Americana
(2001)
• Endpoint
(2009)

NOVELS

The Poorhouse Fair
(1959)
• Rabbit, Run
(1960)
• The Centaur
(1963) •
Of the Farm
(1965)
• Couples
(1968)
• Rabbit Redux
(1971)
• A Month of Sundays
(1975)
• Marry Me
(1976)
• The Coup
(1978)
• Rabbit Is Rich
(1981)
• The Witches of Eastwick
(1984)
• Roger’s Version
(1986) •
S
. (1988)
• Rabbit at Rest
(1990)
• Memories of the Ford Administration
(1992)
• Brazil
(1994)
• In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1996) •
Toward the End of Time
(1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius
(2000)
• Seek My Face
(2002)
• Villages
(2004)
• Terrorist
(2006)
• The Widows of Eastwick
(2008)

SHORT STORIES

The Same Door
(1959)
• Pigeon Feathers
(1962)
• Olinger Stories
(a selection, 1964)
• The Music School
(1966)
• Bech: A Book
(1970)
• Museums and Women
(1972)
• Problems
(1979)
• Too Far to Go
(a selection, 1979)
• Bech Is Back
(1982)
• Trust Me
(1987)
• The Afterlife
(1994)
• Bech at Bay
(1998)
• Licks of Love
(2000)
• The Complete Henry Bech
(2001)
• The Early Stories: 1953–1975
(2003)
• My Father’s Tears
(2009)
• The Maples Stories
(2009)

ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

Assorted Prose
(1965)
• Picked-Up Pieces
(1975)
• Hugging the Shore
(1983)
• Just Looking
(1989)
• Odd Jobs
(1991)
• Golf Dreams
(1996) •
More Matter
(1999)
• Still Looking
(2005)
• Due Considerations
(2007) •
Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu
(2010)
• Higher Gossip
(2011)
• Always Looking
(2012)

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

The Magic Flute
(1962)
• The Ring
(1964)
• A Child’s Calendar
(1965)
• Bottom’s Dream
(1969)
• A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects
(1996)

J
OHN
U
PDIKE
was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of
The New Yorker
. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.