Interior States Read online

  Earlier this year, I was on vacation in Florida, staying in a low midcentury complex four blocks from the beach. The apartment had terrazzo floors, jalousie windows, and a kitchen outfitted in those matching turquoise appliances manufactured by GE in the 1950s. It was like living in an episode of Mad Men. In the backyard, near the pool, stood a laundry hutch filled with used books left by past visitors. It was there, among a shelf crowded with the embossed titles of Dan Brown and John Grisham, that I discovered a first edition of Couples. The dustcover bore a sketch of William Blake’s Adam and Eve Sleeping washed in turquoise—the same chlorinated blue as the pool and the retro appliances. Maybe it was the tropical air that loosened my defenses and called to mind the promise of that gorgeous prose I’d heard so much about. I decided it was time to give the old letch a shot.

  Couples was published in the late ’60s, but its story begins in the early years of that decade. Piet, the protagonist, is a thirty-five-year-old building contractor who lives with his family in a fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox, an old fishing village that has been recently colonized by young Waspy couples who find its decay charming. The narrative point of view often veers away from Piet and travels promiscuously among this circle of couples who spend their plentiful leisure hours playing tennis, hosting dinner parties, and renovating their old saltbox houses. Of this milieu, Updike writes: “They belonged to that segment of their generation of the upper middle class which mildly rebelled against the confinement and discipline whereby wealth maintained its manners during the upheavals of depression and world war.” These mild rebellions are not political, but aesthetic.

  Fenced off from their own parents by nursemaids and tutors and “help,” they would personally rear large intimate families; they changed diapers with their own hands, did their own housework and home repairs, gardened and shoveled snow with a sense of strengthened health. Chauffeured, as children, in black Packards and Chryslers, they drove second-hand cars in an assortment of candy colors. Exiled early to boarding schools, they resolved to use and improve the local public schools. Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games….Duty and work yielded as ideals to truth and fun. Virtue was no longer sought in temple or market place but in the home—one’s own home, and then the homes of one’s friends.

  The passage immediately called to mind the opening pages of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, in which a contingent of white suburban exiles colonizes a not-yet-gentrified city neighborhood in order “to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn.” Perhaps all bourgeois generations see themselves in similarly pragmatic terms. Beneath the antiquated details of Updike’s description, there are surely echoes of my own generation, whose mild rebellions have involved learning to make Greek yogurt from scratch and building tiny houses out of reclaimed wood.

  But the residents of Tarbox are also steadfast products of their time, an era wedged awkwardly between the explosion of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution. Whatever subversive pleasure they initially took in shoveling their own driveways and rambling about the garden soon gives way to more carnal pursuits. Secretive affairs evolve into more transparent experimentations with spouse-swapping, and soon the matrix of open marriages becomes so cross-pollinated it’s difficult to keep track of who’s swiving whom. The women have begun going to analysis, the men are hopped up on Freud’s 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle—and all of the attendant sexual experimentation has been made possible by the invention of oral contraceptives. The first time Piet cheats on his wife, with her friend Georgene, the mistress replies to his anxious query about birth control with a serene laugh. “Welcome,” she says, “to the post-pill paradise.”

  While the women in the novel are not without sexual agency, there’s an obvious power imbalance in all of this experimentation. Even when they initiate affairs, the women are never in control of them; it is the men who dictate the terms and invariably decide when and how they will end. More often than not, women are forced to use sex as a kind of currency—for revenge, for equality—and when they need furtive abortions, they are compelled to trade prurient acts for medical assistance. While the book is not exactly sympathetic to them, the reality of these conditions is rendered with a sharp eye, through characters who are emotionally convincing. For what it’s worth, the book does not pretend that swinging—still referred to in those days as “wife-swapping”—benefited all parties in equal measure.

  Still, there was plenty in the book that lived up to Updike’s contemporary reputation: women who think things no woman would think (“She had wanted to bear Ken a child, to brew his excellence in her warmth”); conversations between women that manage to pass the Bechdel test—in brief: having two women speak to each other about a topic other than a man—only by way of topics related to home renovation; and a panoply of unsettling metaphors (“He fought against her as a raped woman might struggle, to intensify the deed”). There are many passages in which Updike’s prodigious gifts as a prose artist are given over to the effects of gravity on women’s bodies. Nobody can write the female body in decay quite like Updike. So clinical and unrelenting is his gaze, he manages to call attention to signs of aging that even I—someone in possession of a female body—had never considered. “Age had touched only the softened line of her jaw and her hands,” he writes of Piet’s wife, Angela, “their stringy backs and reddened fingertips.”

  The book, when it was published in 1968, landed Updike on the cover of Time and sparked a fury of hand-wringing about the country’s loosened sexual mores. It appears to have captured that glinting moment in time before swinging became a lifestyle choice and seemed, instead, like a revelation—like something everyone should be doing all the time and from which no ill consequences could be conceived. The novel has often been twinned with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, but its closest analogue is probably the film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, released the year after Couples was published, about a pair of LA couples who decide to experiment with open marriages. Like the thirtysomethings of that film, the residents of Tarbox are too old by the time the country splits apart to join the psychedelic bandwagon, too settled to develop anything like a political imagination. Instead, they use sex as a kind of spiritual salve, a way of keeping their fear of death at bay. “The book is, of course, not about sex as such,” Updike said in one interview. “It’s about sex as the emergent religion, as the only thing left.”

  What intrigued me most about Couples, though, was the sense of doom that undercuts the orgy. Throughout the book, Piet suffers from nightmares. In one, he dreams he’s on a plane that is crashing. He feels the cabin jolt and grips his seat as “the curtains hiding the first-class section billowed.” In another, he envisions himself asleep on a frozen pond in the first stages of thaw: “Heavy as lead he lay on the thinnest of ice.” Given Updike’s abiding thematic preoccupations, it’s no great mystery what darkness these dreams portend. “Death stretched endless under him,” Piet realizes upon wakening. But the novel is too steeped in the theories of Freud to take the symbolism of such visions literally. Thanatos, after all, is a god with many faces. There is another kind of death, the kind that is synonymous with castration. (“The plane had plunged,” he marvels recalling his dream, “and he had been without resources, unchurched, unmanned.”) And there is the kind of death that is social, a disruption of the crusty white patriarchal hierarchies that have given rise to this idyll.

  Early in the novel, there is a strange moment between Piet and one of his construction operators, “a Negro,” whom he chats up one morning at a building site. Piet asks the man whether he’s encountered any Indian graves during excavation, and the man admit
s that he has dug up a few bones here and there. When Piet asks what he does when he encounters them, the operator replies, “Man, I keep movin’,” an admission that Piet finds hilarious: “Piet laughed, feeling released, forgiven, touched and hugged by something human arrived from a great distance, imagining behind the casually spoken words a philosophy, a night life.” He’s taken aback when he realizes the man is not laughing along with him. “The Negro’s lips went aloof, as if to say that laughter would no longer serve as a sop to his race.”

  The moment haunts Piet. He mentions it later to his mistress, referring to it as a “snub,” though he “could not specifically locate the cause of his depression, his sense of unconnection.” He’s equally unhinged by Georgene’s insouciance about sex, and recalls her words about the “post-pill paradise” at several moments throughout the novel, like a bellwether of some uncertain future. Tarbox may be paradise, but there is a snake in the garden, and beyond its lush parameters, a storm is gathering.

  Indeed, the women of Tarbox become more politically conscious as the story marches through the first half of the decade. Many wives join the Fair Housing Committee; others instigate drunken rows about school integration during the wee, dwindling hours of dinner parties. But Piet, like his male counterparts in town, finds such crusades tiresome. “Politics bored Piet,” the narrator notes. His wife drags him along to town meetings, where he passively listens to the townspeople discuss collective agendas, cringing as their eyes “lift in hope toward wholly imagined stars.” Piet himself can only feel that celestial ecstasy within the sanctuary of the bedroom. In addition to filling in the lacuna left by religion, sex is supposed to be a surrogate for civic engagement within the moral universe of the novel.

  But Piet fails to see the way in which sex itself is becoming political. He has reason to be disturbed by his mistress’s welcome into that uncertain paradise. If advanced contraception makes married women more likely to sleep with you, it also means that your own wife (as Piet soon discovers) is more willing to sleep around. It likewise means that women might decide not to marry or have children at all, upending the whole bourgeois religion. The privileged utopia of Tarbox, after all, depends not only on a steady influx of sex, but also on wives who are willing to change diapers with their own hands and cook roast lamb with mint jelly for parties of fourteen.

  The year following the debut of Couples, Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, which called attention to how sexual relations in the novels of D. H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, and Henry Miller were informed by patriarchic ideals. The ’70s would usher in a new wave of feminist critics—in Mailer’s words “the ladies with their fierce ideas”—who forever problematized the dominance of that coterie once regarded as the Great Male Novelists. Updike’s later books would more consciously wrestle with the specter of his feminist critics, particularly in the satirical parable The Witches of Eastwick (a 1984 novel he confessed was written in a spirit of chauvinism) and its more troublesome sequel.

  It’s hard to imagine that Updike understood, while writing Couples, the full bearing that the civil rights movement or the women’s movement would have on the culture, not to mention his own legacy. In the end, the novel is not primarily interested in these upheavals, and Updike gave no indication in interviews that the novel’s sense of foreboding was meant to symbolize anything other than death. But novels are never unadulterated acts of will—so goes the intentional fallacy. It’s arguable, in fact, that the possession of an outsized ego makes a writer even more oblivious to his own vulnerability, making the writing itself more porous to the kinds of anxieties that even Updike himself, with his capacious vocabulary, had difficulty giving a name. Couples, like all great novels, can and has been read in myriad ways, but among them it might be regarded as a document of one man’s fears about the limits of his own dominion—his dawning premonition that paradise is tenuous, and his to lose.

  2016, The Los Angeles Review of Books

  CONTEMPORARIES

  The restaurant is the most popular in town, and we wait the better portion of an hour for a table. There are eight of us gathered on the sidewalk. It’s late spring, the kind of mauvish gloaming hour that Virginia Woolf would have marked by the whirling and wheeling of rooks, but there are no rooks here, just dull halos of sodium light and some small brown birds that dart among the shadows, their species unknown to us. We are hungry, and we complain to one another about people who linger at their tables. This is the problem with this town, someone says: there’s nothing to do but eat and drink, so everyone camps out at restaurants. Then our reservation is called, and we are led inside, to a private room lit with tallow candles and assembled entirely of old wood.

  Most of us present became friends in our late twenties, and some of us are only newly acquainted, but we are the kind of people who speak easily of our internal lives, who regard most social contexts as occasions to divulge the experiences we deem most crucial to our personal development.

  One woman, who has recently returned from New Mexico, tells us about the epiphany she had in the wilderness. A year ago, she quit her job and left our town to live in a cabin in the Chihuahuan Desert, where she spent several months meditating “all the time.” She appears, as people always do upon returning from places of ample sunshine, brighter and more defined, her silhouette set in stark relief against the backdrop.

  One of the men says to her: “When you say you were meditating all the time, what does that mean?”

  The woman looks thoughtfully at her empty plate. “I mean it literally,” she says. “I don’t know how else to describe it. I did guided meditations in the morning and afternoon, and then, when I wasn’t sitting, I went out walking and did walking meditation. And I was constantly walking and constantly meditating.”

  After some time, she tells us, she had a revelation. The revelation was this: she needed to come back here, to the city and the job she had left. She had moved to the desert because she was driven by fear. She had been fine all along. “Then I got sick,” she says. “I had a horrible case of the flu. I went around in a daze for a whole week. And then I was better, and all my things were packed into my car, as if by magic.”

  Some of us have been raised by attentive and encouraging families to speak this way. For others, the skill was learned later in life, in the crucible of identity politics, in defiance of those who would prefer that they remain silent. There are only a few among us—I confess I’m one of them—who are a little embarrassed by the effusions, though in my case the aversion is mostly defensive, a reaction to the self-possession I lack and undoubtedly envy. The truth is I love nothing so much as to hear about the hygiene of other people’s souls.

  Another woman says, “I’ve learned that there’s a voice in my head that speaks the truth.” This woman has recently been diagnosed with cancer. She’s nearly a decade older than the rest of us, and whenever she speaks the room becomes very quiet.

  “I have lots of voices in my head, but this one is different. It’s low, and very calm. And whenever I hear this voice, I stop everything and listen. I heard it a few days after my diagnosis. I was making my bed one morning and worrying, as usual, and the voice in my head said—”

  She tells us what the voice said, and we all murmur with approval.

  The waiter arrives with the menus. We order mineral water, glasses of red wine, and kombucha that has been crafted in-house. Then: pork confit, fries with truffle oil, and garlic scapes blackened and coiled on a wooden board. I am thinking of the 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which I watched the night before, a movie about the dawn of psychoanalysis in America. In an opening scene, two couples sit in an Italian restaurant and discuss the awakening one pair has had at a spiritual retreat. They speak in reverential tones of the unconscious, repression, breakthroughs. “But how do you feel about that?” they ask one another. Or, if they sense an evasion: “But how do you really feel? Be honest.” And then they listen to e
ach other, faces pinched with vacant concern, like robots who’ve just become sentient. Meanwhile, a waiter stands at a cart beside their table, whipping up a pan of zabaglione.

  I think: Nothing has changed over the past half century. We are still hopelessly coupling, still confiding to one another at overpriced restaurants our private moments of transcendence. When people look back on our era, they will make no distinction between then and now. It won’t matter that we’ve ceased speaking of Freud, that we’ve traded zabaglione for lavender macarons. In the future, the whole swath of late modernity will call to mind the image of people eating delicacies and talking about the state of their souls—just as, when someone mentions the medieval period, we picture people toiling in ditches.

  * * *

  —

  When I was young, I often imagined that my life was being observed by people from the past. It was one of those voyeuristic games children invent to relieve the essential tedium of childhood, to lend consequence to an overabundance of time. Riding my bike along the streets of our town, I would try to picture everything that entered my field of vision as it might be perceived by people from the time of Moses, or of Plato. That my spectators were always people from the past meant, I suppose, that I believed I was living in the future. In fact, the pleasure of the game derived from imagining that these historic people were seeing, for the first time, a drawbridge, a digital marquee, a yellow Corvette. It was a way to see these things myself. I was told, of course, that God was watching, but the problem with God was omniscience. A lens that captures everything is no longer a lens. What I craved was another subjective consciousness, a point of reference that could reveal something about my place in time.