Word: piet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most of the gossip concerns Piet Hanema, redhaired, stocky, 35-year-old father of two girls, housebuilder and restorer, a man "in love with snug, right-angled things." He is at once the sturdiest and the most pathetic character in Couples, a quasi-Christian and would-be family pillar who finds real joy in such things as "the children's choir's singing, an unsteady theft of melody." His adventures in adultery are an almost accidental byproduct of his own spiritual confusion, his wife's complicated sexual indifference and the irresistible why-not willingness of the women...
...Tutty. Less starry-eyed than Piet, the other couples also begin to ease themselves into each other's beds-some out of boredom, some for revenge, some because they find nothing forbidden, and others because in the past too much has been forbidden. Over the whole group hovers the satanic, death-worshiping Freddy Thorne. He is a dentist by trade, but in fact he is a faithless St. Augustine indulging his "hyena appetite for dirty truths" in his role as Updike's designated "priest" to the tribe. "He thinks we're a magic circle of heads...
...Ritual. Freddy's dirty truths and Piet's butterfly adulteries converge with the arrival in Tarbox of Foxy Whitman and her husband Ken, a biochemist preoccupied with his own second-rateness. Alone of the women, Foxy seems unafraid of what Freddy calls "the smell and hurt of love"; seven years of childless boredom with Ken have made her vulnerable. Now, though she is pregnant, she and Piet Hanema fall in love, an old-fashioned and banal assertion of life that brings down on them and the tribe the old-fashioned and banal tribulations of middle-class guilt, entrapment...
After the Whitman baby is born, Foxy gets pregnant by Piet. In panic, they turn to Freddy Thorne for help in finding an abortionist. There follows a rather absurd turn of plot that seems straight out of 19th century melodrama. All but twirling his mustachios, Freddy agrees-in return for a night alone with Piet's wife Angela, the one woman in the tribe who has never entered the communal bed. Implausibly, Angela consents. One night in a ski lodge, after the Thornes and the Hanemas have had too much to drink, Angela suddenly says, "Well, is this...
...Freddy," says Piet, "should you get your toothbrush or anything...