Couples by John Updike Read Free Book Online

delighted it was them and not you.”
    “You bet. You too. We’re all survivors. A dwindling band of survivors. I took my chances. I did my time for God and Uncle.”
    “You sat at a steel desk reading Japanese pornography,” Harold told him.
    Freddy looked astonished, his shapeless mouth inbent. “Didn’t everybody? We’ve all heard often enough about you and your geishas. Poor little underfed girls, for a pack of cigarettes and half of a Hershey bar.”
    His wife’s bottle-green eyes gazed at the man as if he belonged to someone else.
    “You wonder what they think,” Freddy went on, swimming, trying not to drown in their contempt, his black mouth lifted. “The goddam gauges start spinning, the fucking pipes begin to break, and—what? Mother? The flag? Jesu Cristo? The last piece of ass you had?”
    A contemptuous silence welled from the men.
    “What I found so touching,” Bea Guerin haltingly sang, “was the way the tender—is that what it is?—”
    “Submarine tender, yes,” her husband said.
    “—the way the tender was called Skylark . And how all morning it called and circled, in the sea that from underneath must look like a sky, circling and calling, and nobody answered. Poor Skylark .”
    Frank Appleby stood. “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia. I propose a toast, to the new couple, the Whitmans.”
    “Hear,” Roger Guerin said, scowling.
    “May you long support our tax rolls, whose rate is high and whose benefits are nil.”
    “Hear, hear.” It was little-Smith. “Ecoutez.”
    “Thank you,” Foxy said, blushing and feeling a fresh wave of rebuke rising within her. She quickly put down her fork. The lamb was underdone.
    Little-Smith tried again with Ken. “What do you do, as a biochemist?”
    “I do different things. I think about photosynthesis. I used to slice up starfish extremely thin, to study their metabolism.”
    Janet Appleby leaned forward again, tipping the creamy tops of her breasts into the warm light, and asked, “And then do they survive, in two dimensions?” Through a lucid curling wave of nausea Foxy saw that her husband was being flirted with.
    Ken laughed eagerly. “No, they die. That’s the trouble with my field. Life hates being analyzed.”
    Bea asked, “Is the chemistry very complex?”
    “Very. Incredibly. If a clever theologian ever got hold of how complex it is, they’d make us all believe in God again.”
    Ousted by Bea, Janet turned to them all. “Speaking of that,” she said, “what does this old Pope John keep bothering us about? He acts as if we all voted him in.”
    “I like him,” Harold said. “Je l’adore.”
    Marcia told him, “But you like Khrushchev too.”
    “I like old men. They can be wonderful bastards because they have nothing to lose. The only people who can be themselves are babies and old bastards.”
    “Well,” Janet said, “I tried to read this Pacem in Terris and it’s as dull as something from the UN.”
    “Hey Roger,” Freddy called across Foxy, his breath meaty, “how do you like the way U Whosie has bopped Tshombe in the Congo? Takes a nigger to beat a nigger.”
    “I think it’s lovely ,” Bea said emphatically to Ken, touching his sleeve, “that it’s so complex. I don’t want to be understood.”
    Ken said, “Luckily, the processes are pretty much the same throughout the kingdom of life. A piece of yeast and you, for example, break down glucose into pyruvic acid by exactly the same eight transformations.” This was an aspect of him that Foxy rarely saw any more, the young man who could say “the kingdom of life.” Who did he think was king?
    Bea said, “Oh dear. Some days I do feel moldy.”
    Freddy persisted, though Roger’s tiny mouth had tightened in response. “The trouble with Hammarskjöld,” he said, “he was too much like you and me, Roger. Nice guys.”
    Marcia little-Smith called to her husband, “Darling, who isn’t letting you be a wonderful old bastard? Terrible