Couples by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

the confusion within her body, a clear expression of this.
    He leaned against her and whispered, “Eat some of Bea’s lamb, just to be polite, even if it is raw.” Then he turned from her, as if snubbing a petitioner, and lit Marcia’s cigarette. As he did so, his thigh deliberately slid against Foxy’s. She was startled, amused, disgusted. This fool imagined he had made a conquest. She felt in him, and then dreaded, a desire to intrude upon, to figure in, her fate. His thigh increased its pressure and in the lulling dull light she experienced an escapist craving for sleep. She glanced about for rescue. Her host, his eyebrows knitted tyrannically above the bridge of his nose, was concentrating on carving more lamb. Across the table her husband, the father of her need for sleep, was laughing between Bea Guerin and Janet Appleby. The daggery shadow in the cleft between Janet’s lush breasts changed shape as herhands darted in emphasis of unheard sentences. More wine was poured. Foxy nodded, in assent to a question she thought had been asked her, and snapped her head upright in fear of having dropped asleep. Her thigh was nudged again. No one would speak to her. Roger Guerin was murmuring, administering some sort of consolation, to Georgene Thorne. Ken’s high hard laugh rang out, and his face, usually so ascetic, looked pasty and unreal, as if struck by a searchlight. He was having a good time; she was hours from bed.
    As they drove home, the night revived her. The fresh air was cool and the sky like a great wave collapsing was crested with stars. Their headlights picked up mailboxes, hedgerows, crusts of dry snow in a ditch. Ken’s MG swayed with each turn of the winding beach road. He asked her, “Are you dead?”
    “I’m all right now. I wasn’t sure I could get through it when we were at the table.”
    “It was pretty ghastly.”
    “They seemed so excited by each other.”
    “Funny people.” As if guilty, he added, “Poor Fox, sitting there yawning with her big belly.”
    “Was I too stupid? I told Bea.”
    “For God’s sake, why?”
    “I wanted a pretend martini. Are you ashamed of my being pregnant?”
    “No, but why broadcast it? It’ll show soon enough.”
    “She won’t tell anybody.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    How little , Foxy thought, does matter to you . The trees by the roadside fell away, and rushed back in clumps, having revealedin the gaps cold stretches of moonlit marsh. The mailboxes grew fewer. Fewer houselights showed. Foxy tightened around her her coat, a fur-lined gabardine cut in imitation of a Russian general’s greatcoat. She foresaw their cold home with its flimsy walls and senile furnace. She said, “We must get a contractor. Should we ask this man Hanema to give us an estimate?”
    “Thorne says he’s a fanny-pincher.”
    “That’s called projection.”
    “Janet told me he almost bought the house himself. His wife apparently wanted the view.”
    Janet, is it?
    Foxy said, “Did you notice the antagonism between Frank and the little-Smith man?”
    “Aren’t they both in stocks somehow? Maybe they’re competing.”
    “Ken, you’re so work-oriented. I felt it had to do with s-e-x.”
    “With Janet?”
    “Well, she was certainly trying to make some point with her bosom.”
    He giggled. Stop it , she thought, it isn’t you . “Two points,” he said.
    “I knew you’d say that,” she said.
    There was a rise in the road, cratered by frost heaves, from which the sea was first visible. She saw that moonlight lived on the water, silver, steady, sliding with the motion of their car, yet holding furious myriad oscillations, like, she supposed, matter itself. Ken worked down there, where the protons swung from molecule to molecule and elements interlocked in long spiral ladders. A glimpse of dunes: bleached bones. The car sank into a dip. There were four such rises andfalls between the deserted, boarded-up ice-cream stand and their driveway. They lived near the end