Read Online Couples by John Updike - Free Book Online

an hour’s drive, and yet he, who must do the commuting, seized the house as if all his life he had been waiting for a prospect as vacant and pure as these marshes, those bony far dunes, that rim of sea. Perhaps, Foxy guessed, it was a matter of scale: his microscopic work needed the relief of such a vastness. And it had helped that he and the real-estate man Gallagher had liked each other. Though she had raised all the reasonable objections, Foxy had been pleased to see him, after the long tame stasis of student existence, emerge to want something new, physical, real. That he had within him even the mildstrangeness needed to insist on an out-of-the-way impractical house seemed (as if there had been a question of despair) hopeful.
    The house tonight was cold, stored with stale chill. Cotton, their cat, padded loudly toward them from the dark living room and, stiff from sleep, stretched. He was a heavy-footed caramel tom that in years of being their only pet had acquired something of a dog’s companionableness and something of a baby’s conceit. Courteously he bowed before them, his tail an interrogation mark, his front claws planted in the braided rag rug the Robinsons had abandoned in the hall. Cotton pulled his claws free with a dainty unsticking noise and purred in anticipation of Foxy’s picking him up. She held him, his throaty motor running, beneath her chin and like a child wished herself magically inside his pelt.
    Ken switched on a light in the living room. The bare walls leaped into being, the exposed studs, the intervals of varnish, the crumbling gypsum wallboard, the framed souvenirs of old summers—fan-shaped shell collections and dried arrays of littoral botany—that the Robinsons had left. They had never met them but Foxy saw them as a large sloppy family, full of pranks and nicknames for each other and hobbies, the mother watercoloring (her work was tacked all around upstairs), the older boys sailing in the marsh, the girl moonily collecting records and being teased, the younger boy and the father systematically combing the shore for classifiable examples of life. The room smelled as if summer had been sealed in and yet had leaked out. The French windows giving onto a side garden of roses and peonies were boarded. The shutters were locked over the windows that would have looked onto the porch and the marsh. The sharp-edged Cambridge furniture, half Door Store and half Design Research, looked scatteredand sparse; the room was a good size and of a good square shape. It had possibilities. It needed white paint and walls and light and love and style. She said, “We must start doing things.”
    Ken felt the floor register with his hand. “The furnace is dead again.”
    “Leave it to morning. No warmth gets upstairs anyway.”
    “I don’t like being outsmarted. I’m going to learn how to bank this bastard.”
    “I’m more worried about dying in my sleep of coal gas.”
    “No chance of that in this sieve.”
    “Ken, please call Hanema.”
    “You call him.”
    “You’re the man of the house.”
    “I’m not sure he’s the right man.”
    “You like Gallagher.”
    “They’re not twins, they’re partners.”
    “Then find somebody else.”
    “If you want him, you call him.”
    “Well I just might.”
    “Go ahead. Fine.” He went to the door that led down into the narrow hole that did for a basement. The register began to clank and release a poisonous smell. Foxy carried Cotton into the kitchen, plugged in the electric heater, and poured two bowls of milk. One she set on the floor for the cat; the other she broke Saltines into, for herself. Cotton sniffed, disdained the offering, and interrogatively mewed. Foxy ignored him and ate greedily with a soup spoon. Crackers and milk had been a childhood treat between news and bedtime; her craving for it had come over her like a sudden release from fever, a gust of health. While the glow of the heater and the begging friction of fur alternated on her