Read Online Couples by John Updike - Free Book Online Page A

legs, she spread butterthickly on spongy white bread, tearing it, overweighting it, three pieces one after the other, too ravenous to bother with toast, compulsive as a drunk. Her fingertips gleamed with butter.
    Washing them, she leaned on her slate sink and gazed from the window. The tide was high; moonlight displayed a silver saturation overflowing the linear grid of ditches. Against the sheen was silhouetted a little houseless island of brambles. In the distance, along the far arm of Tarbox Bay, the lights of another town, whose name she had not yet learned, spangled the horizon. A revolving searchlight rhythmically stroked the plane of ocean. Its beam struck her face at uneven intervals. She counted: five, two, five, two. A double beam. Seconds slipping, gone; five, two. She hastily turned and rolled up the cellophane breadwrapper; a voluminous sadness had been carved for her out of the night. It was after midnight. Today was Easter. She must get up for church.
    Ken returned from the furnace and laughed at the traces of her hunger—the gouged butter, the clawed crumbs, the empty bowl.
    She said, “Yes, and it’s the cheap bread I feel starved for, not Pepperidge Farm. That old-fashioned rubbery kind with all the chemicals.”
    “Calcium propionate,” he said. “Our child will be an agglutinated monster.”
    “Did you mean it, I should call this Dutchman?”
    “Why not? See what he says. He must know the house, if his wife wanted it.”
    But she heard doubt in his even voice and changed the subject. “You know what bothered me about those people tonight?”
    “They were Republicans.”
    “Don’t be silly, I couldn’t care less. No what bothered me was they wanted us to love them. They weren’t lovable, but that’s what they wanted.”
    He laughed. Why should his laugh grate so? “Maybe that’s what you wanted,” he told her.
    They went to bed up a staircase scarred and crayoned by children they had never seen. Foxy assumed that, with the revival of her appetite, she would enjoy a great animal draught of sleep. Ken kissed her shoulder in token of the love they should not in this month make, turned his back, and quickly went still. His breathing was inaudible and he never moved. The stillness of his body established a tension she could not quite sink through, like a needle on the skin of water. Downstairs, Cotton’s heavy feet padding back and forth unsatisfied seemed to make the whole house tremble. The moon, so bright it had no face, was framed by the skylight and for an hour of insomnia burned in the center of her forehead like a jewel.
    Monday morning: in-and-out. A powdery blue sky the color of a hymnal. Sunshine broken into code by puffs and schooners of cumulus. The Thornes’ sunporch—the tarpaper deck-roof of their garage, sheltered from the wind by feathery tall larches, entered by sliding glass doors from the bedroom—cupped warmth. Every year Georgene had the start of a tan before anyone else. Today she looked already freckled, austere and forbidding in her health.
    She had spread her plaid blanket in the corner where she had tacked reflecting sheets of aluminum broiling foil to the balustrade. Piet took off his suède apricot windbreaker and sank down. The sun, tepid and breezy to a standing man,burned the skin of his broad face and dyed his retinas red. “Bliss,” he said.
    She resumed her place on the blanket and her forearm touched his: the touch felt like a fine grade of sandpaper with a little warm sting of friction left. She was in only underwear. He got up on his elbow and kissed her belly, flat and soft and hot, and remembered his mother’s ironing board and how she would have him lay his earaches on its comforting heat; he put his ear against Georgene’s belly and overheard a secret squirm of digestion. Still attentive to the sun, she fingered his hair and fumblingly measured his shoulders. She said, “You have too many clothes on.”
    His voice came out plucking and beggarly.