Couples by John Updike

of the road, an outpost in winter. Foxy abruptly craved the lightness, the freedom, of summer.
    Ken said, “Your friend Thorne had a very low opinion of Hanema.”
    “He is not my friend. He is an odious man and I don’t understand why everybody likes him so much.”
    “He’s a dentist. Everybody needs a dentist. Janet told me he wanted to be a psychiatrist but flunked medical school.”
    “He’s awful, all clammy and cozy and I kept feeling he wanted to get his hands inside me. I cut him short and he thought I was making a pass. He played kneesies with me.”
    “But he sat beside you.”
    “Sideways kneesies.”
    “I suppose it can be done.”
    “I think his poor opinion should be counted as a plus.”
    Ken said nothing.
    Foxy went on, “Roger Guerin said he was a good contractor. He did their house. With their money they could have afforded anybody.”
    “Let’s think about it. I’d rather get somebody nobody knows. I don’t want us to get too involved in this little nest out here.”
    “I thought one of the reasons we moved was so our friendships wouldn’t be so much at the mercy of your professional acquaintance.”
    “Say that again?”
    “You know what I said. I didn’t have any friends of my own, just chemical wives.”
    “Fox, that’s what we all are. Chemicals.” He knew she didn’t believe that, why did he say it? When would he let her out of school?
    A mailbox rammed by a snowplow leaned vacantly on the moonlight. The box belonged to summer people and would not be righted for months. Foxy wrapped her greatcoat tighter around her and in the same motion wrapped her body, her own self, around the small sour trouble brewing in her womb, this alien life furtively exploiting her own. She felt ugly and used. She said, “You really liked those women, didn’t you, with their push-me-up bras and their get-me-out-of-this giggles?” The women they had known in Cambridge had tended to be plain Quaker girls placidly wed to rising grinds, or else women armored in a repellent brilliance of their own, untouchable gypsy beauties with fiery views on Cuban sovereignty and German guilt. Foxy sighed as if in resignation. “Well, they say a man gets his first mistress when his wife becomes pregnant.”
    He looked over at her too surprised to speak, and she realized that he was incapable of betraying her, and marveled at her own disappointment. She puzzled herself; she had never been in their marriage more dependent upon him, or with more cause for gratitude. Yet a chemistry of unrest had arisen within her body, and she resented his separation from it. For she had always felt and felt now in him a fastidious, unlapsing accountability that shirked the guilt she obscurely felt belonged to life; and thus he left her with a double share.
    He said at last, “What are you suggesting? We were invited. We went. We might as well enjoy it. I have nothing against mediocre people, provided I don’t have to teach them anything.”
    Ken was thirty-two. They had met when he was a graduate student instructing in Biology 10 and she was a Radcliffe senior in need of a science credit. Since her sophomore year Foxy had been in love with a fine-arts major, a bearish Jewish boy from Detroit. He had since become a sculptor whoselarge welded assemblages of junk metal were occasionally pictured in magazines. There had been a clangor about him even then, a snuffly explosive air of self-parody, with his wiglike mop of hair, combed straight forward, and a nose so hooked its tip appeared to point at his lower lip. The curves of his face had been compressed around a certain contemptuousness. His tongue could quickly uncoil. Eat me up, little shiksa, I’m a dirty old man. I sneeze black snot. I pop my piles with a prophylactic toothbrush . He scorned any sign of fear from her. He taught her to blow. His prick enormous in her mouth, she felt her love of him as a billowing and gentle tearing of veils inside her. Before he took her up she