Free Toward the End of Time by John Updike

like a city rowhouse, close to the road, surrounded by these sloping fields going back to cedar and scrub maple. I went to U. Mass., when it cost almost nothing, and met my first wife, and we came to Boston, where I went to the B.U. Business School on student loans, and became a stockbroker. I changed my accent, to blend in. I suggest you change yours too, darling, if you expect to get anywhere in this very class-conscious commonwealth.”
    This nearly made her spit, naked as she was, crouched on the bed. “Commonwealth, well, la-ti-da darling, yourself. What a liar! We should both wash our mouths out, me from sucking your stubby dick and you from being a liar. I can see all around this house, it’s full of inherited stuff.”
    “It’s Gloria’s. My late wife’s.”
    “Who says she’s late?”
    “She’s not here, is she?”
    “No, but she wouldn’t be, would she? With me here. Unless she was a real AC-DC.”
    In a rage of annoyance—she was resisting me, in every resentfulfibre—I seized her brown arm, which was propping her up over my belly like the leg of a beast poised to drink. “Who says it’s stubby? You’re the liar. If it’s so stubby why do you gag when it’s only halfway in?”
    She sullenly pulled her arm away, revealing four white finger-marks. “Ow. O.K., not stubby. Stinky, though.”
    “You should talk. You’re like low tide down there—low tide next to a sewer outlet.”
    Deirdre brushed a mass of her curls back from one ear, contemplating thoughtfully the erect refutation of stubbiness which my surge of violence had pushed through my blood. “You guys hate us, don’t you?” she said musingly. “Cocks hate cunts.”
    “But they love mouths,” I crooned to her, and fell into a state of beatitude as her lips absent-mindedly enclosed me, and her brown hand, narrow as a hoof, worked the skin at the base up and down, into a moist tingle mounting heavenwards.
    “We hate you, too,” she told me afterwards, when I was too languid to hurt her. “You own us, but we hate your guts.” She had come back from the bathroom, after a tumult of flushed toilet and expectorated mouthwash, in a clearheaded, combative mood.
    “Who’s this ‘you’?”
    “You rich creeps. I never got into one of your houses before. Usually the tricks are guys with no background, Irish or eyetie, you know, who have a little money they can’t hang on to. They don’t want to hang on to it. They’re too Catholic. Down deep they think it’s holy to be poor. Only the Jews and you Wasps aren’t ashamed to hang on to money, to sit in heaps of it and roll in it and smear it all over yourselves—disgusting! You think you’re so great God likes your being stinking rich.”
    “Darling, I agree. I must learn to spend. That thing you just did was worth every welder.”
    “Two hundred.”
    “It’s usually a hundred fifty.”
    “You had a lot of come today. I nearly choked.”
    “I love it when you nearly choke.”
    “I know you do, you prick. That’s what my father began by having me do, blow him.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked into the past, preparing to match my confession with her own.
    “Hey,” I said, “do I need to hear this? I’m no therapist. I’ll start charging you by the hour.”
    “I was eight. My head came up to just the right height on him. He said to do it, I didn’t know, I thought it might be normal. He was my father, he said it was all right, who else could I trust?”
    “You could have gone to your mother.”
    “Tchaa!” —a catlike snarl. “She was worthless. She would have slapped me and called me a liar. She didn’t want to know. He was all she had, too.”
    “I’m sorry, dear, for calling you a liar.”
    “O.K. I appreciate your saying that. I’m a hooker and I steal, but I don’t generally lie. It’s too confusing, it makes another world. So I stick with the truth, generally. Except when I said you were stubby. You have a nice prick.”
    “Don’t break my