Free Couples by John Updike

jism. Piet jealously shucked his shoes and socks and trousers, leaving his underpants, Paisley drawers. He was a secret dandy. He lay down beside her and when she turned to face him reached around and undid her bra, explaining, “Twins,” meaning they should both be dressed alike, in only underpants.
    Her breasts were smaller than Angela’s, with sunken paler nipples, and, uncovered, seemed to cry for protection. He brought his chest against hers for covering and they lay together beneath the whispering trees, Hansel and Gretel abandoned. Shed needles from the larches had collected in streaks and puddles on the tarpaper and formed rusty ochre drifts along the wooden balustrade and the grooved aluminum base of the sliding glass doors. Piet stroked the uninterrupted curve of her back, his thumb tracing her spine from the knucklelike bones at the nape of her neck to the strangelyprominent coccyx. Georgene had the good start of a tail. She was more bone than Angela. Her presence pressing against him seemed so natural and sisterly he failed to lift, whereas even Angela’s foot on his instep was enough, and he wondered, half-crushed beneath the span of sky and treetops and birdsong, which he truly loved.
    Before their affair, he had ignored Georgene. She had been hidden from him by his contempt for her husband. His, and Angela’s, dislike of Freddy Thorne had been immediate, though in their first years in Tarbox the Thornes as a couple had rather courted them. The Hanemas in response had been so rude as to refuse several invitations without an excuse or even a reply. They had not felt much in need of friends then. Piet, not yet consciously unhappy with Angela, had dimly dreamed of making love to other women, to Janet or to stately gypsy-haired Terry Gallagher, as one conjures up fantasies to induce sleep. But two summers ago the Ongs built their tennis court and they saw more of Georgene; and when, a summer ago, Piet’s dreams without his volition began to transpose themselves into reality, and unbeknownst to himself he had turned from Angela and become an open question, it was Georgene, in a passing touch at a party, in the apparently unplanned sharing of a car to and from tennis, who attempted an answer, who was there. She said she had been waiting for him for years.
    “What else?” he asked.
    “What else what?” Behind the sunstruck mask of her face her senses had been attending to his hand.
    “What else with you? How’s Whitney’s cold?”
    “Poor little Whit. He had a fever yesterday but I sent him off to school in case you decided to come.”
    “You shouldn’t have done that.”
    “He’ll be all right. Everybody has a spring cold.”
    “You don’t.”
    She carried forward the note of contention. “Piet, what did you mean, a minute ago, when I told you Frank criticized you, you said you had never slept with Janet?”
    “I never have. It’s been years since I wanted to.”
    “But do you think—stop your hand for a second, you’re beginning just to tickle—that’s why Freddy doesn’t like you? I lied, you know. It was Freddy who told the Whitmans you were a bad contractor.”
    “Of course. The jerk.”
    “You shouldn’t hate him.”
    “It keeps me young.”
    “But do you think he does know, about us? Freddy.”
    Her curiosity insulted him; he wanted her to dismiss Freddy utterly. He said, “Not as a fact. But maybe by osmosis? Bea Guerin implied to me the other night that everybody knows.”
    “Did you admit it?”
    “Of course not. What’s the matter? Does he know?”
    Her face was hushed. A thin bit of light lay balanced across one eyelid, trembling; a stir of wind was rippling the sheets of foil, creating excited miniature thunder. She said carefully, “He tells me I must have somebody else because I don’t want him as much as I used to. He feels threatened. And if he had to write up a list of who it might be, I guess you’d be at the top. But for some reason he doesn’t draw the