Free Couples by John Updike Page A

conclusion. Maybe he knows and thinks he’s saving it to use later.”
    This frightened him, altered the tone of his body. She felt this and opened her eyes; their Coke-bottle green was flecked with wilt. Her pupils in the sun were as small as the core of a pencil.
    He asked her, “Is it time to break off?”
    When challenged, Georgene, the daughter of a Philadelphia banker, would affect a playful immigrant accent, part shopgirl, part vamp. “Dunt be zilly, fella,” she said, and sharply inched upward and pressed her pelvis against his, so that through his cotton he felt her silk. She held him as if captive. Her smooth arms were strong; she could beat him at tennis, for a set. He wrestled against her hold and in the struggle her breasts were freed, swung bulbous above him, then spilled flat when, knees on thighs and hands on wrists, he pinned her on her back. Tarpaper. Her glistening skin gazed. Wounded by winning, he bowed his head and with suppliant lips took a nipple, faintly salt and sour, in. Suddenly she felt to be all circles, circles that could be parted to yield more circles. Birds chirped beyond the rainbow rim of the circular wet tangency holding him secure. Her hand, feathery, established another tangency, located his core. If her touch could be believed, his balls were all velvet, his phallus sheer silver.
    Politely he asked, “Do we have on too many clothes?”
    The politeness was real. Lacking marriage or any contract, they had evolved between them a code of mutual consideration. Their adultery was divided precisely in half. By daring to mention their breaking up, by rebuking her with this possibility, Piet had asked Georgene to cross the line. Now it was her turn to ask, and his to cross. She said, “What about those trees on Indian Hill?”
    “They can fall without me,” he said. The sun was baking a musty cidery smell from the drift of needles near his face, by the blanket’s edge. The tarpaper scintillated. Good quality: Ruberoid Rolled Roofing, mineralized, $4.25 a roll in 1960. He had laid this deck. He added, “I’m not sure you can.”
    “Oh I’m not so fallen,” Georgene said, and quickly sat up,and, kneeling, flauntingly stretched her arms to the corners of the sky. She possessed, this conscientious clubwoman and firm mother, a lovely unexpected gift. Her sexuality was guileless. As formed by the first years of her marriage with Freddy, it had the directness of eating, the ease of running. Her insides were innocent. She had never had an affair before and, though Piet did not understand the virtue she felt in him, he doubted that she would ever take another lover. She had no love of guilt. In the beginning, deciding upon adultery with her, Piet had prepared himself for terrible sensations of remorse, as a diver in midair anticipates the underwater rush and roar. Instead, the first time—it was September: apples in the kitchen, children off at school, except for Judy, who was asleep—Georgene led him lightly by one finger upstairs to her bed. They deftly undressed, she him, he her. When he worried about contraception, she laughed. Didn’t Angela use Enovid yet? Welcome , she said, to the post-pill paradise , a light-hearted blasphemy that immensely relieved him. With Angela the act of love had become overlaid with memories of his clumsiness and her failure to tolerate clumsiness, with the need for tact and her irritation with the pleadingness implicit in tact, her equal disdain of his pajama-clad courting and his naked rage, his helpless transparence and her opaque disenchantment. Georgene in twenty minutes stripped away these laminations of cross-purpose and showed him something primal. Now she kneeled under the sun and Piet rose to be with her and with extreme care, as if setting the wafery last cogwheels of a watch into place, kissed the glossy point of her left shoulder bone, and then of her right. She was double everywhere but in her mouths. All things double. Without duality,