Couples by John Updike

spying.
    “Oh, sweet. Oh so sweet,” Georgene said. Piet dared peek and saw her rapt lids veined with broken purple and a small saliva bubble welling at one corner of her lips. He suffered a dizzying impression of waste. Though thudding, his heart went mournful. He bit her shoulder, smooth as an orange in sun, and traveled along a muffled parabola whose red warm walls she was and at whose end she also waited. Her face snapped sideways; drenched feathers pulled his tip; oh. So good a girl, to be there for him, no matter how he fumbled, to find her way by herself. In her strange space he leaped, and leaped again. She said, “Oh.”
    Lavender she lay in his shadow, the corners of her lips flecked. Politely Piet asked her, “Swing?”
    “Dollink. Dunt esk.”
    “I was sort of poor. I’m not used to this outdoor living.”
    Georgene shrugged under him. Her throat and shoulders were slick. A speck of black construction dust, granular tar from his hair, adhered to her cheek. “You were you. I love you. I love you inside me.”
    Piet wanted to weep, to drop fat tears onto her deflated breasts. “Did I feel big enough?”
    She laughed, displaying perfect teeth, a dentist’s wife. “No,” she said. “You felt shrimpy.” Seeing him ready, in his dilated suspended state, to believe it, she explained solemnly, “You hurt me, you know. I ache afterwards.”
    “Do I? Do you? How lovely. How lovely of you to say. But you should complain.”
    “It’s in a good cause. Now get off me. Go to Indian Hill.”
    Discarded beside her, he felt as weak and privileged as a child. Plucking needs agitated his fingers, his mouth. He asked at her side, “What did Freddy say about me that was mean?”
    “He said you were expensive and slow.”
    “Well. I suppose that could be true.”
    He began dressing. The birds’ chirping had become a clock’s ticking. Like butter on a bright sill her nakedness was going rancid. She lay as she must often lie, accepting the sun entirely. The bathing-suit boundaries were not distinct on her body, as on Angela’s. Her kitten-chin glutinous with jism. The plaid blanket had been rumpled and pulled from under her head, and some larch needles adhered to her hair, black mixed with gray. Because of this young turning of her hair she kept it feather-cut short.
    “Baby,” he said, to fill up the whispering silence surrounding his dressing, “I don’t care about Freddy. I don’t want the Whitmans’ job. Cut into these old houses you never know what you’ll find. Gallagher thinks we’ve wasted too much time restoring old heaps for our friends and the friends of our friends. He wants three new ranch houses on Indian Hill by fall. The war babies are growing up. That’s where the money is.”
    “Money,” she said. “You’re beginning to sound like the rest of them.”
    “Well,” he told her. “I can’t be a virgin forever. Corruption had to come even to me.”
    He was dressed. The cool air drew tight around his shoulders and he put on his apricot windbreaker. With the manners that rarely lapsed between them, she escorted him from her house. He admired and yet was slightly scandalized that she could walk so easily, naked, through doors, past her children’stoys, her husband’s books, down stairs, under a shelf of cleansing agents, into her polished kitchen, to the side door. This side of the house, where the firewood was stacked and a single great elm cast down a gentle net of shade, had about it something rural and mild unlike the barbaric bulk of the house. Here not a brick or stone walk but a path worn through grass, now muddy, led around the corner of the garage, where Piet had hidden his pick-up truck, a dusty olive Chevrolet on whose tailgate a child had written WASH ME . Georgene, barefoot, did not step down from the threshold but leaned silent and smiling in the open doorway, leaving framed in Piet’s mind a complex impression: of a domestic animal, of a fucked woman, of a mocking boy, of