Couples by John Updike Page B

proud daddies.”
    “I don’t know all the daddies. I see Harold—why is it little- Smith?”
    “It’s one of those jokes that nobody knows how to get rid of. There were some other Smiths in town once, but they’ve long left.”
    “And that big imposing one is our real-estate man.”
    “Matt Gallagher. My husband’s partner. The bouncy one with red hair is my husband.”
    Foxy thought, how funny that he is. She said, “He was at the Applebys’ party for us.”
    “We all were. The one with the beard and grinning is Ben Saltz. S-a-l-t-z. I think it’s been shortened from something.”
    “He looks very diabolical,” Foxy said.
    “Not to me. I think the effect is supposed to be rakish but it comes out Amish. It’s to cover up pockmarks; when we first moved to town it was bushier but now he cuts it square. It’s misleading, because he’s a terribly kind, uxorious man. Irene is the moving spirit behind the League and the Fair Housing group and whatever else does good in town. Ben works in one of those plants along 128 that look as though they make ice cream.”
    “I thought that was a Chinaman.”
    “Korean. That’s John Ong. He’s not here. The only things he plays are chess and very poor tennis. His chess is quite good, though, Freddy Thorne tells me. He’s a nuclear physicist who works in MIT. At MIT? Actually, I think he works under MIT, in a huge underground workshop you need a password to get into.”
    Foxy asked, “With a cyclotron?”
    Angela said, “I forget your husband’s a scientist too. I have no idea. Neither he nor Ben can ever talk about their work because it’s all for the government. It makes everybody else feel terribly excluded. I think a little tiny switch in something that missed the moon was Ben’s idea. He miniaturizes. He once showed us some radios that were like fingernails.”
    “At the party, I tried to talk to—who, Ong?—you all have such funny names.”
    “But aren’t all names funny until you get used to them? Think of Shakespeare and Churchill. Think of Pillsbury.”
    “Anyway I tried to talk and couldn’t understand a word.”
    “I know. His consonants are not what you expect. He wassome kind of booty in the Korean War; I can’t believe he defected, he doesn’t seem to have that kind of opinion. He was very big with them I guess; for a while he taught at Johns Hopkins and met Bernadette in Baltimore. If they ever dropped an H-bomb on Tarbox it would be because of him. Like the Watertown arsenal. But you’re right. He’s not sexy.”
    Her tone implied a disdain of sex mixed with the equanimous recognition that others might choose to steer by it. Studying the other woman’s lips, pale in the sunlight, composed around the premeditation of a smile, Foxy felt as if she, Foxy, were looking up toward a luxurious detached realm where observations and impressions drifted nodding by one another like strolling aristocrats. Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. Foxy, though by more than an inch the taller, felt beneath Angela, as a student, at once sheltered and challenged. Discovering herself blushing, she hastily asked, “Who’s the quick one with the ghostly eyes?”
    “I guess they are ghostly. I’ve always thought of them as steely but that’s wrong. His name is Eddie Constantine. He’s an airline pilot. They just moved a year or so ago into a grim big house on the green. The tall teen-ager who looks like the Apollo Belvedere is a neighbor’s boy he brought along in case there weren’t six. Piet didn’t know if your husband would come or not.”
    “Oh. Ken has made the sides uneven?”
    “Not at all, they’re delighted to have another player. Basketball isn’t very popular, you can’t do it with women. He’s very good. Your husband.”
    Foxy watched. The neighbor boy, graceful even ill at ease, was standing aside while the six grown men panted and heaved, ducked and dribbled. They looked clumsy,