Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Licks of Love is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,
and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2012 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2000 by John Updike

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon
are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States
by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2000.

“Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War” first appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly; “Oliver’s Evolution” in Esquire (as a piece of
“snapfiction”); “Scenes from the Fifties” as a small individual volume
published by Penguin Books, Ltd. The New Yorker first published the
other nine stories and portions of “Rabbit Remembered.” The latter
could not have been written without the kind advice of Martha Ruggles,
LICSW. Information was also gratefully received from Ted Bernhard,
Carole Sherr, John Schrack, Jack De Bellis, and Robert McCoy.
The stories were written in much the order they have here.

eISBN: 978-0-307-41584-4

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photo: Rapid Eye Media/istockphoto

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THE WOMEN WHO GOT AWAY

Pierce Junction was an isolated New Hampshire town somewhat dignified by the presence of a small liberal-arts college; we survived by clustering together like a ball of snakes in a desert cave. The Sixties had taught us the high moral value of copulation, and we were slow to give up on an activity so simultaneously pleasurable and healthy. Still, you couldn’t sleep with everybody: we were bourgeoisie, responsible, with jobs and children, and affairs demanded energy and extracted wear and tear. We hadn’t learned yet to take the emotion out of sex. Looking back, the numbers don’t add up to what an average college student now manages in four years. There were women you failed ever to sleep with; these, in retrospect, have a perverse vividness, perhaps because the contacts, in the slithering ball of snakes, were so few that they have stayed distinct.

“Well, Martin,” Audrey Lancaster murmured to me toward the end of a summer cruise on a boat hired out of Portsmouth in celebration of somebody or other’s fortieth birthday, “I see what they say about you, at last.” The “at last” was a dig of sorts, and the “they” was presumably female in gender. I wondered how much conversation went on, and along lines how specific, among the wives and divorcées of our set. I had been standing there by the rail, momentarily alone, mellow on my portion of California Chablis, watching the Piscataqua River shakily reflect the harbor lights as the boat swung to dock and the loudspeaker system piped Simon and Garfunkel into the warm, watery night.