John Updike's "Gesturing"

John Updike's "Gesturing" uses third person omniscient point of view.  Updike's story tells the tale of a middle-aged couple that have decided to separate because their marriage has grown "stagnant."  The husband Richard through the narrator is shown to still be in love with his wife Joan, but both Joan and Richard had taken on outside lovers.  The narrator jumps between Richard's thoughts of hurt and also his discovery of happiness when it came to his new found freedom in bachelorhood.  Richard's lover Ruth who also is married to another man gets mad at Richard for having sex with Joan in his new apartment even though she continues to have sex with her husband, Richard does not feel guilty telling Ruth about his sexual encounters with Joan.  This story is written for playboy, written about love affairs with no guilt attached, this story's attempted audience is middle-aged men living in the eighties that find themselves unhappy and fantasizing about sexual liberation in a stagnant life.  It also says something about excessive behaviors of the 1980's questioning "Why have one sexual partner when I could have many?"  Followed closely by the widespread outbreak of AIDS ironically.