Dodson arrived in New York, fresh from Kansas, in 1950 to train as an artist; the walls of her living room are lined with her own paintings of erotic couplings and blown-glass sex toys.
Her description of the extended family's torrid couplings and decouplings makes the Brezhnev era sound like an Eric Rohmer film: "The young mothers with babies or toddlers usually arrived at the beginning of the season; their working husbands didn't stay long, a couple of weeks, rarely a month.
The novels keep offering whips-and-velvet couplings between the innocent young heroine and her rich, handsome dominator/lover.
Other couplings among the elders struggle, as couples often do regardless of age.
The Higgs bosons couple to fermions via their Yukawa couplings.
When Joe describes her initiation at the hands of Jerôme, Seligman adds up their couplings (front and rear) and says that they remind him of Fibonacci numbers, a series that we later see written on the screen.
That's 40 couplings, and then some, since the sorceress, having miraculously regained her virginity, presents herself for a second deflowering.
In "Hannah and Her Sisters," Woody Allen's 1986 romantic comedy of revolving doors, passionate couplings and neurotic soliloquies among upscale Manhattan bohemians, Mia Farrow does it all, without breaking a sweat.
That diary focuses on her lesbian encounters with women she stalks and surreptitiously records during their steamy couplings.
In rendering this alternate universe, Silver is clearly interested not in the question "What if?" but rather "Who?" As we follow Mary from her childhood in Oklahoma to California through a series of births and deaths and couplings, we experience a portrait of poverty not through the dreary accumulation of gritty detail, but via a series of direct shots to the heart.
