Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

of traffic. In summer she wanders into her garden, beginning to pull weeds, in her nightie; its hem becomes soaked with dew, her flip-flops get muddy. He has to go downstairs in his pajamas to win a response. He even paddles out in his bare feet onto the asphalt driveway, not hot enough to burn in the early morning. During two decades of residence here, in this or that small emergency (a car door left ajar and the inner lights devouring battery juice, or a newspaper carelessly thrown into bushes as the delivery man careened around the circle in the pre-dawn dark, or a watering hose absent-mindedly left running when they went to bed, its sound audible in their bedroom like a murmuring heart), Owen has trod barefoot on the macadam in a range of weathers, even in some fresh inches of snow, and found that for a few steps almost anything could be borne, snow and heat imparting to dulled, shoe-bound nerves an invigorating elemental shock.

He wants to share a dream with her. He often wakes with such a desire, though Julia long ago established a considerable lack of interest in his nocturnal brain activity. It is important to strike in the first waking minutes, before the dream’s delicate structure is crushed under humdrum reality’s weight.

Last night he dreamed that, standing on the lawn on the sea side of their white house, he saw her go off, in her black BMW, on one of her innumerable errands or escapes to Boston. He saw her car, as shiny as patent leather, rush by and, immediately after it, his shabby maroon Mitsubishi follow, driven not by him but by Julia again, her pale profile preoccupied. His first wife, Phyllis, had also held her head in this tense, eye-catching way when behind the wheel—tipped slightly back as if in anticipation of the engine’s exploding.

In his dream he saw nothing peculiar in the duplicated Julias, but felt something headlong and dangerous in her speed. Slow down, darling, slow down. Now several cars were coming up the driveway, which is too narrow for automobiles to pass. To cope with this difficulty, the men driving the cars conducted unprecedented maneuvers—one Volkswagen Bug, that fabled, notoriously unsafe ’sixties vehicle of counterculture rebellion and conspicuous thrift, backed right down off the driveway onto a grassy ramp that Owen had never noticed before. Another vehicle pulled a clattering trailer; he realized that these men were his weekly lawn crew. But it wasn’t as simple as that; when he came back into the house, a family of three Chinese, identically blobby, like inflated dolls or swollen gray ticks, were sitting in his living room, silent but expectant. They, and the lawn crew—morbidly tan men who smoke cigarettes while they noisily ride their mowers around and around, missing many corners and scalping many a high spot—appeared to assume, wrongly, that in Julia’s absence (she has gone to Boston, in duplicate) he will know what to do, what courtesies to extend, what orders to give. He was the owner, the host, the proprietor, the boss—a role he has never quite grown into. Born young, he has stayed young: a charmed life has kept him so. Nonplussed, he woke up.

He wants to describe all this to Julia, to make her laugh. He wants to discuss with her the dream’s possible connections to real life. A few years ago, they visited China for three weeks—another senility-fending maneuver. All the couples they know in Haskells Crossing take trips, in the quick-closing window between retirement and death. Like children trading bubble-gum cards they swap the names of restaurants and hotels, museums, and temples that must not be missed, local guides who must be sought out and consulted. The whole globe has been colonized by Haskells Crossing and its companion community, Haven-by-the-Sea, sending out pilgrims who tread the same paths, in one another’s footsteps, eating in the same restaurants, using the same guides, even encountering the same memorably persistent souvenir-saleswomen in the shadow of the Great Wall. Also, Owen’s career in computers has given him many Asian-American colleagues, some of them as opaquely expectant and uncoöperative as the figures in his dream. Come to think of it, on a business trip to Chicago last winter he and Julia saw, in the Art Institute, an enigmatic installation of identically smiling, gray spray-painted, pajama-clad artificial Chinamen standing around the marble railings of the majestic central staircase.

Owen imagines Julia laughing with him as he tests these possible connections to the imaginary Oriental visitors, who had been so self-contained, so non-nonplussably pleased in the Mackenzies’ living room, which had been reconfigured into a largely empty room with a sloping floor. Was the slope an oneiric reference to slant eyes, or to the slanting floor of the Scheherazade back in Willow, where he had watched many a Charlie Chan movie?

He wants to share this dream especially because it was, under its discontinuities, somehow all about Julia. His desire that she not come to ruin in the driveway; his heart leaping in fear that she might slip on wet leaves and fatally crash. So many of his dreams are not about her, drawing heavily, as on the raft of the mattress they drift together through their private universes, upon a fraught territory left behind twenty-five years ago—the domestic confusions and commensurate griefs in the town of Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Phyllis had played, with a dramatically understated affect, the role of his wife. Often in his dreams the wife-figure is ambiguous, misty-faced, and could be either woman. Phyllis, a stately dirty-blonde, had been taller, retaining from her student days a certain bohemian insouciance, and Julia, a compact, long-lashed brunette, with controlled passages of frosting in her sleek coiffure, is snappier in her dress and in her way of moving: but both acquire in his dreams a recessive, generic wifeliness.

Falls. Fragility. If an intruding stranger or psychiatrist asked him why he loved Julia so, Owen might have dredged up an erotic memory generated,