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

social observances discharged, achieved freedom in a car of Elsie’s, it seemed perverse, after the movie or the miniature golf was behind them and they had found a parking spot, to have her seated on his left instead of on his right. Come at this way, she felt like a strange girl, with whom he must begin from scratch. Their chins and mouths made angles opposite from the usual, and his hands coped with reversed routes.

“Should we switch?” she asked, when he remarked on this strangeness. Her voice came out breathier, lower in her throat, than the polite, Dutch-flavored voice she used with his mother and the teachers at school. Her lipstick had already begun to smear and flake. Her face was waxily lit by a streetlamp half a block away; they sometimes parked in a hidden place he knew from his childhood walks, at the back of the Dairy Queen lot on Cedar Top. He lived ten miles away, and she four miles more to the south, but Willow was the town whose map he knew and where he felt safest. Other times, they would park up by Shale Hill, near what had been the Victory Gardens, on a dirt road made by recent developers. Always, as the scope of her permissions widened, he searched for even safer spots, where the police would never come up and shine flashlights in their faces, as once had happened, behind the long low sheds of the old farmers’ market. As she sat high behind the wheel of her father’s expensive car, her mussed hair caught fire in stray loops and strands from the distant streetlamp.

“Let’s,” he agreed. “If you don’t mind my sitting behind your father’s wheel.”

“I don’t mind, Owen. I don’t like it poking me in the ribs all the time. I don’t see how you can stand it.”

“Elsie, when I’m with you, I don’t notice such things. Here I go. I’ll get out and you slide over.”

Thrusting himself into the public space outside the automobile, where adult morality pressed down from the stars, he opened and shut the Chrysler’s passenger door (it made that sucky rich rattle-free sound) and scuttled around the broad chrome bumper and white-walled rear tires hunched over, for he already had an erection. Even behind his fly it felt scarily as if it might snag on something, until he settled behind her father’s steering wheel, which wore a suede cover. The tang of new-car smell was warmed into freshness by the heat of their bodies. As he slid across the front seat, wide enough for three, into the space where she huddled, the far streetlamp illumined her blurred face and a small pearl earring and the fuzzy wool of her short-sleeved angora sweater. She let him slide the sweater up and sneak a finger into her bra and stroke the silky skin there, the gentle fatty rise of it. Though Elsie was plump her breasts were small, as if still developing. When he had advanced to taking off her bra and pushing the sweater way up, her chest seemed hardly different from his own; a breast of hers in his hand felt as delicate as a tear bulging in his eye. One night, parked this time up by the Victory Garden wasteland, where the streetlamp was closer than on Cedar Top, he watched raindrops on the windshield make shadows on her chest, thin trails that hesitated and fell as his fingertips traced and tried to stop them, there, and there. She had dear little nipples like rabbit noses. She let him kiss them, suck them until she said in her breathy, un-Dutchy voice, “Ow, Owen. Enough, baby,” and touched his head the way the barber did when he wanted it to move. Sitting up, he made circles with his finger and his saliva around her nipples, softly round and round, loving the sight of them so much he felt dizzy, as the parallel shadows of the raindrops faintly streaked her chest and the backs of his hands.

She never touched his prick. It was too sacred, too potent. They pretended it wasn’t there, even when their bodies straightened at the angle permitted by the front seat and its heater-crowded foot space and he held her buttocks through her rumpled skirt and pressed himself rhythmically against her, all the time their mouths kissing, until he came, came in his underpants, where the dried jism made a brittle stain he later picked off with his fingernail, hoping his mother wouldn’t notice it when she did the wash. In the house they had now she did the wash in a dim cobwebby space under the cellar stairs, on a newer machine than the tub-shaped one that had seized his hand in the Willow basement; this machine had a lid that closed, and a spin-dry phase in its cycle instead of a wringer.

His sense of sexual etiquette was primitive, gleaned from the way men and women acted in the movies up to their huge close-up kiss at the end, and from enigmatic dialogue in a few books, like For Whom the Bell Tolls and Forever Amber and A Rage to Live and The Amboy Dukes, that he had looked into, and from a pornographic poem that Marty Naftzinger’s younger brother, Jerry, a runty curly-haired kid in Owen’s class, could recite, if you paid him a dime. But it was developed enough to ask, after one such climax against her compliant body, “What can we do for you?”

This embarrassed her. Elsie liked to pretend that what had just happened hadn’t happened at all. “How do you mean?”

This made him shy in turn. “I mean—just holding still for me isn’t enough, is it?”

She said, “We can’t do more, Owen. There might be consequences you don’t want.” She never touched his prick and never said “I love you,” knowing it would put him to the discomfort of saying the same thing back, when he wasn’t ready. Otherwise she could have explained, I love you,