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

Yet there was more, both knew it, and as his senior year ran out they groped to find it without committing sins so dark and final their lives would be forever deformed. Elsie was less afraid of this than he; he refused to test how far she would let him “go.” It had become their way in the car for him to bend over and kiss the silky warm inner sides of her thighs and then press his mouth as far up as he could into the warmth, her warmth, its aroma at times like the tang his mother gave off on a summer day and at others of the musky mash bins in the back of her father’s store. At first she resisted, pushing at his shoulders, and then came to expect it. In those days even teen-age girls wore girdles: the crotch of her underpants was guarded by edges of stiff elastic, and though she shyly edged her hips forward in the car seat his lips could not quite reach the damp cotton. Not that he knew enough to make her come with his mouth, or how girls came at all. The pleasure was his, in being this close to a secret, in having her yield it up to him, even her fragrance, which was strong enough at times to exert a counterforce, a wish to pull his face away. But he loved it there between her legs, and how hot and sticky his cheeks grew against her thighs, and the graceless awkwardness this maneuver asked of her, still wearing her knee socks and loafers.

The summer before he went off to MIT, their experiments took on a desperate edge. She knew he was slipping away; the baton had not been passed after all. Owen had got a summer job on a surveying crew, tending the target marks and chopping brush out of the sight lines. Elsie had been sent to a Lutheran camp in Ohio, where she was a counsellor, for six weeks. He would get rides with the crew to far corners of the county and have to be fetched from Alton when he could not hitch a ride south; he would come home exhausted and dirty, and tried not to think that college in a foreign region was swooping down upon him and would carry him away—for good, he both hoped and feared. His grandparents were ailing and his parents were no longer the young couple on Mifflin Avenue into whose bed he would climb when a dream scared him.

After Elsie returned from Ohio, it seemed almost too much work to take a bath in the farmhouse’s one tub and go out again, into the dark. He and she needed the dark now. With the freedoms they had granted each other they needed such privacy that even a distant streetlight or the remotest chance of a Willow cop with a flashlight and barking voice could not be borne. Where could they go, with their maturing needs and fears of eventual desertion? His summer had not been so distracted that he had missed the implication, in her letters from camp, that she had found companionship with the boy counsellors, or the gossip, when in August she had returned, that while he was cutting brush in future housing developments she was to be seen at the township public pool, lounging in a two-piece bathing suit on a towel on the grass, with another boy, a boy her age, in her class, who would be there with her after September.

“My father owns a hundred acres of woods not that far from Brechstown,” she told Owen, after an hour of directionless cruising one evening. “There’s an old road in. Nobody ever comes there.”

“Sounds perfect,” he said, but did it? He let her direct him, turn by turn, on narrow roads he had never driven before. He was frightened at the road entrance, with its No Trespassing sign and rusting remains of barbed-wire fence; there was a sandstone boulder that with his summer muscles he rolled five feet to the side so they could get by. They were in the fragile old black Chevrolet that his father, mocking his own poverty, called “the flivver.” As branches raked the creeping car’s sides, Owen felt guilt, yet less than if it had been her father’s Chrysler, which was kept so shipshape and Simonized. A litter of cans and wrappers in the headlights revealed that others had been here before, also pushing aside the boulder in their strength of desire. The road was rough; the old car rocked. Suppose they broke an axle or got a flat tire? The scandal, the disgrace would stain his charmed life forever.

“Isn’t this far enough?” he asked. He felt a trap closing behind him.

“It goes in for a long way but gets worse,” Elsie admitted. He turned off the ignition and the headlights. Such darkness! It pounced upon them with an audible crackle; it locked around the windows as if the car had plunged into a black river. As Owen’s eyes adjusted, he saw a star or two high in the windshield, in the spaces between the great still trees overhead. Occasional headlights on the dirt road a half-mile away twinkled. Their own headlights must have been equally visible. Elsie’s face was a mere glimmer in the cave of velour, rubber, shaped steel, and shatterproof glass. His lips found hers, and they were full and moist, but the old melting, one mouth into another, met impediments, things he couldn’t put out of his mind. Suppose the Chevy didn’t start when they wanted to go? Suppose he couldn’t back it out on this overgrown road, the bushes a solid mass behind them and he without the machete he used on the surveying crew? He felt life, a silent vegetable life, enclosing them, on this her father’s land, this man present in every leaf and reaching branch. Owen was