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

still young enough to invest the darkness with spying presences; they distracted him when he should have been purely bent on the treasure at hand, in the deepest privacy he and Elsie would ever know.

It was August; she wore shorts and no girdle. As their embrace gained ardor and flexibility her crotch came into his hand as if rising to it. She lifted her hips on the car seat so he could slide her shorts down; through his clumsiness her white underpants came off with them and Elsie did not try to grab them back. She seemed to stretch, elongating her belly. Even in this darkness he saw wet gleams upon her eyeballs like faraway fireflies and the pallor of her long belly descending to a small soft shadow. Frightened of that shadow, he turned his attention to her breasts; with a touch more practiced than with her underpants, he unhooked her bra and tugged up her short-sleeved jersey. She crossed her arms and pulled the jersey the rest of the way, up over her head, with the bra. Her hair, cut shorter this summer so she could be in and out of the lake at the Lutheran camp, bounced, releasing a scent of shampoo. The bony smooth roundness of her shoulders gave him the shock of her nakedness; he hid his face in the side of her neck, saying, “Oh God. I can’t stand this.”

Her cheek tensed, smiling. “Now you, Owen,” she breathed into his ear. “Your shirt.”

Quickly, not wanting to let go of her for a second, he pulled it off, wishing he had bathed more carefully at home, for the smell of his armpits joined that of her shampoo and her skin in the close air of the car. He could see more and more, as if light were leaking from the patches of sky in the gaps between the trees, shedding glimmers into the woods, where faint noises were reviving and becoming less faint. He kissed her breasts, trying to be delicate, trying not to bite as the nipples grew hard, while she pressed into his ear a voice that seemed made up, enlarged and rehearsed, like something in the movies: “Owen, I used to take off my clothes in my room and walk around looking at myself in the mirror, wishing you could see me.”

“You’re beautiful—amazing,” he told her, meaning it, but, as if her voice had swabbed out his ears, he now heard other things, whispers and stirrings around them, on the other side of the glass and metal. From somewhere not too distant there was a hoot, an owl or possibly a signal from a murderous, demented gang that lived here in caves and came out at night. Suppose the car doesn’t start? he thought again. It often didn’t, in rainstorms, or on cold mornings, his father frantic, flooding the engine in his panic, so the wearying starter turned it over uncatching, cooga cooga. “Did you hear something?” Owen asked Elsie.

She had left her loafers on the gritty floor of the car and had risen up, bare now even to her feet, to kneel on the seat beside him, stroking his face as he tongued her breasts; even in his state of growing terror he marvelled, holding her tight, at the give of a girl’s waist, at the semi-liquid space below the ribs and then, behind, the downy hard plate at the base of the spine and the glassy globes of her buttocks, smooth into the cleavage, all of it unified like the silvery body of a fish, all so simple and true, the simple truth of her, alive in his arms. He heard the distant hoot again. Something rustled near the car tires. She felt his mouth losing interest in her nipple, and began to listen with him. Behind the skin between her breasts her heart was beating. “I don’t think so,” Elsie answered him, her voice losing its movie-screen largeness and becoming small, with a childish quaver.

For reassurance she added, “He says nobody ever comes here except in hunting season.” But she too must have seen the cans and wrappers in the headlights, evidence of others. He: her father, the owner, all around them, hating Owen, what he was doing to his daughter, striving in every twig and trunk to eject the two of them. They listened and heard a noise so faint it could have just been saliva rattling in their held breath. Owen’s hands began to move again, gathering her tender taut nakedness closer to him, his fingertips finding a touch of fuzz in the cleavage behind. He wondered how to get his head down to kiss that soft shadow he had glimpsed; it had seemed shyer, gauzier than what he had seen in dirty photographs and drawings, the few he had seen. His prick was aching behind his fly, and her hand dropped and, the first time ever, began fumbling at his belt buckle to release it, its imperious pressure, its closeted sour smell.

But he had spooked her, he had spooked them both, and the desire that dominated him, bare-chested though he was, was the desire to escape, to see if the car could start and he could back it up that narrow road without hitting a tree or deep hole. Her father’s land, and her nakedness in it like a shout: Owen was vulnerable, criminal even—trespassing, and she a minor. He must restore her intact to society. The rustling he had imagined near the tires became a sudden thrashing, a distinct lunge of the unknown.

“Elsie,” he whispered.

“What?” Perhaps expecting some avowal, some earthy plea.

“Let’s get out of here.”

She hesitated. He heard her heart beat, her breath whistle. “It’s up to you,” she decided in the mannerly voice that she had used with his mother. Then, catching his mood, she whispered, “Yes, let’s.”

Often afterwards he would remember details of this hour (her shorts and underpants in one sweep; her gleaming eye-whites; his sense of her slithering into the