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

space above his head like a silken kite, like an angel crammed into an upper corner of a Sienese Nativity) and regret his lack of the boldness that would have let him linger with her gift of herself, and taste it, and let her continue undoing his pants. But his nerves had poisoned their privacy. Naked or not, she was a person, and now a frightened one. His retreat was cowardly but he felt brave and cool, successfully managing the maneuver. He started the engine—thank God, it started, drowning out all those other sounds—and backed down the overgrown road by the wan glow of the back-up lights while branches scraped metal and Elsie scrambled into her clothes. He would have backed up right onto the paved road, not bothering to roll back the boulder, but she said in a voice whose calmness sounded stern, “Owen. We should put it back the way we found it.”

Her father’s precious land. This had been her show, he realized. He got out angrily and in the glare of his own headlights heaved the rock back into place, for the next trespassers. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said when the Chevy was safely running down the highway, to the village, Brechstown, where she lived. “I chickened out.”

Elsie said, after lighting a cigarette (rare for her, but girls in Willow smoked, and he had taught her), “You’re more citified than I am. Woods don’t frighten me. My father and uncle hunt in the fall. There are no bears or anything, not even bobcats any more. I felt safe.”

“You should have told me that while we were in there.”

“I tried to distract you, to keep you interested.”

“You did, you were stunning. I loved it. You.”

She was silent, putting his jerky speech together.

He told her, “It’s just as well. We might have fucked.”

Not a word they used, with others or between themselves: it was a kind of offering. But she held her silence. It occurred to him, his face heating in a blush, that he hadn’t been prepared even physically, with one of these rubber things he had seen years ago up by the abandoned Dairy Queen. Don’t touch it!

She at last spoke: “I wouldn’t have let you, Owen. I intend to be a virgin for my husband. It was just, like I said, I wanted you to know me, to see me as I see myself.”

“You were beautiful. Are beautiful, Elsie.”

Was she crying? “Thank you, Owen,” she brought out. “You’re a nice person.”

Too nice, was the implication. Still, he couldn’t blame himself. Her body like that of a slithering cool flexible fish in his arms had been a revelation, but it had been revelation enough for one night.

Were there other nights, to follow? There might have been, but when he looked back, trying to recall each underlit detail, it didn’t seem so. Their futures came upon them fast. Elsie had another boyfriend for her senior year, and married yet another boy she met at the local Penn State extension. Surprisingly, they left the region, settling in the San Francisco area. If Owen wouldn’t take her away, another would.

They must have driven around that night, burning up gas, letting their heartbeats slow down, trying to talk into place what they had learned about each other and their own lives, before he drove her home, to Brechstown. It was a village almost in Chester County, an erratically spaced cluster such as Willow must have been before the advent of trolley cars made it a suburb of Alton. Right behind the houses were fields and farm buildings, barns whitewashed white by their Amish owners and silos built of a brown-glazed oversized brick. Mr. Seidel’s feed-and-hardware store, with its loading platform and checkered Purina ads, sat between a gas station and a one-man country barbershop, closed, its striped pole not turning. Elsie waited on store customers on Saturdays, and Owen had more than once shaken her father’s hand in there; Mr. Seidel was a muscular man bordering on fat, and even though he lifted eighty-pound feed sacks into the Mennonite trucks and Amish buggies he wore a shirt and a necktie and a gold tieclip. He would take Owen’s hand with an expert lunge, flashing a mischievous smile beneath a small, squared-off mustache. His house was a quarter-mile away, up a long crunching driveway, an old farmhouse like Owen’s own family’s but fussily improved. A new addition held a two-car garage below and a family room above, with a TV and built-in loudspeakers and furniture that all matched; the addition was covered in aluminum siding. The original house was built not of sandstone but of limestone, because that was what the earth yielded here, near the Chester County line.

When he and Elsie kissed good-night, again there was not that melting together, though he took the liberty of stroking a breast as she leaned toward him getting out of the car. Owen felt he had failed but no one could take from him his stolen treasure, how far Elsie had “gone,” leaving him with a kind of home movie his mind could run and rerun in a rickety projector, not just in bed but in inward moments of daylight, flickering bits and pieces of her—her shampoo, her heartbeat like a stranger knocking on the other side of a door, the surprising elastic give and stretch of her waist.

So Phyllis Goodhue was not his first love interest, though it must be admitted that even for the innocent ’fifties Owen was an innocent. Having been taken too deep into the woods by Elsie, he saw sex as something to be deferred until he had made space for it and didn’t feel squeezed. His freshman year had been squeezed by his efforts not to fail and fall back into the farmland and his disconsolate family. At home, his grandmother, crippled by Parkinson’s disease, stayed more and more upstairs in bed; when he would visit her she would hold out her clawlike blue hands to him and