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

“Not this one. He’s short, and dense. He does boxing to keep fit. One of his letters talked about smashing my face in.”

“Oh my God. Your gorgeous face?” Her skin appeared to him thinner than other people’s; it sunburned in minutes, and a blush stayed on her cheeks for an hour; his lightest touch, he felt, travelled instantly to nerve centers all over her body.

She blushed; even her lowered eyelids blushed. “That’s what he called it, too. Gorgeous. He wrote that he would leave marks on me I would always remember him by.”

“Oh, dear. What kind of section man was he? How was his Projective Geometry?”

When Owen tried to remember this conversation, he had trouble locating it. The authorities of MIT discouraged privacy for mixed-sex couples. MIT didn’t know where to put its female students; some were housed across the river, at 120 Bay State Road, and then the university opened up a section of Bexley Hall. Phyllis’s room in either dormitory was out of bounds, but there were chintz-covered sofas at 120 Bay State Road, and corners of the big reception room where the lights—stately floor lamps with pleated shades and three-way bulbs—could be dimmed to coziness. Students would lounge and lie in the semi-dark with their brush-cuts and perms; the boys then wore white bucks and narrow rep ties, the Ivy look not yet yielded to the blue-jeaned geek look, and the girls wore single-strand pearls and pastel sweaters whose wool seemed to melt in the hand. It wasn’t until Phyllis moved in her senior year back to her parents’ home off Garden Street that she and Owen could be alone between four walls; but that was later, surely, than the scare from Ralph Finneran.

“Smart enough,” she answered, “but he had a pugnacious way of making students feel stupid. He came from—how can I say this?—very ordinary people, near Worcester. He took me out there for Thanksgiving once, and all anybody cared about was the high-school football game, this sacred rivalry between two old mill towns; we all had to go, though it was bitter cold that year. His nephew was playing and got injured, even. They were tough, I should never have tried to be nice to him. After that Thanksgiving I knew it and tried to pull back.” Owen made noises of sympathy but she talked through them, her gray eyes gazing at that past gray day. “They were Roman Catholic, and though he was quite dismissive of what he thought were people’s attempts to cling to illusions, he once told me that we of course would be raising our children Catholic. When I expressed surprise, he became very angry. When he was angry, he would go all dark in the face, I don’t know how he quite did it, but it frightened me.”

She tried to imitate, in her fair and passionless face, Ralph’s lethal look, and the effort was like a cheap beer poured into a crystal wineglass. Owen thought for the hundredth time how fortunate he was to be with her, if only for the time being. She was an education. “And me?” he asked her. “Am I tough and ordinary?”

“Owen, don’t fish for compliments. You’re a Bird.”

In her girlhood, she and her girlfriends at Browne & Nichols, in the innocent cruelty of their adolescent clique, had classified people into three types—Birds, Horses, and Muffins. Owen could not quite grasp it, just as he could not grasp the ritual she described, acquired when she was thirteen or so, of lying in bed and, when she could not sleep, resting her eyes, with religious rigor, on each of the ceiling’s four corners. It meant more to her than she could say, or would say.

“A cute little bird?” he asked. “Chirp, chirp?”

“Not really,” Phyllis said, pursing her lips in a concentrating, solemn way he adored, crinkling the unpainted flesh of them. Making a moue, she told him it was called, when he had lovingly described this expression of hers to her. Now she told him, “A big lazy bird that hovers all day, in circles, hardly moving its wings, and then swoops to the kill.”

“Oh, dear! I sound frightful.”

“No more than anybody else. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill,” she said. She explained, “That’s from Shakespeare,” adding, “Just using mouthwash—think of all those microbes you kill.”

“I’m shocked,” he said, “that you could ever see me killing anything. I can’t even step on a spider. I have a phobia about them.” Yet he was pleased by her description, as granting him some initiative and force, when his inmost sense of himself was of an innocent witness, acted upon but not acting. He snuggled closer into Phyllis’s cool warmth and asked, “And you? What are you? I keep forgetting.”

She was shy of talking about herself, as if touching too tender or shameful a part of her body, or as if her ego was difficult to locate. “Not a Horse,” she said. “I have a Birdy look, but am really a Muffin, inside.”

“Surely not.”

She was offended. “Muffins aren’t a bad thing to be. They’re accepting. They’re non-disruptive. They don’t hurt anybody.”

He saw himself swooping in her mind, a dark shape empowered to hurt. “Not even other Muffins?”

“They don’t meet other Muffins, Muffins are too rare. Most people are Horses, clumping along.”

He laughed at the subtlety of this boast. She valued herself highly enough, but in terms so subtle as to be almost beyond him, like higher math, or the fine points of a foreign grammar.

Impatient with self-exposition, she reverted to an earlier topic: “I showed my father the most unpleasant and threatening of Ralph’s letters, and Daddy wrote him one of his own, mentioning legal action.”

Owen felt relief; he wouldn’t have to handle it, then. Her father was still in charge. “Well, good. And did that shut the creep up?”

“We don’t know yet. That was just days ago.”

“You poor angel, you’re still in the middle of this, aren’t you? Uh, did your father have to