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

himself. In the evenings, unable to be away from each other for more than four hours, the two reunited amid the smoke and misted mirrors of the little restaurants where students huddled in overheated symposia.

“I mean,” he said, insisting on his own obtuseness, thrusting it upon her, “so what if there exists a set of sets that are not members of themselves, which makes it a set that both is and isn’t a member of itself?”

“But, Owen dear,” Phyllis said, “the antinomies—the paradoxes—undermine classical logic, but the way they have to be phrased brings us to symbolic logic, which brings in Boolean math and the Turing machine and algorithms. Undecidability is like knowing you have a swamp and having to invent methods to build on it anyway. It’s like the Back Bay on all its pilings,” she said, so pleased with her own analogy that her face for the moment was more a Bird’s than a Muffin’s.

Phyllis inhabited an attenuated realm where he longed to join her. Her very air of absence pulled him up, led him on; at times he had the sensation that the void which the rigors of post-Aristotelian logic discovered at the very roots of arithmetic existed also in her—a refusal to be obvious, an implacable denial beneath the diffident, compliant surface. “You know I don’t love you yet,” she said after they had been going together for a year and were already considered a couple by their peers.

Owen was shocked, especially since they were lying stretched out together somewhere, on a bed or floor—it must have been in her senior year, when she moved back to her parents’ house, giving them some sneaky privacy. They didn’t shed their hot clothes but were, in those inhibited, swaddled times, “making out.” Owen had assumed he was lovable, though beneath the regard of the Ginger Bittings of the world. His mother and Elsie had loved him.

He betrayed no feeling, simply hugging Phyllis tighter and saying, “Really? Well, I love you. Maybe you love me but don’t know it yet.” At the same time he felt his own body drifting away, washed backwards by the thought that he should not be directing his life to flow through this other, alien body.

“Maybe,” Phyllis ambiguously agreed, in a voice thickened by regret that she had revealed so much. Her face was inches from his in the shadows of the room, which in his memory of the moment he felt to be on a high floor, perhaps her brother’s room in her parents’ house. He had been kissing her, those lipstickless numb lips, as if to press blood to their surface, while individual strands of her mussed hair tickled his face with the exasperating persistent delicacy of flies’ feet on a muggy day. Sometimes it seemed that she was the one being tickled; more than once, as a spasm of love drove him to a flurrying multiplication of kisses on her lips, and her high blushing cheekbones, and her fadeaway eyebrows, and her lids with their squirming pulse, the whole marvellous silverpoint precision of her, she laughed aloud, disconcertingly, deflatingly. He read these moments of rejection as his clumsy, premature rupture of the delicate barriers she had erected in twenty-one years of being so fine, so solitary. He tried to imagine what motion within her, what minute climate change, would persuade her that she loved him. She had let slip, at moments in their courtship which stuck in his mind as illuminations of her obscure inner life, that she and another girl at Browne & Nichols used to hold hands and that the unspeakable boyfriend that her parents agreed would never do had been, in a way that made her hands fly apart in memorial measurement, “enormous.” He had been a creature of summer camp and perhaps had acquired for her the mythic stature of the mountains, the great rough-barked pines, the distant granite outcroppings, the thunderheads on a still summer day blazing white above the dark evergreen ridge. Hank—his name, which she let slip—had been head of maintenance at the camp, captain of the battered pickup truck, master of the trash dump and the pine-needle-covered roadways, and though he had spent a few semesters at the University of New Hampshire, he professed no ambition but to continue in Nature, hewing and hauling and spraying DDT on mosquitoes and black flies. His lack of ambition had included placing no claim on her, though they knew each other through several summers. Perhaps she had been the suitor, the shy aggressor, like Owen setting up the Monopoly board for Buddy Rourke. Phyllis’s face, when she thought of Hank, shed its absence, its indolence, and somehow steeled itself, though she tried to hide her feelings behind a pensive moue. Owen comforted himself that, if he was less intelligent than she, Hank had not even competed.

They no longer shared Introduction to Digital Computer Coding and Logic. She, a senior, disappeared into the counterintuitive exotica of advanced topology—differential manifolds, invariant Betti groups embedded in Euclidean space, duality theorems. Her senior thesis sounded suspiciously like Projective Geometry: she said it had to do with “the topological classification of manifolds of dimensions greater than two.”

“How high can dimensions go?” he asked.

“To n, obviously.”

“I can’t picture it.”

“You can’t, but numbers can. Calculations can encompass however many. Don’t look so disapproving, Owen. Relax. It’s elegant, it’s fun.”

“Fun for you, I can almost believe.”

“I’m at a point where I’m not sure Riemann was right, in the case of some local curvatures.”

“The immortal Riemann of Riemann surfaces? You’re going to refute him? Baby, you’re too much.”

“He wouldn’t mind. He was a saint, of sorts. His father was a Lutheran pastor. He himself died at the age of thirty-nine, of tuberculosis. He left behind notebooks and papers full of ideas he hadn’t had time to publish. The whole universe, you know, is a kind of Riemann surface, according to general relativity.”

Her eyes wore that expression of abstracted steeliness with which she guarded the thought