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

in the sexual transactions of others, a polymorphous sharing noticeable not only at weddings, where the weeping parents and awestruck flower-girl unite to consign the bride to the connubial mysteries, but at polite adult parties where custom seats husbands and wives not together but beside the spouses of others, tempting potential confusion and exogamous trespass. Copulation, in short, is so powerful and highly prioritized an event that we take pleasure not only in our own but in that of others, even of a daughter or wife as she draws away from us into the sexual seethe. Phyllis in all her aloof beauty was a fruit with a stem more weakened than was apparent; she fell to Owen rather confoundingly, her fall resisted less than he had expected or, at some deep level, hoped.

All this could be glimpsed only in long hindsight. At the time, as her return to her home gave them more opportunities for intimacy than 120 Bay State Road or Bexley Hall had offered, they felt daring and furtive; in their minds it would have shocked their parents to see them and shocked God as well, if He had deigned to watch. Owen, with the furtive religiosity inherited from his pious grandparents, was not sure that He was not watching, much as He had watched over the house in Willow, in its snow globe of safety. Now, like the vibrant green beam of a science-fiction ray-gun, or like the ruby-red lasers that in science-fact would be developed in the next decade, God’s gaze perhaps penetrated through the Goodhues’ dormered roof into the third-floor room still flavored by her brother’s dirty socks and ratty comic books.

Phyllis liked, Owen discovered, having the back of her neck, with its sweaty pale tendrils, stroked; it loosened her up. And the bluish inner sides of her arms, turned submissively uppermost, and the backs of her thighs, his fingers curled to lightly scratch the goosebumped skin with his nails. He tussled her into advanced déshabille, to the goal of pink-faced nakedness, but he clung to her virginity, as something sacred, a threshold he could still retreat from. Not that he wanted to retreat; she was his prize, his captive princess. She was taller and slimmer than Elsie, with that same breathtaking give to her waist and bigger breasts, so big she made motions to disown them, fighting her hands as they fluttered in instinctive cover-up. When his mouth became too busy at her nipples, she pulled back, deflecting his rapturous smothered comments as if they were the asides of a bumbling lecturer. Product of an academic environment, Phyllis could produce an academic frown, a mental sniff of disapproval. She held him against her, however, with a certain skill, gripping his buttocks; she had done this before, let a boy come against her pelvic region, though her hands felt gloved in tentativity. When it came to mopping up, though, Phyllis participated efficiently, their hands intertwining with his handkerchief as it pursued the puddles of semen on her belly and in her pubic hair, curlier and darker than the hair on her head. On the night of their wedding, surveying the moonlit field of flesh of which he had taken legal possession that afternoon, at a ceremony as watered-down yet graceful as the Unitarianism of Cambridge could make it, he knelt between her legs and combed her luxuriant pussy, now his, as if preparing a fleecy lamb for sacrifice, until she irritably took the comb from his hand and tossed it away from the bed; it clattered against a baseboard over beneath the window.

Rejected again. He scarcely dared ask why she had done that—dismissed his currying, his proud adoration. “What was wrong?” he asked. “Did it hurt?”

“It began to feel funny,” Phyllis admitted. “Tickly. Theatrical. Like you were showing off for somebody. Let’s just do it.”

“Do you want to? We don’t have to. I can wait until you want to. Maybe tomorrow, when we’re not so tired and jazzed up by other people. Weddings are killing, aren’t they?” They were in a cottage, the Truro cottage, lent to them for a week by her parents. He had graduated in the top third of his class; she had spent an unhappy year at graduate school desultorily taking advanced courses in number theory and topology and groping for a thesis topic and not getting along with her advisor. They were to go back to Cambridge for the summer, she to pick up a few more credits at summer school and he for an eight-week internship with Whirlwind that the department of electrical engineering had arranged. They could hear from afar surf breaking and withdrawing on the beach at the base of its sand cliffs and smell the stunted pitch pines. The sound and the smell, which would be there whether they were or not, gave the dark outside a vastness their newly joined lives could never fill. “Why is everybody supposed to like champagne?” he asked, timid of her silence. “To me it always tastes sour.”

He could not read her expression, only see the lean arabesque of her jaw and the long tendon of her neck as she turned her head toward the window. A three-quarters moon was framed and bisected by the sash; its light picked out the tab of an earlobe in the obscure mass of her hair. What was Phyllis doing, with her motionless gaze? Saying goodbye to the moon? This small bare house, strange to him, to her was full of girlhood summer memories and quaint souvenirs—books, shells, immature watercolors fading in their dime-store frames—of a bygone family life. The cottage’s briny, musty odors would be murmuring a language to her brain. Still kneeling, possessed of the privileges of a husband, his brain sapped by the flight of all his blood into his erect prick, he surveyed the glimmering moonlit wealth of her—the crescents of round hard shoulder and the collarbone jutting above its slant pockets of shadow and her breasts flattened on the