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

“No, let’s do it,” her voice came, softer. “Why buck tradition?”

“Did you say fuck tradition?”

“That’s not funny, Owen.”

His impression grew that he was looking down at someone somehow slain. The weak moon-shadows of window muntins cast a net over her white form. Her sunken eyes seemed unseeing. His poor prick, so hard it ached, emitted an anxious little stink. Then a white hand drifted from her side and lightly grazed his glans and shaft, testing. She lifted her knees, assuming the exact pose of the drawing gouged into the back of the playground shed, and as if idly, with cool fingertips, she guided him in. He met an obstacle, and pushed through it. What he had not expected, it hurt him as well as her. He finished, and it was not clear that she had even begun. Her mucous warmth had seared him. As if back in the bed of his adolescence, he had had a sensation of his inner world somersaulting, the sensation less pure and violent than when produced with his left hand. Phyllis had submitted, and that was a start. All tension had fled his muscles, and he marvelled at how many times ahead of them they would do this together, each time better, the two of them both less clumsy and shy.

In the bathroom, a resiny salt scent pressed against the window screen; trees were growing right here, live breathing things, scrub oak and bayberry bushes as well as the pitch pines. He washed his genitals of blood and semen and called in from the lit bathroom into the dark, “What shall we do about the sheet?”

“Didn’t you notice? I put a towel under my hips.”

“Oh my God, I didn’t,” he said, stricken with tenderness, as if this proof of her calm prudence and foresight opened Phyllis to him wider than fucking her had. He rushed to return to her, to see the towel with his eyes, to make some kind of relic of it. Others—Hank, Jake—would have coveted such a relic. She still assumed the position of the drawing on the shed, the obscene M-shape, looking back at the moon. Perhaps herself dazed, she lifted her hips enough for him to ease the stained towel away; he kissed the terrycloth, pressed his face into it, its receding clash of flesh and blood.

“Owen, really,” she said. She swung her naked legs past him and set her feet on the floor, taking the white towel with her into the bathroom. “I’ll wash everything up,” she announced. When she came out she was wearing a dotted wool nightie and he was still naked, kneeling at the bedside, pressing his face into the pocket of leftover heat where she had become his woman, deflowered. She made him feel foolish, theatrical, trying to make something religious of this moment. Under her nightie she was wearing, he discovered, underpants, with a pad at the crotch.

In her brother’s room, in the year past, Owen would move away from one of their tussles on the edge of intercourse and look out the dormer window, to the dizzy jut and recession of Cambridge rooftops and the narrow back yards with their rusty barbecue grills on little brick patios or added-on decks, and feel its communal force, its collective pride. He was privileged to have this elevated access to its wooden cityscape—so many barny mansions built on an industry of thoughts and scholarship. Via one of its maidens he had secured himself a place here, a seat at the Goodhues’ mahogany dining table with its diet of dry gossip and liberal indignation, in these days of evil Joe McCarthy and lackadaisical Ike. Yet Owen felt less than fully part of it—he was practical, Phyllis had sensed from the start, and, compared with her father, coarse. There was an ethos expressed by these dormered rooftops, these innumerable golden windows admitting views of stuffed bookshelves, of faded Oriental rugs, of kitchens adorned with copper-bottomed pots and quilted potholders, of bathrooms papered in New Yorker covers, of narrow, unmade student beds: he could admire it, even marry into it, but never make it his own. Tall and wiry, he had a smile quick to expose the crooked, sensitive teeth of a boy reared far from this self-cherishing village.

Their first Cambridge apartment, where they lived for the six months before he was drafted, was not on any top story but in the basement of a brick apartment building on Concord Avenue, with an eye-level view of a shady patch of pachysandra and myrtle, barberry and cotoneaster. The overplanted patch, hidden from the street, was a trysting place for cats, a feline bedroom and bathroom both. That summer and into the lingering warmth of fall the young Mackenzies had to leave, in lieu of air-conditioning, their screenless windows open; more than once Owen awoke with a jowly yellow tom, whom they had nicknamed Uncle Ugly Cat, sitting purring on his chest, his blue lips so close to Owen’s face the smell of rancid fish oil was nauseating. Phyllis, indecisive and fretful for the first time since he had known her, drifted through her course in probability (combinational analysis, random variables, laws of large numbers, recurrent events, Markov chains, prediction theory) and still groped after a Ph.D. thesis topic, unable to find, in the vast tangle of achieved mathematics, an unformulated scrap she could make her own, while Owen, an ill-paid apprentice at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, struggled, in this twilight of the ponderous Mark I, with the primitive programming system called the A–O compiler and with the complications of hard-disk data storage, an innovation that would liberate the machines from programs on cumbersome punched cards or reels of magnetic tape. Already IBM had marketed, to government and research departments, the first commercial computer, the 701. The visions that these developments opened up, of ever more intricate workings down in the tiny layered circuits, an abstract processing