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

Her face, bony and narrow, seemed slightly too small for her features—the large hazel eyes, the mobile mouth, the arched brows pencilled darker than the hair on her head. But her hips were wide in the pool-table felt and her upper arms bare and white and dotted with freckles like small pin-pricks; she was real enough, not a dream he was having.

He dared confess, to stop her from walking away, “I have been down, I guess. I missed my daughter’s birth, and really she must be the last child.”

Faye nodded. “You and Phyllis,” she dryly pointed out, “don’t seem to have a fertility problem.”

Did she and Jock? They had two pale children, frail-looking and shy compared with their animated, hard-living parents. Owen told her, “It’s not as if we screw all the time, either. I hardly know how it happens.” This was too much to confide, probably. He felt he was leaning out over a little abyss—the fresh soft grass at his feet, the gleam of his third gin-and-tonic. But Faye, as wide-eyed as infant Eve, took it in gravely, her lips parted in suspense. Owen went on, “And then, when I was out in California, I saw how these new companies are feeding off of one another, swapping people back and forth. They call it Silicon Valley. I came away thinking that that’s where Ed and I should be, and wondering if hardware instead of software isn’t where it’s at, at least until the Japanese move in.”

“How fascinating,” Faye said, in a tone that seemed to come from another conversation; Phyllis had appeared at his side.

“Baby,” his wife said to Owen, “I know you’re having a wonderful time talking with our charming hostess, but we promised the babysitter six, and I need to see Eve. And she me.” Phyllis’s breasts embarrassed him, they were so big, stuffed with milk, straining against the top of the oversize cotton dress, plain beige, with which she had covered a body still somewhat distended by childbirth. Yet Phyllis had her princessly air still, and said loftily to Faye, “Such a glorious day, Faye, and such a good idea for May. ‘Sumer is icumen in.’ ”

“Can’t you stay, then? Some people will, when most have gone. We have a ham. Please.”

“Oh, darling Faye, we just can’t, for a dozen good reasons. We have too much going on at home. I can’t trust the sitter to feed the children anything but junk. But you’re sweet.” To Owen she said, in a lower, firmer register, “I’ll go say goodbye to Jock for us, he’s on the veranda, and see you at the car.”

When she was gone, Faye said to him accusingly, “You complain, but you don’t see yourself when she’s pregnant or topped up with milk; you preen. It’s lovely.”

“I’m sorry we can’t stay.”

“Of course you can’t, baby. You heard your wife. Her tits hurt.”

Owen took the first step, past her, to leave, and Faye turned with him, to walk him across her lawn, the sparkling new-mown spring green, down to the driveway. They walked through broad bars of late-afternoon sunlight, beamed between trees and tall-shadowed people standing conversing in the heat and boisterous freedom of a cocktail party two hours old. Her arm, surprisingly, went around his waist, and his, more smoothly than his inner shakiness revealed, around hers. Their hips slithered together as, faces downturned as if alert for treacherous footing, they walked to the edge of the grass, where the driveway pebbles began. Her waist felt solid and flexible under his hand. Faye was a good compliant height for him; Phyllis was a little tall. Through the filter of his inner tremble Owen saw himself and Faye, stepping down the lawn, as a couple in a Hollywood musical, about to complicate their steps as the background music soared, opening their mouths in duet, or, by camera trickery, taking off together up into the sunlight that lay in stripes at their feet like slippery golden stairs.

The summer was to pass before they slept together. There was so much clutter to work around—children on school vacation, spouses with their own holiday plans, still-living parents to placate with a visit. Grammy had died, but Grampy lived on, sitting on his sofa, his head tipped up, waiting for the mail, which came later and later, since the route, once a matter of connecting the widely spaced mailboxes of rural delivery, was filling in with houses, one farm after another gone under to development. Owen and Phyllis visited the farmhouse, with the kids, once a year, but his wife and mother had never meshed, even their silences speaking in a different language, and Floyd Mackenzie, paler and thinner, stared with some dismay at the visitors, as if he had acquired six new dependents. He felt exploited and taken for granted by the old college classmate in Norristown who had rescued him from unemployment. Owen’s mother’s weight and blood pressure had gone up alarmingly. The first time she had met Phyllis, before the marriage had taken place, some socks and underwear of Owen’s that Phyllis, with innocent possessiveness, had washed in her parents’ Maytag emerged from her suitcase and gave her future mother-in-law a fit of sullen temper that never quite abated over the years, though grandchildren and Christmas presents and, eventually, faithful financial support came to her out of her son’s marriage. Without being especially religious or conventional, she was offended by Phyllis’s liberal assumptions, and her confidently casual clothes, and her lofty lack of discipline with the children. The two women made bad electricity in the crammed little house, and the half-welcome intruders sought escape in car rides and backyard games. His mother’s resistance to Phyllis, who unlike Elsie had no local instinct for the tussle, made Owen more loyal, during the brief duration of their visits, yet at a deeper level, back in Middle Falls, gave a blessing to his impending betrayal.

With Lyndon Johnson as President, the old decorums and austerities were melting away. Johnson ordered bombing