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

of North Vietnam after a U.S. destroyer was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. In Philadelphia, over two hundred were injured in black riots protesting police brutality. Malcolm X called the American dream an American nightmare. Hit singles of the year included Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!,” Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” the Supremes’ “Baby Love,” the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” and Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody.” Owen and Faye met at the town’s numerous get-togethers, formal and casual, small and large, packing all their tension into mannerly brief exchanges and light touches which they imagined were unnoticeably discreet. If anyone noticed, that was all right; in this particular social setting it was to be expected that some men and women would like each other especially. Liking each other was what all of them needed, to get through the slog of child-rearing, of homemaking, of earning a living, hour by hour. It was what they had instead of what younger people had—the defiant scarecrow costumes, the drugs, the crash pads, the sleeping where you fell, into whosever arms. Up to a point even Jock and Phyllis approved, what they could see and guess, because to have your spouse desired increased your own desirability; it increased the value of what you brought to the table of general acquaintance.

At a party at the Morrisseys’, where the illustrator’s cluttered, casually artistic decor encouraged latent recklessness, Faye told Owen, speaking in a clenched way as if her lips might be read, “My psychiatrist wants me to ask you something.”

“Really? What?”

“Guess.”

His mind obediently flitted about, startled by the news that she saw a psychiatrist, but settled on nothing. “I can’t.”

“It’s so obvious, Owen. He wants me to ask you why you don’t want to sleep with me.”

He felt his whole body blush, as if plunged into hot water. “I do, of course. But—”

“But there’s your lovely wife.” Faye’s small face with its big features looked feral, drawing her lips back over these last words.

“I was going to say, But how do we arrange it?”

She opened her mouth to laugh but in her tension nothing came out. She too felt the hot water. “And you so clever, they say, arranging the insides of computers. Can you use the telephone, or is that too simple?”

Yet this was not simple: the phone at E-O Data, his desk just separated by a chest-high cubicle wall from Ed’s desk, offered no privacy, and if Phyllis was out of the house there were still Gregory and Iris, who were eight and nearly seven, with sharp ears and childhood’s guileless curiosity. Phoning Faye was a grave, irrevocable step compared with flirting with her; there was no misconstruing it, or passing it off as part of normal life. He stalled for days, walking through the motions of normal life with a tingling body and a numbed, guilty head—guilty chiefly in regard to Faye, for ignoring her unambiguous overture. When he lay down beside Phyllis to sleep, his head churned with bits of this other woman—the inner curves of the two shy, shallow breasts that a certain low-cut dress revealed; the glazed bold stare of her muddy-green irises when she’d had one drink too many; the nervous dampness of her hand when it touched his; the look her face acquired when excited and amused, of being all eyes and mouth, and then the wry crimp of the lips, clipping shut a smile. He had trouble sleeping, and blamed Phyllis. He felt that if only Faye were beside him he could fall asleep in an instant. It was like wanting to stretch out beside Ginger Bitting on the top of the playground shed.

There were phone booths dotted about Middle Falls; he finally resorted to one on the edge of town toward Upper Falls, in the strip of highway, once orchards and dairy farms, now filling in with fast-food franchises or low cinder-block buildings selling discount carpeting and tiles. Trucks kept roaring by, drowning out the faint scratchy words at the other end of the line and blowing late-summer road dust into Owen’s lungs. “Hello?”: it was Faye, he was sure; her voice, disembodied, had a contralto timbre he had never noticed, a cello color at an opposite pole from the high bat’s cry of her laugh.

“This is Owen Mackenzie,” he said, in case there was someone else there listening. If there was, her stiffened voice would tell him, and he would ask if by any chance he had left a pair of reading glasses there the other night, when the four of them, on an impulse after volleyball, had had pizza with their children. It was a long shot, his phone call would go on, but he had tried everywhere else, and it was driving him crazy. In her silence, he began, “I’m calling to ask if by any chance I left a pair of reading glasses—”

“Owen,” she breathed. “Well, at last.”

“You told me to call.”

“And then you didn’t. For a week!”

“I was scared.”

“Why? It’s all so natural, Owen. It happens all the time. You hurt my feelings, not calling before.” Her contralto had a singing, lullaby quality he had not noticed before.

“I’m sorry. Like I said, I—”

While he tried to think of how not to repeat himself, Faye interrupted. “You want to see me?”

“I do. God, I do.”

“Can you get away next Tuesday?”

“Next Tuesday! What about right now, now that I’ve got you? Are you going to be home?”

“I am, but somebody could drop by any minute.” She paused, and then her voice hurried, laying down rules. “I want it to happen, but not in my and Jock’s house. Not the first time.”

“Oh? It, as you call it, doesn’t have to happen at all; I just want to hold you a minute. To see you, and make sure you’re real.”

“I know. That’s what they all say.”

“Who does?”

“Men. Don’t do your naïve act, Owen. Now, listen. I have a sitter coming Tuesday at ten. I’m seeing my shrink in Hartford and then supposedly going shopping at G.