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

Fox and Sage Allen and then looking at what’s on at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Could you get away from Ed for a few hours? Say you have a dentist appointment. We’ll have a picnic. I know a place. I’ll meet you at the new mall, parked in front of Ames. You know the car—a maroon Mercedes. Call me Monday if there’s a problem. If somebody else answers, tell them you found your glasses.”

“It’s all so cold-blooded!” he protested.

This made her laugh. “Owen, you must learn,” she said, solemnly, “to be practical. Life isn’t some dream you can just wander through.” She was being a teacher; he loved that.

The picnic spot was a twenty-acre nature preserve called Whitefield’s Rock. The great evangelist was supposed to have preached from there, but scholars now doubted it and thought, from the topography, he must have preached from a similar outcropping of ledge some miles away. The rock itself, worn smooth with footsteps and its crevices littered with cigarette filters and Popsicle sticks, was not their destination; they found an open space, well off the path, sheltered from the September breeze and, they trusted, from any stray walker’s sight. The preserve, with its religious taint, was never crowded and after Labor Day virtually deserted. People, over the summer, had found this secret space before them; a beer can glinted beneath a bush, and the grass, soft and yellowish in the way of constantly shaded grass, showed matted patches. She had brought a blanket and their picnic in a well-stocked basket but neither Owen nor Faye had an appetite, even for the Portuguese rosé in a squat round bottle with a twist-off cap. They fell into each other as if to hide from the other’s gaze. He could not believe the monstrous miracle of it, a woman not Phyllis kissing him, licking his ear, sighing in his arms, not resisting when he began to unbutton her blouse.

Faye had dressed for Hartford, in a suit of light pimento tweed, over a cream-colored silk shirt, with two-tone high heels that she had changed, in the car, for old loafers, to hike in. She moved the picnic basket off the blanket to give their bodies room. He undid the blouse and, as she lifted up on one arm to let him get at the hooks and eyes, her bra. Her back was bonier than he was used to; to slacken the bra a second her shoulder blades dipped inward, as if in sitting-up exercises. Her shoulders were brown with summer’s merged freckles; her flat midriff showed a tan where Phyllis was sallow and stretch-marked. He wanted to cry out as Faye’s breasts, smaller and tauter than his wife’s, came free, to be touched by his trembling hands, his careful lips. The trees around them formed green walls, twitching and rippling in the breeze, showing leaves’ silver undersides, with here and there a maple or beech leaf already turned yellow.

When they were done with her breasts she lifted her hips up from the blanket matter-of-factly. “The skirt, too,” she directed. “It’s getting rumpled.” He tugged the tweed, but her hip bones, wider than her shoulders, didn’t let go. “The buttons at the side!” Faye said, in the urgent, ungentle tone in which his mother had once said, Don’t touch it!

He undid the buttons, the skirt slid down, and then, with the faintest gust of genital scent, the silk underpants, paler than her bra. They slid down, as with Elsie, but that was in the deep dark and this moment was awash in daylight. Revelations were coming too fast to take in, like presents at a speeded-up birthday party. Faye’s pubic hair was scanter than Phyllis’s; two gauzy waves met in a coppery crest down the middle of her mount. He wanted to see her face, to watch her watching his face as for the first time he saw this essence of her, this crux of her femininity; however long or short their future stretched from this moment, there would never be another such first time. Her face looked sleepy, complacent, her eyes halfway lidded, as if she were drinking in with him the sight of her, the top of her cleft visible through the scant reddish hair; she was drinking in the sight of him drinking her in, her expression proud and skeptical both. He loved her for her innocent lewd vanity. Faye enjoyed, he was discovering, being naked, even here in this precarious open, while his ears strained for a broken twig or a suppressed rustle in the forest around them. Her skin was a blinding pelt, not quite hairless and pricked by stray pink dots and threadlike capillaries. Bare but for her barrettes and loafers and a ring or two, she knelt to unzip him, his wits too slowed by listening for forest sounds to assist. He recovered his manners enough to ease his unbelted corduroys and Jockey shorts around his prick, already thumpingly erect. She gazed down at it as if into a baby’s face, touching it with the same fingertips that had gently rested on his wrist at the other end of summer. “Sweet,” she said. “Scary.”

He was average, he had always supposed, from what he saw in locker rooms and, at MIT, stag movies. There was now a new roominess in his and Faye’s relationship, space into which he expanded. His voice had grown husky and murmurous, a seducer’s. “You can handle it, I think. But”—in more his own voice, too light and tentative—“do you want to? You don’t have to. We’ve already done a lot, for a first date.”

“Owen,” she scolded, “I want you to make love to me. I’ll be very angry if you don’t.”

“O.K., wonderful. I brought this for us.” He rummaged, so awkwardly he began to blush, in the pocket of the corduroys, still rumpled and caught around his knees. In a square foil packet, brought from the bathroom cabinet at home, where one wouldn’t be missed from the box of