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

“Oh, darling. I’m on the Pill, isn’t Phyllis? No wonder you two keep making babies.”

A flock of crows, six or eight, raucously rasping at one another, thrashed into the top of an oak on the edge of the square of sky. The heavenly invasion made his heart race; he looked down at his prick, silently begging it not to be distracted; his mind fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.

Faye took him in hand. He slipped in. He became an adulterer. He went for the last inch. She grunted, at her own revelation. His was that her cunt did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze. It was soon over. He could not help himself, he was so excited, proud, and nervous. When he was done, he opened his eyes, and saw this stranger’s face an inch from his, seemingly asleep, the closed eyelids showing a thin pulse, her long lips curved self-lullingly. “Sorry, sorry,” Owen apologized. “You never had a chance. Next time I’ll do better. If you’ll give me a next time.”

“You were lovely, silly,” she said. “So intense.”

“I was?” She could compare; she had had other men, he knew from the practiced way she had managed this meeting.

“Yes.” Now she was feeling her nakedness as vulnerability; her mouth made its little deprecating crimp, and her eyes moved from side to side, taking in their green, breeze-rippled surroundings.

But he felt in no hurry to get off her. “Tell me about it,” he idly demanded, in a soft growl that rubbed his throat like a purr. “About my coming.”

“It tells me that this is important to you.”

“Isn’t it to every man?”

Faye frowned, perhaps at his weight still being there, upon her. “No,” she said. “To some …” She shrugged and didn’t finish. Owen guessed that Jock was one of the some.

She told him things. She saw him as living an unnaturally proper and aloof life with Phyllis, and needing instruction. “You should drink more,” she once told him, as if his moderation were a diet deficiency. She wanted him to join her on the muddy earth, to be more like Jock. Yet she appreciated that he was not like Jock. She told him, later, of this day, that, after dropping him off on the parking lot in front of Ames, as she drove around in her Mercedes with its uneaten picnic lunch and then home she cried to think that she could never have him, except for a time in this illicit, doomed fashion.

Later still, years later, he would wonder why he had loved her so much, flashy and hard-nosed and shallow as Phyllis explained to him Faye was. For some months he dreamed of marrying her, so as to have her always at his side, and everything touching her—her two skinny, wan children, her rambling Victorian house, her jauntily improvised costumes, her casual mix of furniture (Jock’s inherited antiques, her faddish sling chairs and airfoam sofas), the photographs of her in her attic that she showed him, herself as a girl, as a college freshman, as a bride in white lace—everything touching her seemed holy. She tinged the world a new color, an iridescent stain in her vicinity, giving even the gritty parking lots where they met for a tryst a sparkling, poignant glory. Later he would come and stand on the spot where their cars had parked, one driver furtively becoming a passenger, and he would feel a hollowness spreading around him. Like strong sunlight she faded once-important sections of his life—his children, new wrinkles in programming code, E-O Data’s growth and struggles, even the news, as freedom marches wracked the South and a distant sliver of Asia took more and more front-page space—so that he moved insensible through these realms of former interest. This tinge, this sweet sickness of love, lingered in his system for years, an imbalance that was precious to him. Faye had dwindled to an inner sore, but that bitter remainder he pressed deeper into his sense of himself. She had given him, at thirty-one, a freedom that others (Marty Naftzinger, say) had long known, a freedom of the body. He was grateful but could not repay her—had ill repaid her. The women, including Phyllis, who advised him told him he was making too much of it. Women took their chances, their gambles, and sometimes lost. Faye had lost.

But what only he could know was that he had failed a kind of child. Naked, Faye showed round white hips and thighs, though she was lean and bony above the waist, with a face her features seemed to be struggling to escape. She was experienced, sexually, more than he, but adultery had left her innocent. Sex with her was straightforward, with none of the elaborations others were to demonstrate. The grip of her vagina had something infantile about it, something heartbreaking, like a child’s shy, hopeful question. She persuaded him he had the answer. During the months of the affair his lovemaking with Phyllis became more confident and insistent. He spoke more loudly and warmly to his children, when they materialized to him through his mists of being mentally elsewhere. Photographs from that time show him as mussed and manicky-looking. He felt fonder of the world at large—the old mill town with its services and cheerfully laborious local characters and the winter weather with its scrape of plowing and their cozy circle of friends. He felt especially fond of Jock; he wanted to hug the man, red-faced Jock with his baked-on