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

alcoholic grin, for feeding and sheltering such a marvel of beauty and concupiscence. He could hardly contain the wonder of it—this well-cared-for woman, in such expensive and amusing clothes, taking such risks to perform for him acts that Phyllis performed reluctantly, ironically, looking to one side, in her own safe home, with all society’s sanctions backing his thrusts.

Why Faye would behave in such a reckless and adorable way—why any woman would—was still not clear to Owen. He assumed that she had wanted something in return, him as husband, and that he had failed to give it to her; the heat of his failure annealed her image to him. He would show loyalty where he could, in his inner theatre. He would always remember how she looked at certain moments, wistful moments, her generic female beauty married to something specific and complicated happening in her face, an awareness of cross-currents and half-lies and underlying sadness. “Well, I’m glad it was you,” she said at the end, trying to make a life-stage of it, a lesson learned.

Toward the end, they were getting careless. Once, trying to find privacy down a dirt road, they got her heavy Mercedes stuck in the March mud and had to phone for a tow truck from the home of the owner of the property they were trespassing upon. Tired of sleazy motels and furtive excursions, they would sneak him into her house, with Jock off and the children at school and no plumber or cleaning woman scheduled to show up. To bring them, after a while, something to eat or drink, she would wander naked through the winter-bright rooms, like a deer at home in the camouflaging forest. Returning to him where he lay languid in the wrecked guestroom bed, she would laugh at something, something utterly marvelling and grateful, she saw in his face. She would laugh, and her mouth would stay open a second longer as the girlish high sound died away. Even now, an elderly resident of Haskells Crossing, looking both ways before judiciously forcing his creaky body to cross the street, he feels his heart skip when he sees a young woman of a certain taut, bony-faced type emerge from the 7-Eleven or wait in front of the new Starbucks, giving someone she suddenly spots on the street a big grin, exposing her gums as well as her teeth, as Faye used to greet him at one of her and Jock’s parties. She has come back to him.

ix. Convalescence

It was Faye who ended it, by telling her husband. She let Owen know over the phone. When he, knocked nearly breathless by the betrayal, asked her why, she was vague. “Oh—my shrink thought I was getting confused. It was too much, Owen. I didn’t know what you wanted, and it was killing me, frankly. I’m sorry. If I hadn’t loved you so much, I could have handled it better.”

“But you never told me any of this. You were always so gay, so—so giving and cheerful. Like this was all you wanted. Even that time we got stuck, the cool way you offered to pay the man for repairing the ruts, after using his phone. You were wonderful, Faye.” Meaning wonderful in everything, and said very softly. Owen was at his desk, with Ed in the next cubicle and their employees passing by with coffee and folders. He murmured into the receiver with his back turned and his chair, an ergonomic swivel on a five-roller chrome pedestal, facing the wire-webbed window. If he stood up he could have seen the Chunkaunkabaug, most of its rocks concealed beneath the fast-running meltwater, heading for the falls.

“I was terrified that man would tell Jock,” Faye was explaining, a tiny voice caught in the receiver, like an insect under a water tumbler. “Or that somebody would see us in a car together. It could have happened at any time, and then Jock would have had me over a barrel—he can be very tricky, about money. This way at least he found out from me: the errant wife confesses. Owen, I can’t talk forever about it; we were awake all night, except for a couple of hours, and he just went out of the house to go buy cigarettes and the Wall Street Journal. Watch out for him downtown.”

Owen was not sorry to think that the conversation would be short. The workaday world around him had become realer, for the first time in seven months, than that illicit annex into which he was pouring his voice, through this little electronic hole at his lips. “Still,” he said, seeking for leverage in the sudden shift, “you should have discussed this with me.”

“You would have argued and got me more confused.” Faye laughed—a disagreeable yelp, a high-pitched sound a child would make when pinched. She said, as if reading the words from a card, “Men don’t think beyond their next piece of ass.”

Was she deliberately trying to offend him, to soften this blow? He said, angry anyway, “Is that what Jock tells you?”

“It’s what I tell him. You’ll get over it, Owen. We all will. People do.”

Those showy clothes of hers, that babylike happy nudity, those wide-open hazel eyes, that voice with its stagy range from high to low, all slipping from him, into the abyss of forever. “Thanks a lot for those comforting words,” he said, so sarcastically that she hung up.

Ed, visiting Owen’s cubicle in the next hour, took a look at him and said, “You want to go home early? You look like you’ve been socked in the belly. You look like shit.”

“I think I’ve caught a spring cold. I never know how to dress this time of year.” But he did leave the factory early; he couldn’t get home fast enough. To their surprise, he dragged Gregory and Iris out into the threadbare, muddy yard to play a little softball. Their puzzled efforts to please him, to find the ball with their wild swings,