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

to know about life. “Not so’s you’d notice,” Ed answered. “Her folks are really from the West Coast; her dad worked for Grumman. She says ‘my daddy.’ They moved to Dallas when Stacey was nine. She picked up the accent, but, more important, the attitude.”

“The Texas attitude.”

“Yeah—it’s great. She thinks the American dream is still on. I get so fucking tired of wise-ass sourpuss Easterners, who think everything worth doing was done before 1750, always taking cheap shots at America and LBJ.”

“Another Texan.”

“Damn right. Johnson’s done more for blacks in two years than Saint Franklin Roosevelt did in twelve, and still all these knee-jerk liberals keep knocking him, calling him a redneck.”

It occurred to Owen that Ed considered himself a redneck, Bronx-style. A girl from Texas would see him as the suited-up electronic empire-builder he was. “When do we all meet her?” Owen asked.

“Soon, O. I’d like you to be my best man.”

Owen blushed. “With pleasure, Ed. I’m tickled pink, as they used to say.” It smelled a bit as if he was being restored to society’s good graces, after his Faye episode. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be restored. “When is the, the happy event?”

“We thought soon, May, maybe. Later than that it gets stinking hot down there. Then we come up here and have the Eastern summer before the long winter. She’s never experienced a Northern winter. The only snow she’s seen has been on mountaintops, on the San Gabriels.” Already Ed was sounding pompous, a consumer of geographies and climates.

The waitress came and offered dessert or coffee. Ed thought he’d try the prune-fig brownie, with whipped cream, and a cappuccino. Owen settled for mint tea. He asked Ed, “How did you do all this courting? I never knew about it.”

“You haven’t been paying much attention,” Ed said, for the third time jabbing in the direction of Owen’s private life. Owen was still not, the Middle Falls consensus was, “over” Faye. “I’ve been down there, she’s been up here a couple times. Phyllis has met her.”

“She has?” Mint tea, hot water barely tinted green, was put down before him; Ed’s brownie looked as heavy and rich as chocolate cake, wearing a toppling squirt of whipped cream. Saliva sprang from Owen’s inner cheeks. Was this to be the rest of his life, self-denial? He said, “She never said anything to me.”

“I asked her not to. She liked Stacey a lot,” Ed told Owen, squinting as if daring him to object.

Ed had sought Phyllis’s approval, and she had given it, all without her husband’s knowledge. We all have inner lives, Owen thought: secrets to protect. The recognition seemed to click into a segment of his own liberation.

Stacey was a charmer, it turned out. She was skinny but soft-boned, floppy even, in the way she moved and talked. She had a wide soft mouth that seemed to slow her words, like a child’s endearing impediment. She was enough younger than they to lack some of their inhibitions. She liked to swim naked in the heated pool that came with the somewhat pretentious house Ed bought for them in the new hillside development on Wilson Drive. “Woodrow, Charlie, or Don?” Owen had asked, but Ed was too besotted with the married state to hear any sarcasm. By the second summer, Owen and Ed had gotten used to her nudity and some nights Phyllis joined her in it. It was no worse, after all, than a hot tub, which is supposed to be good for you. The older woman’s figure, breasts and stomach taut now that her spell of child-bearing was forever over, had nothing to lose in the comparison with Stacey’s, which was, younger though she was, droopier. Ed and Owen kept their bathing suits on.

“Aren’t they sweetly shy,” Phyllis said to Stacey. The pool as well as being heated had underwater lights that revealed wobbly truncations of the two women’s hips and water-treading legs. Their heads looked small, with their hair licked flat against their skulls.

“Oh, aren’t men just!” Stacey said back, in her twang. “They’re afraid of having their little jimmies chopped off.”

“Or laughed at,” Phyllis suggested, to make the image less horrific.

“Pretty much the same thang,” Stacey said.

The men being teased sat in the shadows, on aluminum chairs, with cans of beer, while the mermaids wobbled in and out of the pool lights. When Stacey decided to emerge from the water, she would thrash to the ladder and stand on the pool edge and, tipping her head way over, wring out her long dark hair towel-style. If light was behind her, Owen would see her pubic triangle dripping from a point like a wet goatee between her skinny thighs. Languidly, her long feet leaving prints on the flagstones that rimmed the pool, she would seek out a beach towel to wrap herself in. With the hand not clasping the towel at her chest she would fiddle a cigarette from the pack on the little white poolside table and, her head still tilted as when she was wringing her hair, manage with wet fingers to get it lit in her mouth. It was in this pose, Owen thought, that she looked most glamorous, squinting and exhaling, and her drying hair backlit like a burning haystack. Stacey brought whiffs of the counterculture into Middle Falls. Somehow she produced pot in little cellophane envelopes, and Zigzag paper, and the four of them would partake, usually on Sunday nights, in the Mervines’ living room. Fridays and Saturdays there were dinner parties to give or go to, dances for this or that good cause, and the Mackenzies’ house was too inhibiting, with all those children upstairs listening. Ed and Stacey did not intend to have children, at least not immediately. This was somehow shocking to Owen; Phyllis offended him by seeming to agree. “I think it’s better not to hurry,” she said, making her little frosty moue of thoughtfulness. “The kids now have the right idea—have the sex but don’t get trapped.”

“Trapped?” Owen