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

“Nobody, sweetie—it just happens. Used to happen. Are you going to pass that joint or just hang on to it in that foolish way?”

“Do you really think Owie is foolish?” Stacey asked in her slowed, sweet Texas voice. “I don’t think he’s foolish, he’s just stunned.” The last word elongated in Owen’s mind like a lasso. When had women started to talk about him as if he were absent? Nearly being sued for alienation of affections had given him a sort of Exhibit A status.

“You mean …” Phyllis began, and let the thought trail as she relinquished the joint and passed it to Ed, who held the smoking thing up before his nearsighted eyes and studied it as if it were a distasteful puzzle.

“Drugs,” he announced, “eat up your brain cells.”

“Yeah,” Owen agreed, anxious as always to preserve male solidarity, “but so does aging. Brain cells die all the time, and still the brain has more than it needs, for most purposes.” Completing so extended a thought seemed a miracle, like a strand of DNA.

“Listen to them,” Stacey said to Phyllis, “worrying about the size of their brains. Isn’t that macho?”

“Men,” Phyllis offered, “are into quantification. Did you mean,” she went on, in her lovely light laid-back style—he had always been drawn by her diffident voice, from the days at MIT, when he had to strain to overhear it—“that Owie, as you call him, is still stunned because of that affair he had ages ago with that ridiculous woman? I forget her name.”

“Faye Dunham,” Ed supplied, taking a very gingerly hit from the joint, which was becoming a roach. In these Sunday nights all the Middle Falls gossip came out, bringing Stacey up-to-date, including Owen’s affair, mostly as presented by Phyllis, as a pathetic breach not only of marital vows but of self-respect and enlightened self-interest. Stacey seemed interested, to Ed’s discomfort, which he expressed by withdrawal into silence or laconic pronouncements. “Faye was O.K.,” he said. “Just easily bored. She was at a restless time of life, married to a lush like that.”

Stacey crooned to him, “Don’t you ever get to that time of life, honey.”

“How could I?” he asked.

Nobody knew the answer. Did he mean he was too fat? Or Stacey was too perfect a wife? The women were in clothes now. Stacey sat on the floor, on a large Navajo rug she had brought as part of her dowry. Its stripes, black, red, green, and clay-color, vibrated around her. She sat in the yoga position, her miniskirt hitched up her thighs and barely hiding the crotch of her underpants. Phyllis was erect on the pale sofa beside a slouching Ed; her long neck stretched as she sucked down the smoke on a deep inhale. Owen sat in the ample, cunningly made Danish teak armchair that was probably Ed’s when there was no company. They were drinking watery bourbon-and-sodas, with a beer for Ed. Phyllis passed Stacey what was left of the joint. From the floor Stacey cried, “How’d this poor little thang git so wet? Who’s been slobbering, honey?”

“Not me,” Ed said. “I passed.”

“Now I’ll need to make another,” his wife complained.

“Not for me,” Phyllis said. “I feel funny.”

After what seemed quite an interval, Ed said, “You need air. Let’s go walk around.”

“How funny?” Owen asked.

There seemed to Owen to be a curious double quality to time in the room: very slow when people spoke, yet speeded up in the silences, with many hurried pulse beats crowded into seconds.

Phyllis refined her statement: “I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, and asked the air, “Who would have thought this country would wind up dropping napalm on a lot of Indochinese peasants and children?”

“That’s no worse than what we did to the Indians,” Stacey said.

“Is that all they are?” Owen asked Phyllis, as if at home they didn’t have time to exchange views, which in a way was true. “Or are they also Viet Cong, who are burying village chiefs, head-down, and trying to force a grotesque style of misgovernment on the South Vietnamese?” “Good question,” Ed admitted.

“Poor Owen,” said Stacey; her face seemed to swim in her hair as she sat on the floor at Owen’s feet, beside the glass coffee table, through which he could see one of her deeply tanned knees. “He’s such a patriot. He reminds me of the true-blue men in Texas.”

Phyllis stood, with a tumult of cloth and audible breath that brought back to Owen how sizable she was, what a catch she had been. “I need air, I guess,” she said, “and, Owen, we both need to go home and rescue the babysitter.”

“Right,” he agreed, but with no intention of moving. Life was too good here, with this hopeful new couple, in high bourgeois comfort. He wondered where the joint had gone and hoped it wasn’t burning a hole anywhere. He put the glass of weak whiskey to his lips and sucked, the glass’s rim making a cool brittle arc in his mind.

Ed had stood, laboriously, in delayed synchrony with Phyllis. There was a discussion among them as opaque and irrelevant to Owen as consultations among his parents overheard when he was three or four. He could have listened and understood, with the half of his mind that was clear and cold, but his attention was turned to the other half, which was experiencing an extraordinary happiness befalling him, permeating him like the fog of neutrinos that pour by the trillions out of the sun, even during, as now, nighttime. This was bliss: the slick texture of teak under his fingertips; the black and red and clay and cactus-green Navajo zigzags of thick wool under his eyes; the very grain of wood in the broad bleached floorboards, testifying to cycles of growth within a distant spruce forest; the clean white plane of the ceiling meeting the white-painted bricks of the Mervines’ exposed chimney; the horsey scent of Stacey’s damp hair, not far from where he was sitting;