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

the soft, pecking sounds of adult conversation; the very feel of his awareness along the length of his body, as if consciousness were a silken robe tapping his skin wherever he chose to direct his attention; the enclosed air of this room, this parallelepiped clipped from the trillions of cubic feet of domestic space in America, snugly but freely full of human love, his for his wife and for his partner and now his partner’s partner, whose deeply tanned knee no longer showed beneath the glass coffee table because she had moved closer to his Danish armchair. These details, animate and inanimate, arrived on his neuronal structure with that lost purity, that flat enumerative wonder, of childhood illness, when one is confined to bed and relieved of every duty but the one to exist, to survive, to continue to be. How could he have so long mislaid so basic a treasure, this dimension of bliss in things?

Parental voices mixed in the hall; the sounds of a door opening and closing were followed by those of a car starting and receding. “What’s happening?” he asked Stacey, whose face had come closer to his own knees.

“Phyllis asked Ed to take her home. She felt like she might be sick.”

“Couldn’t she be sick here?”

Stacey’s face looked broader than he had ever noticed, and more intelligent, with kindness molding every molecule of the curving, insouciant lips. They had known each other for going on two years and he had never noticed this encompassing, angelic quality of hers before. She said, “And she’s worried about the babysitter.”

“Who’ll drive the babysitter home if Phyllis is so sick?”

“Ed will.”

“What about me?” Owen asked. “Why am I left out of all this?”

“You weren’t, you dear baby. She asked you to come home with her and you refused.”

“Refused?”

“Well, you didn’t say anything. You just sat there stoned, and I guess she felt too funny to stay and argue.”

“I was thinking about how lovely everything is, here among the four of us. She has a negative side, Phyllis.”

“I know she does, darling Owen. I know she does. I know all about you both. Ed talks about the two of you all the time. Phyllis wouldn’t let you have Faye and you’ve given up inside. May I be frank?”

“You may be frank.”

“It makes me sad”—“sayud”—“to see the way you’ve given up. Owen, you’re jes’ gone through the motions.”

“Am I truly? How do I know? I mean, I don’t feel I’m just going through the motions. It’s like everybody asking if computers think. Well, do people? All you can say about people is that they think they think.” He was fending; her assertions about him seemed self-serving, his cold half-brain saw, but overall there might be something in them.

“Oh yeass,” Stacey said. “You pore, pore beautiful prisoner.”

Her warm wide face had moved even closer, to between his thighs as he slouched dreamily in Ed’s teak armchair. She leaned her face against the inside of his thigh so that when she smiled he felt the bulge of her cheek press lightly through the khaki cloth. “Prisoner?” he asked, trying to coördinate the word with these surfaces, the walls and furniture that he had felt to be such repositories of bliss not many seconds ago. The clear half of his brain felt like a splinter in the flesh of this bygone revelation. “When is Ed coming back?” he asked. People were in the wrong places and he had to straighten it out.

“Not quite yet, you sweet thang,” Stacey said, still smiling, her perfect white California-Texas teeth biting down on the lower lip as if to taste her own smile. “I want to do something, Owen. Now, you’ll just have to bear with me.” With her middle finger and thumb pinched as if to untie a bow, she pulled the tab of his fly zipper down. “Don’t you get nervous, I just want to see him, all by myself,” she explained soothingly, with a touch of petulance.

The windows were black, Wilson Drive outside was clean of traffic, it was late on Sunday night. They were, in a sense, alone, but, then, Owen half-saw, the world, all those atoms and neutrinos and electrons, is always with us. Her clever hand had found the fly of his boxer shorts and the little limp sleeping thing was in the open and then in her warm soft mouth. He felt himself begin to harden, and said, “No.”

“No?” she repeated in puzzlement; her mouth, backed up an inch or two, was still shaped, it seemed, by what had been in it, being wetly warmed. She was a different generation, Owen thought from a distance, and this was less of a deal for her. Cocksucking was just friendly. The smell of her damp horsey hair swelled in his nostrils. “Because of old Phyllis?” she asked.

“And Ed,” he pleaded. “Think of Ed, we can’t do this to him. To Phyllis either. She needs your friendship, Stacey; she really can’t talk to these other women around here. The only time I see her relax is when she’s over here with the three of us. She likes you a lot.”

“Really?” His prick, not listening to him, had woken up and was getting harder. Stacey saw this and said, “Look at that dear friendly jimmy. Faye used to sing his praises to her girlfriends, they do tell me.”

He found this hard to picture and stopped trying. “We don’t want to make a mess of things,” he insisted. “E-O Data and all that.”

Rebuffed, sitting back on her bare heels, Stacey began to explain herself: “Owen, I just felt so fond of you, like you were going to waste—it must have been the pot.”

He had talked himself out of a pretty good deal, he saw, sickeningly. He was wilting, listing to one side. “You could do a little more if you wanted,” he suggested, “it’s just that in the long run—”

“Oh, no, darling. You put him right back,” she said, and floppily pushed herself to her feet,