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

tugging down the miniskirt to ease out the wrinkles, rocking back and forth for balance on her long brown feet and staring angrily around at her own room, as if the walls had been witnesses to her rejection. Her mouth had shocked him with its warmth; now he felt a chill.

“Listen,” he began, “that was terrific but—”

“Owen, you are one hundred percent right, I don’t know what I was thinking of.”

“You were feeling sorry for me,” he reminded her.

“Or something like that. But, honey, you shouldn’t tease a girl. We are going to be friends. And whenever I get a tingling in my pussy I am going to tell it, You shut your big mouth.”

He laughed, working his disheartened penis back into his resistant pants, and zipped. “You’re sounding more and more Texan,” he told her.

“I try to keep it down, it embarrasses Ed. He’s very insecure.”

“I never noticed that about Ed.”

“Oh yes. He doesn’t like being fat but, I tell him, it won’t go away by itself.”

“Feed him salads,” Owen suggested. The half of his head that was not icy and lucid was being squeezed to one side, above his right ear. “And lots of loving.” Or did he just think that last phrase? Stacey registered no reaction, moving about the living room clearing glasses and ashtrays. Was he really such a homosexual, Owen asked himself, that he was trying to provide for Ed’s sex life? When Stacey came off her high she would see she’d been spurned, and be pissed off. Already she was moving in and out of the room, back and forth into the kitchen, with an excessive, closing-up-shop energy. He could not stop thinking about her loose warm mouth, with regret and a sour sense of righteousness. She was Ed’s, Phyllis was his; did things have to be that simple?

Stacey’s housekeeping would have soon come down to how to get him out of here, but the other couple pushed at the front door and were back. “What happened?” Owen asked them, looking down to make sure his fly was zipped.

Phyllis followed the direction of his glance but was in her stately mood, above it all. “Ed drove me toward home but then, just being out, with the car windows down, I felt better and thought we should come back. Didn’t you two miss us?”

“We did,” Owen told her. “We felt abandoned. We had run out of conversation.”

“Then let’s go home, dear. Are you too stoned to drive? I still feel too detached.”

Ed and Stacey were murmuring together, so that Owen felt cruelly excluded from the couple. He rose, hunching a bit in case anything still showed. He had uxoriously extricated himself from his partner’s wife’s mouth, but her aggression had reopened him to possibilities. Polymorphous life beckoned. The dark gods were in fashion. Everyone was sinning, including the government. He resolved in his heart to become a seducer. He would never treat his poor prick that cruel way again.

It was 1967. Walt Rostow averred, “Victory is just around the corner.” Robert McNamara, not sure this was so, resigned the office of Secretary of Defense to become head of the World Bank. H. Rap Brown claimed of the black riots in Newark and Detroit that they were a dress rehearsal for revolution. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West. Lunar Orbiter V was launched, to obtain a complete mapping of the moon’s surface, including the dark side. Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali announced, “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” In San Francisco, an estimated hundred thousand hippies claimed “Haight Is Love,” and Golden Gate Park played host to a giant “Be-In.”

x. Village Sex—V

In his dream, Owen is back in Middle Falls, moving between his house on Partridgeberry Road and his central desk at E-O Data and the little retreat room, with a DEC PDP-8 and a CRT and a desk and telephone and an imitation-leather sofa, that he rigged at one end of the old arms factory on the Chunkaunkabaug. Between these stations of his life lay a network of village streets and vendors—the three restaurants, the two banks, the Woolworth’s, the dry cleaner’s, the shoe-repair shop, which was beginning to do a nice business in hippie-style leather sandals and clogs. The town, pre-CVS, had multiple drugstores, the oldest of them, Amory’s Pharmacy, on the hill, still holding some back shelves of patent medicines with faded Victorian labels and displaying in its window the two traditional oversize vials of emblematic liquid, iodine-red and litmus-blue, that since medieval times have advertised pharmacological healing. On another, more personalized level of the net were the family dentist; the doctor, taciturn and unsympathetic with any but the most dramatic complaint; the pediatrician, for the children’s many minor ills; the eye doctor, a tall bald Jew who winced with back pain when he leaned over to administer his pupil-dilating drops twice-yearly; and, at an annual appointment, the tax accountant, a pointy-nosed mole of a man who waved his hands in agitation when Owen threatened to confide information he didn’t want to hear. There were the schools—the public schools until Gregory turned thirteen—which involved periodic teacher conferences and recitals, playlets, choral performances, and team-sport events, usually in the rain. And there were committee meetings—the Chamber of Commerce and the School Building Needs Committee for Owen, the Garden Club and the Downtown Betterment Society for Phyllis, along with her madrigal group and yoga classes.

Somewhere in this thick net, he dreams, there is his rapidly burgeoning relationship with Julia, compact, firm, decisive, surprisingly sexy Julia, but he keeps losing her, it is just too hard to keep up the precarious secret connection—the hurried, hard-breathing phone calls, the panicky trysts where the edges of this town merge with the edges of another—and weeks go by, in his dream, without any connection being made, and his love object sinks deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the everyday, the respectable thick weave of citizenship and work and parenthood,