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

thrilled him to have her mention such things as potency and disaffection, coarse matters she usually disdained to touch.

“Well, figuratively, for sure. He’s beating a dead horse and knows it. Nothing is the same, suddenly. The middle-class magazines he fed off of are gone or dying. People watch television, and if they read it’s the tabloid at the supermarket checkout. Even The New Yorker has changed. It’s become strident, about Vietnam.”

“Everybody’s becoming strident,” he said, adding, in his sudden fitful fondness, “except you.”

“I’m strident inside,” Phyllis said, in a level, resigned tone, as their house, behind its semi-concealing curved driveway off Partridgeberry Road, took their headlights full on its white clapboards, behind which their four children slept.

Alissa, too, was a frustrated artist—at least, she made love to Owen as if each time had to be a masterpiece. In his little locked room at the factory, or the motel or hotel room they once in a while managed to find the time for, or her own bedroom with its sagging low pre-1750 ceiling on the few occasions when Ian was safely away in the city peddling his wares and the children were safely in school, she gave herself to fucking as if to save her soul. And sucking—his prick in her mouth, she would go into a trance, repetitively nodding like one of those drinking birds you fitted to the edge of a water glass. She was oral: sitting impaled on his lap while his tongue played with her nipples, she would put two fingers into her mouth and, eyes shut, begin an inner ascent. Coming was not easy for Alissa; she was an artist in that conditions had to be just right and her concentration undiluted, his parts—tongue, prick, fingers—distributed just as she wanted them. Owen felt like a translator who had to be present so that Alissa could communicate with herself. But, unlike smiling, light-loined Faye, she came unambiguously, with an increasingly rapid succession of high-pitched gasps capped, at a summit both lovers had almost despaired of reaching, by a sharply lower-pitched whimper, as if she had been struck, while the hand of hers not half in her mouth beat on Owen’s back like a panicked wing. He was proud that, after a few early misfires bred of guilt and fear, he could go the route with her, holding up his side of it. Her body as he grew to know it had a curious way of emanating heat where she wanted to be touched, so that his hands and mouth went there of their own. He had slowly, timidly realized that, while sitting on his prick having her nipples teased, she wanted his finger in her anus, deep in it at her climax. He became an enabler, an abettor, joined with Alissa in sweet trespasses, crossing a line drawn by their Protestant ancestors, who never wholly shed their Bible-black clothes and made their love in lightless log cabins.

He discovered in himself the capacity to be cool in sex, cold even, watching their sweating bodies from a distance, freezing his own orgasmic curve with deliberately unsexual pictures—a calm Caribbean harbor at sunset, or a smartly executed double play. When Alissa reached her inner divide, and the summit within her was irreversibly attained, he could give her what he had been effortfully holding back; he could steady her ass with two hands and sock it to her upwards without thought of delicacy or mercy. Her whimper, coming from the territory beyond her own climax, renewed itself in the higher register; he wondered, amid his own sullen blood-thump of release, if she might faint. Then her hand on his shoulder blade slowly ceased fluttering and she covered his face with weak kisses.

Her gratitude for his learning to make love to her, in the deep but narrow furrow of stimuli that her nerves accepted, included a license for him to ask of her what he would—but, again, within limits. Rapt fellatrice though she was, Alissa did not want him to come in her mouth, “like men do with prostitutes,” and if an impulsive flutter of her tongue brought him too far she took his ejaculation on her chin or chest, where his gob gleamed embarrassingly. But fucking her a second time on days with a few extra minutes to the tryst, as she knelt on the bed or floor, was allowed: an image that lingered long after she was no longer available to him was the gleam of her coccyx, a bit of hard tailbone catching the light just above the creamy spread of her buttocks. From his vantage, at the other end of the spine cleaving her back into two plump and golden halves, her cervical vertebrae peeped touchingly from beneath fluffy tufts of her snuff-brown hair, cut short in her style. This is the neck, Owen thought, the executioner sees. On the day of this thought the light fell from the single high factory window, sifted through grime and reinforcing wire. His cell at E-O, with its oily scent of former industry and its walled-off hum of many-bodied intellectual activity, excited them both to a breathless, whispering shamelessness, a fascination with their bodies as thorough, perhaps, as that which hospital patients receive and bestow in the days before death.

But he, too, had a squeamish side, a limit. He couldn’t suppress his surprise and disgust when, in a stolen half-hour in a parked car, his exploring finger came out from under her skirt bloody, the thin redness of such blood like a medicinal coating and abhorrent to him. He resented her failing to warn him that she was having her period—it seemed a betrayal of decorum even worse than his semen puddled above her breast like an explosion of snot.

He failed, Owen saw in retrospect, to use her compliance, her spells of tranced utter slavery, to the hilt. Though both confessed to being nervous, needy masturbators, they never masturbated for each other, though it would have been easy, it seemed to