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

him in the darkness behind his eyelids, as he lay beside Phyllis missing Alissa. But in actuality their genitals, when the opportunity was there and the love-flush was hot upon their skins, seemed made to be hidden, as it were, one by the other, their warmth and wetness merged.

Though innocent herself, a few years over thirty and never having cuckolded Ian before, Alissa tried to ease Owen away from the certain strangeness he felt in inhabiting a body at all. Once, in a flash of shyness soon after becoming her lover, kneeling between her spread legs, he put his hands over his flaming erection, and she said, slightly offended and gently directive, “Don’t hide yourself, Owen.” “Yourself”—this sore-looking blue-veined thing was himself. These hair-adorned nether parts, closely fitted into the sites of urination and defecation, were seats of being, ugly and odorous in external contemplation but in sensation exquisite. This high value was altogether inward and had to be taken by others on faith. The daze of sexual excitement bestowed this faith but then left Owen uncertain as to why—the question he had asked himself behind the playground shed—women put up with it. So much risk, so much potential for disgrace and abasement. Abasement was part of the bliss, perhaps: being lowered like a bucket into the black well of biology while knowing that the rope was still attached, the daylight of society waiting above.

He could have talked her, he imagined when it was too late, into swallowing his semen. He could have coaxed her, too, into letting him kiss her between the legs until she came. Elsie had allowed this, that last summer, when both were angry because their love was coming to nothing. So he gave her a treat for a virgin. Hitched forward on the car seat with her skirt around her waist, she came with a snap, an unmistakable inner percussion. His back and shoulders ached from bowing his face into her lap, there on the bench seat of her father’s Chrysler. He liked it, being in touch with her another way from watching her face and hearing her voice. Alissa said she had never come that way and never would. He should have insisted. She would have remembered him for it. But sexual events easy to stage in the privacy of his skull encountered obstacles in reality, limits in the psychology of the other.

A sexual transaction was a psychological transaction—one must feel the other, however ideally submissive, has a psychology, a mind registering events somewhat in parallel. Otherwise we are stuck with the sordid pathos of the inflatable female bodies, with usable mouths and vaginas, advertised in the back pages of Hustler. There must be a who, not a thing—another consciousness. With otherness a political dimension enters the psychological. He could relax into Alissa’s blowing him because she had breasts; his joy in a sensation another male could equally well have administered was sanctioned by her vagina, that rosy badge of her authority to service the male. And she, she needed to arrange him strictly, tongue and prick and hands, like a child arranging pillows and stuffed animals around her before she could go to sleep. Her dull blue eyes when she was making love, and a minute after, became as bright and dark as wet ink. Then they faded back, as she allowed him to untangle their arrangement so he perched by her knees and she reposed, like Manet’s Olympia, semi-reclined the length of the three cushions of his Naugahyde sofa in his E-O aerie. Her breasts, minutes ago tipped with erectile sensitivity, sank against her chest. He lit a cigarette, a Parliament, for her, and they searched their heads for things to talk about.

That was the problem: what do you do with the bodies afterwards? A man and a woman like-minded enough, with physiologies and sexual educations roughly matched, agree to meet and use each other for an hour; then what? After the melodramatic disaster of his breakup with Faye, Owen was determined not to fall in love next time, for everybody’s sake. Alissa seemed to accept this emotional prophylaxis, as fitting her own situation. She was loyal to Ian if not faithful, and he to Phyllis. Yet it was a strain; Alissa was so lovable, so much wantonly his in their cozy crimes, his body cried out to possess her forever.

He even felt cozy enough to ask her his question: “Why do women fuck?”

She laughed, her cigarette smoke coughed away before the inhale. “Why do men?”

“It’s obvious. Women are so beautiful.”

“And not men?”

“Not. As far as I can see.”

“How unflattering to me, Owen. I thought I had loved that idea out of you. You’re gorgeous.”

“Oh, you, sure; you make me feel good about myself. But you could do that by flirting at a cocktail party.”

“Well,” she said, “screw you.”

“You know what I mean,” he insisted. “You get this thing poked into you and have the risk of making a baby or if you’re a hooker or the girlfriend of somebody primitive of getting killed. Every day in the paper you read about some poor girl killed because she fucked some simple-minded guy who couldn’t let go.”

The word “fuck” and its cousins bore in this era a pleasurable charge of decided intimacy. Also in this era, incredibly, sex was thought of as safe. At worst its consequences were easily reversed, by a shot of antibiotics or a trip to some more enlightened land where abortion was legal. Women were on the Pill or contained an IUD; crabs were something that happened to hippies, as part of their good-humored, anti-bourgeois life-style, and herpes was not yet a proclaimed problem. Itches were passed from vagina to penis to vagina and nobody in polite society mentioned it except to the doctor, who provided an ineffective salve. Sex was then thought to be innocent even if its practitioners weren’t. Owen and Alissa were explorers in a terrain, adultery, not totally strange but far from deeply familiar to