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

them. They had been driven into this wilderness by annoying or neglectful traits of their spouses, and the film of guilt that attached to them was, like the secretions of lovemaking, something to be wiped off before they went back out into the street. Like those secretions, it was part of it, part of its defiant health.

“Making a baby mightn’t be so bad. But don’t kill me, Owen.”

“I know how it happens. I get crazy with jealousy sometimes, lying in bed at night picturing you and Ian in bed together probably screwing.”

“Do you and Phyllis always not?”

“Not quite always, no.”

“Well, then. We’re married and this is extra and let’s not think too closely about it. You ask why do people do the things they do. People don’t know, it’s deeper than the brain. It’s pheromones and all sorts of programmed behavior, like the nest-building instinct. Haven’t you ever watched birds building a nest and wondered how they do it, just the right twigs and so on? They don’t know either.”

“Welcome to my nest,” he said, of the bleak tall brick room around them, feeling uneasy. Ed might be needing him—some little crisis or other, some scramble nobody else could sort out.

“Women need attention,” she explained. “They don’t have a lot of a man’s ways of getting it. So they do what they can, with what they’ve got.”

“You fuck just to get attention?”

“When you put it like that it sounds silly, but, yes, sort of. For this time with me you are paying attention, though I can feel you beginning to wonder how you’re going to ease me out of here and get back to work.”

“Not at all. I’m crazy about you.” A substitute for that poisoned chalice of a phrase I love you. He didn’t say it to Elsie and now not to Alissa. Faye had believed it and so had he and they had done damage. “Give me twenty minutes and you’ll see how much.” He pictured her on her knees on the hard floor, or back on the sofa: the curly downy bits at the nape of her neck, the glossy knobs of her spine.

“I appreciate the thought, kind sir,” she said, and jackknifed her flashing legs together around him, so she sat up and her bare feet rested on the floor. “But I must go shopping for Ian’s dinner and pick up the cleaning before school gets out.” Alissa and Ian had two children—Norman, who was ten, and Neysa, whose entry into the first grade had freed her up yet left her, she had told Owen, at enough loose ends to begin her affair with him. Her lips had trembled, after laughing at this comic connection. Though this was November her body still bore the gold-and-silver disparities of her summer tan. Having made the effort to rise, she slumped back on the squeaky imitation-leather cushion. “I don’t think it’s good, by the way,” she volunteered, “for a woman’s health, to screw like mad and then jump up and do errands. We’re supposed to harbor the seed, or something.”

He would treasure such casual glimpses into what it was like to be a woman, which Phyllis rarely afforded him; she knew she was female but didn’t deign to dwell on it, whereas Alissa was something of a village philosopher on the subject. “A woman would rather be hit on the head than ignored,” she once told him. He couldn’t imagine ever hitting her on the head, but the idea of it fed the brutish tenderness with which he contemplated her back as he pumped away at her on his smarting knees. After their little contretemps with her menstrual blood, she confessed, “When I was just, you know, coming into womanhood as a teen-ager I imagined that would be the time when I would be most attractive to men, when there was the blood.”

It was such an intimate illusion for her that she trailed away shyly, and he hardly dared pursue the subject. “What did you think,” he asked, “men would do with it?”

His mistress blushed. “Oh, I don’t know, Owen, don’t keep after me; it was just a feeling. It’s like giving milk, it feels very feminine. It’s exciting.”

“Even with the cramps?”

“The cramps aren’t so great,” Alissa admitted, “but they establish a woman’s relation with pain. You have it, and you hide it. Everything, come to think of it, that makes you you is hidden. Including,” she went on, melancholy overtaking her nudity and with it a need to lighten the mood, “your savage lover,” and jabbed him, not just in play but with enough animus to shorten his breath and give him pain, there in that defenseless pocket just under the sternum. Seeing the shock on his face, she looked away and sighed. “There are so many claims on me, or on any woman, Owen, that it’s a relief to know that when I’m coming to you it’s for one purpose. There’s not that awful vagueness there is in marriage—will we or won’t we, and if so shouldn’t we be getting to bed before we get any sleepier? At least with you I know we will, you’ve been counting on it, dreaming about it; I feel focused. Sometimes down on River Street, before or after seeing you here, I can’t get the smile off my face, and it frightens me that everybody out there in the sunshine will guess, that I’ve been fucked or soon will be.”

“Do you feel that way after Ian?”

“Don’t fish for compliments, darling. It’s unbecoming. I’ve already told you, we’re sleepy. Sometimes one of us falls asleep before we finish, we’re so bored.”

“Ian can be boring, lately,” Owen pointed out, with tentative cruelty.

“He’s boring,” his wife explained, “because he’s trying to explain away in general terms what he really feels is a personal failure, a loss of creativity.”

“I know the feeling,” Owen said, in a tone that said they were done for the day.

For a year and a half more they carried on furtively,