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

hardly believing their good fortune. Ian and Phyllis didn’t appear to know, and although the village knew—not just their set of friends but pedestrians who saw her smiling on River Street and the lady at the desk at the motel on the highway toward Willimantic—it isn’t a village’s way to tell. A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall. She and Owen might have gone on longer, meeting never more than once a week and in summers less than that, until the pressure of deceit deformed one of them beyond what the other could love; but Alissa became pregnant. Her wistful talk of naïvely expecting her menstrual flow to be admired had actualized into a panicky wait for the flow to recommence. Many hurried phone calls confirmed that it had not.

“But whose is it?” That was the question, once her period was three weeks late and she was waking up nauseated. “Who did you make love to at the right time?” He was shouting over the pay phone beside a highway, straining to hear, his finger poked into one ear and clouds of last winter’s salt and sand, pulverized by rushing tires to a fine dust, billowing into his face. He said “make love” instead of their usual frank verb as if a telephone operator, that obsolete eavesdropper on village life, were listening.

“Neither of you,” came the faint answer.

“Oh my God. You’ve been seeing somebody else?”

“No, no, you silly. I mean it could be either of you, but I don’t see how. The Pill was making me feel bloated, so I went back to the rhythm method, but Ian and I used it successfully for years before he let me have Norman. He said he was an artist and children were hostages to fortune.”

“It must be me,” Owen said gamely, “the great way we fucked.”

“Darling, it doesn’t take great to make a baby. If it did the population crisis would be no problem.”

“I’d rather believe, of course, it was Ian. I thought you said he was impotent.” This was a slip: he remembered that it was Phyllis who had said it.

“Did I say that? I may have said he was discouraged. But he’s only forty-three, he’s not ancient.”

“Don’t tell me about it,” Owen begged. It was repulsive. Her blood, Ian’s semen, his own. His insides were feeling watery; he was on the edge of the doom that waits, bottomless, where the skin of the humdrum tears. “What are you going to do about it?”

“What do you want me to do?” He had to repeat the question; an eighteen-wheeler had been roaring past.

“Can you get an abortion?” he shouted, there by the dirty highway.

“I don’t see how,” came the faint answer. “How would I explain it to Ian? He knows about my period already. Where would I go without telling him?” Her faintness was increasing; she was getting smaller, sinking down into the transparent depths, away from him, forever away. “Owen, I’m going to have the baby,” she called. “We must never see each other again.”

Perhaps these revelations and determinations did not come all at once, in one noisy, dusty conversation over a roadside pay phone, but in repetitious, relentless snippets; her abrupt withdrawal from his life did him so little credit that he repressed the details. By late summer Alissa was visibly pregnant. Why hide it?—that was clothing designers’ new thought on this perennial fashion issue. Her snug and unconcealing jerseys and loose-waisted miniskirts and even, at Heron Pond, adjustable bikini curved around a new center. Her plumpness was freshened. With dimpled smiles she received the pleased notice of their friends. Pregnancies among them were thinning out. Owen was horrified by the paternal ambiguity of this growing fetus, yet the tiny complicating creature, whom he would have gladly killed if he could, was ever more securely wrapped in Alissa’s body, and in social acknowledgment of its being. A village is a hatchery, cherishing its smallest members. A fresh birth votes for the status quo, validating the present and assuring the future.

The last summer of the ’sixties brought more news than comfort: Nixon and Kissinger trying to bomb their way to an acceptable surrender in Vietnam, Ted Kennedy drowning a starry-eyed young campaign worker at Chappaquiddick, the first man on the moon looking like a Puppetoon. Judy Garland dead, Bishop Pike gone missing, a pregnant Sharon Tate stabbed to death in Los Angeles, everywhere in the United States defiance and hatred of the government. But in Owen’s vicinity the news was Alissa Morrissey’s pregnancy, and his hidden tie to the event tugged him close to the dreadful, ruinous realm behind the headlines, where people made their bets and met the consequences. It affronted his innermost innocence that his body in experimenting with freedom could have thrown off, once again, a consequence as irrevocable as this, this living being whose cells daily multiplied along the majestic, ramifying routes laid down by DNA. Poor Ian preened, his pompous little goatee waggling as he parried the party jests, for though not ancient he was older than the others, and Alissa’s pregnancy, like the Biblical Sarah’s, had not been looked for. Owen felt a searing guilt toward Ian, whom he had never liked but who seemed in this biological event totally a victim, blindsided, smugly oblivious. Why so much tender remorse toward Ian, and so little toward the child that he feared to be his own, and even less toward Alissa? Swiftly she had sized up the situation and decided to jettison her lover to keep her baby safe. He thought back to his first triangle, his father and mother and himself. His mother had given him love and guidance and a sense of his life’s being a charmed one, but when his parents quarrelled his sympathy went always to his father, his wan, worried, literal-minded, beaten-down father. Men understand men, mechanisms with very few levers—a few earthy appetites, an atavistic warrior pride and