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

“He’s not. He’s a prick, and I should have his job,” Antoinette said, as if he hadn’t been listening at all. Yet they lay there another hour, side by side, their drying sweat chilling them so they pulled up the flimsy hotel blankets, then tossed them aside for trips to the bathroom. Her hard white buttocks gleamed in the strips of shadow and light that fell through the venetian blinds, at the window overlooking the silent lit courtyard, while Owen drowsily wondered if it was true, as she said, that women are always conscious of their asses. Returning, she nudged up against him, even stroking him where he was limp and silky-soft, as if to demonstrate to herself that he was there, a not-Eric, and that none of the grievances against Eric applied. She made an effort, as the red digits on the bedside clock radio jiggled through the minutes of the wee hours, to give him his due, a man who had stuck with her through all that tipsy tirade, processing Eric’s snubs, and who had made love to her, after all, praising her body and flexibility while keeping his reservations about her clitoral management to himself. But it was too late, the Association of Electronic Industries was striking its tent tomorrow, and they would be winging their way back to lives for which this interlude was no lasting solution.

No solution, but an event nonetheless, partaking of sublimity. When they met the next day, under the high metal roof of the exhibition shed, they took a break from their duties to share coffee in Styrofoam cups, in the back room set aside for workers, for exhibition insiders, with free crullers and disgustingly hi-cal Danish. Neither had enough to say, but as they fumbled sheepishly and sleepily for words they were acknowledging that, though they would not meet again, they had made a start, a stab at significance. There was a flavor to this, a taste, amid those of coffee and sugary fried dough, of sluggish animal ease and of mutually achieved knowledge—a swallowed mournfulness which lovers with a future avoid knowing. Two kinds of women existed in the world, Owen perceived: those with whom you have slept and those, a cruelly disproportionate but reducible number, with whom you haven’t.

One-night stands had their underside of sorrow, but had he ever been more crazily happy, more triumphantly himself, than when Mirabella was blowing him while he sped at ninety miles an hour into the flat Nevada desert, straight into the rising morning sun? There was just space, in the rented tangerine Camaro, for her head to fit between the steering wheel and his sucked-in abdomen. The honeyed sensations in his prick, hard-used the night before, were mixed up with what he imagined her sensations were in that confined space, as the westward-bound cars materialized in the morning glare and flashed past at a combined speed that made the Camaro shudder and suck toward the middle of the highway. The highway was a thin ribbon beginning to show trembling puddles of mirage as the sun settled to baking the miles of lilac-gray vegetation on either side; distant cattle lowered their heads to graze. He knew a twitch of the wheel would annihilate them both and Mirabella knew it too but kept giving him exceedingly welcome sensations, including, with a twist of her head of bleached and teased hair, warm kisses on his naked abdomen, his button-down shirt rumpled and pulled up. Under his caressing fingers her shell of curls felt stiff and sticky, from too much spray. When he glanced down, he saw slant sunlight piercing her hair so the chalky pink of her skull showed through, the defenseless epidermis of it, skin on bone, and he had to fight losing his erection in the suppressed shock of the sight.

This conference was in Las Vegas, in one of the enormous luxury hotels—was it the Sands? or the Stardust?—that have since been pulled down to make way for yet larger ones. Her hair was dyed to a platinum pallor except for a half-inch of hometown-brown roots. Her ears had been double-pierced for two sets of little earrings, in those days an advanced self-mutilation. He took her, in her chamois-colored hotpants and green net stockings, for one of the hookers of the place, but she surprised him by knowing his name and saying, “You invented DigitEyes. My father was a structural engineer in Fresno and when I’d go to his office he used to let me play with the things on the screen. How they turned in space and still stayed together, the volumes described by these, like, wires, all with a few commands on the keys—it was magical.”

“An ingenious artifact of the past, I fear,” Owen told her. “Like the apple corer and the treadle-operated sewing machine.” He must have had a few drinks already; he had been on a panel, and when there was a reception afterwards girls from the hotel circulated among them with plastic glasses of champagne.

“The future builds on the past, and you can too,” she reassured him, Mirabella with her two-tone hair and green fishnets on her legs like a shrunken piece of costume from Sherwood Forest.

He confessed to her, “I’d like to gamble here but I don’t know how.” She led him to the roulette wheel, but he didn’t like it, because it was pure chance and the odds were unashamedly in the house’s favor. At the blackjack tables, he won because the game was a problem in mathematics, and most people, stupidly optimistic, tried to improve their hands with one more hit: the house counted on that. He most enjoyed the machines, the impersonal slots, gaudy and solemn both, their melting colors and the silky tug of the handles, the soft leveraging within, and the gush of their occasional jackpot spitting Kennedy half-dollars into the battered trough.

In his room high above the Strip she showed him something else—a line of white powder on the glass coffee