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

table. He knelt on the carpeted floor as he had with Jacqueline in quite another city, in another hotel room. Mirabella, her broad face shining and smiling, guided him in rolling up a twenty-dollar bill and inhaling the powder as best he could. He had never been good at blowing out candles on a birthday cake, either. He disliked the tickly sensation, like loose hair across his lips except that this was deeper into his head. The powder that eluded his nostrils she scraped up quickly, neatly, with a one-edged Treet razor blade, and inhaled herself, making afterwards an ingratiating child’s grimace. She was an angel, Mirabella, with something Slavic in the shine and breadth of her face.

Owen distrusted drugs because he needed his brain cells, but this was a slow icicle to the brain that awoke that gray organ to its potential, gave it the precision and speed immortal spirits must know. His body, too: he had never wanted to fuck so much, and been so good at it, so hard and controlled, a man of iron, desire rising in him throughout the night like hydraulic pressure and always being greeted willingly by the marvellous Mirabella, her body as thick and resilient as a peasant woman’s, her breasts thoroughly brown and a ghost of non-tan around her trimmed pubes smaller than a doily. She reminded him of Alissa except that she was firmer-bodied and younger and didn’t want a baby. Her back viewed from above as he humped her was less touching, less articulate in its muffled spine. Her back was blank. Her cunt became full of him, so soppy he felt less and less friction, and she confessed toward dawn that he was hurting her with his cock. He apologized and kissed her all over tenderly, including the vertebra just above the sallow cleft of her ass, but in fact he was not sorry, he enjoyed the idea of hurting her with just himself.

She said she wanted to show him something beautiful and suggested he rent a car. He said it was six in the morning and no rental agencies would be open.

“They all will,” Mirabella said. “This is Vegas.”

Las Vegas was her Sherwood Forest, it seemed to his hopped-up head, and it was just as well he forgot to ask her what computer company she worked for. Or if he had, he had forgotten her answer. But she was right: they rented cars right off the main lobby of the hotel—was it the Dunes?—and in his confused, extremely happy state he chose tangerine when it was offered because he figured it wouldn’t get lost in a parking lot. He drove east into the sun, and the cars coming toward him with what seemed electronic speed were black silhouettes, shapes without people, dangerous imperfections in the great clean pane of the morning. After they stopped for coffee and eggs, with the inevitable hash browns, at a place she seemed to know, Mirabella, fed and sleepy and playful, went down into his lap and undid his fly and pulled up his shirt and started to suck him off. He was sensitive enough there it felt like a bite; he asked her to stop but she giggled and didn’t, and it occurred to him that some women did sex because it was what they could do, just as he could write programs for payrolls and pension plans. It was what they were programmed to do, there was no mystery. Why had he ever thought there was a mystery? The sun was getting higher, burning down through her spun-sugar curls, so her scalp felt warm where his free hand lightly massaged it, and the backlit mountains in the distance were giving up more and more of their shadows, and her lips and fingers were doing this sweet tugging number on him, and he came, came upward into the cozy pink darkness beneath all those bobbing shellacked curls as a long side-slatted truck roared by in the opposite direction, and she gagged. He loved her gagging. He would drown her in his jism.

In his imperfect memory, the truck had shuddered past with a load of white-faced cattle looking out between the slats. But how could he have seen them? He was concentrating on keeping the little Camaro on the road; he must have observed the cattle truck at some other point in that glorious, wide-open morning. The vast alkaline sky with its translucent towers of cloud, the purple-tinged pastures stretching on either side of the highway. Mirabella lifted her head from his lap and raucously asked, “Where do you get all that stuff? I’d have thought you’d be pumped out by now.” Her face was shining with sweat from the close quarters she had been working in. She sat up, and with a thumb and finger wiped the corners of her mouth. Batsy. She settled back, leaning her skull on the padded headrest. She looked tired and not as young as he had thought. Her profile against the hurtling lilac desert showed a double chin, and a ripple of collagen around the cheekbone.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “You excite me.”

“I’ll say. You should get a wife.”

“I have one, thanks.”

He was getting a headache, where the transformative, clarifying icicle had entered. When they came to the beautiful sight Mirabella had promised—a huge blue lake, there in the middle of the desert, created by a federally financed dam—it seemed part of his headache, another unnatural intervention, with speedboats and a tacky marina. Owen later wondered if she in fact was a hooker who had been primed by pals of his at the conference to say she was a childhood fan of DigitEyes. But he couldn’t believe it, she seemed too computer-savvy, and she charged nothing for the sexual services, though she did say he owed her six hundred dollars for the cocaine.

xii. Village Sex—VI

Back in Middle Falls, in the ’seventies, the path to illicit sex had grown shorter; the skids