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

“Insulated.”

“Wrapped up in herself.”

This was fascinating to Owen—a road map out of his guilt, being offered by a woman he hardly knew. Other people, seeing by their faces that their conversation had reached a heated depth, avoided approaching them. He said rapidly, “O.K., let’s have lunch some time. Way out of town, and not in Hartford. What does Henry think?”

“About what, dear?”

“About Phyllis and me and whatnot.”

“Henry and I don’t talk about anything. That’s the beauty of it.”

“I’ve often wondered,” Owen admitted, “what the beauty of it was.” He liked his so quickly, dryly saying this; he felt that, in a few furtive minutes, he was learning to dance with this woman.

“Likewise,” Vanessa said, tapping the ash from her Pall Mall, as the music stopped and their spouses approached. Henry and Phyllis were laughing in relief that that was over and squinting blindly, out of the flickering strobe lights that the Oglethorpes, overanxious to please, had installed for the evening.

The lesson Owen learned from Vanessa was a surprising one: masculine women give great sex. It was perhaps no accident that it had been the tomboy Doris Shanahan who had let him look up the leg of her shorts. Sex is more up front, so to speak, with them. They go at it straight out, pouncing on orgasms like a hawk on a baby quail. Though Vanessa rarely (unlike giddy Faye, unlike dimpled Alissa) smiled during the process, she often laughed, gruffly, her low husky laugh. In her customary thick-fabricked, wide-shouldered clothes, her ass and chest both looked flat, minimal; undressed, she showed charms enough. Her body, neither fat nor bony, had below her brown face the eggshell smoothness of a plaster cast, an even tone that neither her dusty-red nipples or chestnut-brown pubic hair markedly interrupted. She brought to sex a certain serious playfulness; like a man, she was willing to consider the event basically physical, a meal of sorts, and, like a good cook, was conscious of the need for variety. In a graceful, short-nailed hand she would hold his erection as if it were the stem of an oversize wineglass, her extended little finger resting ticklishly in his curly hair at its base, and study it, the blue-veined stalk and empurpled glans, from inches away, pondering what to do with it. Like a good craftsman she thought about the task while away from the workbench, so she could greet him, at their next tryst, with a fresh idea: “I thought today you could come between my breasts, if you’d bring me off with your mouth first.”

“What a divine agenda, Vanessa. But shouldn’t I be inside you at some point?”

“Where inside me, dearest? There are choices.”

“Oh, God, don’t drive me crazy with choices. Just rape me, can’t you?”

The feminine side he had suppressed when Buddy Rourke rejected his fancy Monopoly arrangement was coming back to him under Vanessa’s tutelage. She said, “That’s one of the beauties of being a man—you can’t be. You can be aroused against your will, but you can’t be raped without your prick’s consent.” Vanessa was a considerable connoisseuse of the advantages of being a man, and frequently mentioned them.

“Except,” Owen pointed out, “by the back entrance.”

“Oh. That.” She thought a moment. When she thought, her eyes, the amber of a lioness’s, darkened a shade, as had Alissa’s abraded-looking blue irises when making love. Vanessa didn’t afford him Alissa’s feeling of an infinitely soft, furry, moist socket to hide himself in, a safe dirty place where a terrible tension was resolved, but she could briskly arrange a buffet of other treats. “Would that turn you on?” Her voice had roughened in her throat.

“I don’t think so,” he said, and his own voice sounded high and fragile in his ears. “How about you?”

Owen had never had, at the adolescent moment when it would have been useful to his growth, a male friend with whom sex in its mysteries could have been, however ignorantly, discussed. Now, twenty-five years late, Vanessa was that frank friend. She answered, after reflection, “It didn’t do terrifically much for me, the few times I tried it. It felt like the wrong way. But that was not unexciting, I suppose. The wrong way as the right way.”

He was roused. She knew more than he; he could still catch up. “Let me do it to you, then.”

“O.K.,” she said. “Just to get it off your list. If I do it to you first.”

“With what?” he asked, fearfully.

“My tongue?” Vanessa suggested. “Then a finger, wearing a surgical glove. Then—we’ll see.”

“This is getting to be,” Owen had to admit, “a rather repulsive conversation.”

“Yet, dearest, look at how hard you are! You’re so hard you’re bending backwards, staring into your own navel.”

“Suck me,” he begged.

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Her serious mouth made a pouting little moue, as Phyllis used to. “First let’s think what you can do for me.”

Her cunt, those livid wrinkles looking like lava folds, had become his to contemplate, to finger, opening the petals to their peony-pink inner side and bringing his mouth to breathe on the clitoris, to tongue that gleaming wet nub. Don’t touch it. Don’t tell me what to touch. Between her legs her plaster-pale body took on color and gave up its stately evenness of tone. Her stern face softened as she sat on the edge of the bed and toyed with his hair, the boyishly soft brown hair into which gray was being sifted one strand at a time. Then as if in sudden surfeit she flung herself back on the motel bed, with a violence that jolted into his head an image of what she saw—through the cloudy small window above their bed a glimpse of green leaves flung upside down as in a hurricane. She rested her thighs one on each of his shoulders, her eyes shut against the daylight to be alone with her sensations as Owen knelt there at her service, laboring in his own trance of mounting attention. Vanessa