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

eventually released a throaty grunt and in a spasm clamped his head between her thighs as Elsie had once done; his hot face felt then so imbued with her juices that for twenty-four hours he tried to avoid coming close to Phyllis, even for their courtesy good-night peck. No amount of soap or aftershave quite quenched the smell of one woman in another’s nostrils.

She had been with women, Vanessa admitted to Owen. She and her girlfriend in high school did things, and then there were others the year she went to the state university in Storrs before family finances—she had brothers who needed the tuition money more—forced her to switch to what was still called secretarial school, in Hartford. She became an office manager’s assistant in the bureau where Henry worked. She learned efficiency. The manager she assisted was a woman, unusual back then, and had tried to talk her out of marrying Henry and into coming to live with her instead. But, no, Vanessa had known she needed men, clumsy and simple as they were. She needed marriage, for a base. She had intuited about Henry that she could always get around him. He was older, he would take her on her own terms. He had never mistaken her for one of the cute clinging girls he could have had. She owed him one child—a son, as it nicely turned out—and after that he gave her her own space. He didn’t pry into her day. Weekends, she was his.

“What’s it like?” Owen asked her. “Being with a woman.”

He saw her amber irises alter, as shuttling interior pictures activated them. “It’s like being with a weak man,” she said. “Why be with a weak imitation when you can be with a real one? It’s all a matter, isn’t it,” Vanessa went on, perhaps unconsciously echoing that buried Bible never quite scrubbed from our brains, “of being known. You want to be known better than you know yourself.”

“You kill me,” he told her, “so casually mentioning these others you’ve had. I want you to be all mine.”

“No, Owen, you don’t. You’re like the rest of us. You like the muck and the muddle.”

“When was the last woman you slept with?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

“Then it was recent.”

“No comment, dearest.”

“Is she around here? She must be. You must tell me about it; could I watch? Could we all do it together?”

She contemplated his still-importunate penis and in a flick of amused indulgence licked the tip of it quickly. Her tongue was grainier than other women’s, it seemed to him, and more triangular, coming to a more muscular point. “I think not,” she told him. “If you want a threesome, the third is up to you to provide. What a wicked man you turn out to be, you funny dear. You’re such a puppy.”

The Oglethorpes had bought the Dunhams’ rambling Victorian, with its spindlework and scalloped shingles, behind its palisade fence and lilac bushes, for themselves and their three children and what seemed, when they came bounding together over the slanting lawn in loose-jointed, crotch-sniffing welcome, a herd of golden retrievers. The Oglethorpes were both rather comically thin, he with an amiable discombobulation that appeared to seek to disown his embarrassing height (he was six four) with a distracting whirl of hand-flaps and misplaced guffaws, and she with a Twiggyesque knock-kneed winsomeness that chose to set itself off in filmy short shifts and school-uniformish, big-buttoned outfits, as if going shopping with Mommy. Her hair was a shiny, cedar-colored cap sometimes adorned with a big ribbon and bow. The Oglethorpes entertained almost as much as the departed Dunhams had. Perhaps the old house demanded it. Its rooms were scaled for life with servants and its steam heat clanged like a madman trapped in the walls with a hammer. Moving through its familiar rooms, now renovated and refurnished in a less reckless, eclectic style than Faye had favored, Owen frequently found himself pierced by a memory of her. He seemed to see her, flickering gaily through a doorway in one of her bright, improvised costumes, or treading toward him naked, silently barefoot, with a less smiling expression, tentative and imperilled, out of the second-floor back bathroom. He had come to know the brown tearstains on this little room’s turn-of-the-century porcelain and its high, industrial-strength showerhead, the size of a sunflower. That particular sentimental plumbing, he noticed, sneaking around upstairs while an Oglethorpe party raged downstairs, had been ruthlessly replaced.

The Oglethorpes fought off alcoholic calories with exercise, from dog-walking to tennis. The sight of them playing tennis was comical, especially when they teamed up together: so many angles of elbow and knee and of feet that in white sneakers projected like those of kangaroos as they hopped here and there with an occasional clash of rackets. Trish was the first woman Owen knew who had made jogging a part of her life, and it was somehow exciting to see her in unexpected parts of town, even along Partridgeberry Road, a good two miles from her house. In rainy weather she wore a short yellow slicker from which her naked legs seemed to dangle over the asphalt like a puppet’s, and an extensive rain hat down her back like the little girl’s on the Morton’s salt box. When Owen suggested her to Vanessa, in playful continuation of a fantasy that turned them both on, as their possible third, his lover said, “Not much meat on those bones, as Spencer Tracy said.”

Having seen the movie back at the Scheherazade, he finished the quotation: “But what there is, is choice.”

“I don’t know, Owen. You’re welcome to try, but I never get anything much back from her when we talk. The bounce is too quick. There isn’t any depth behind what you see.”

“How much depth do you need, Greedy? I like the way the bounce is always a little off, as if she hasn’t quite heard you and is desperately trying to imagine what you want her to say.