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

he might have scheduled something; his four children had their appointments—their sports, their teeth.

“See, that’s negotiations,” Karen said. “I’ll come when I want to, when I can. I’m getting paid to work here, don’t forget. Other people watch you. People sense things.”

“They do?”

“I did, didn’t I? You knew, too. You weren’t so surprised that time when I first hoisted my skirt.”

She was right: even this bit of recapitulation, of purposefully hoarded memory, revealing that she had put some twos and twos together and evolved a plan of action, tainted the relationship. It was weeks before she appeared in his room again, and then shamefaced, as a suppliant; she had caved in to desire, and he didn’t entirely like it that he had gained this power over her. He made her, though she said she had only a minute, take off her blouse and played with her little pert breasts, as she had played with DigitEyes. Their impulsive fling was beginning to deviate into sexual politics and a clutter of scrupulously kept old scores.

He had learned to have sex without kindness, without a grandiloquent gratitude. He could dislike Vanessa even as he milked her for revelations and wisdom. He guided her toward discussing the other women of their set, especially those he had known, to revisit them from another angle, in a cooler light. “Faye,” she said. “I loved Faye, her giddy spirit, but she hadn’t a clue how to dress. Like a ragbag on speed, and those ridiculous long skirts to hide her bow legs.” “I never noticed she had bow legs.”

Vanessa laughed her laugh, a growl deep in her throat. “How could you, dearest, you were too focused on what was between them.”

“I still feel guilty about her, making that mess of her life.”

“Faye was a butterfly—how long do butterflies live? A day or two. She was born to be a victim. Anybody who stays married to an alcoholic likes being a victim. Then you victimized her, and you weren’t the only one, I’m sure she told you. You’re quite naïve to blame yourself.”

“Alissa. What do you make of her?”

“What did you make of her? Or out of her, you could say.”

She meant the baby. He said, “I can’t say anything.”

“Of course you can’t. Nobody can. Hush-hush.”

“Except that she’s delicious, isn’t she?”

“It depends on how much fat you have the stomach for.”

He took a handful of the soft flesh at the side of Vanessa’s stately waist, above the hip bone, and gave a sharp, cruel squeeze. Her grimace showed her eye teeth. They were in her home—a rare, risky occasion, with his red Stingray in her and Henry’s two-car garage like a piece of gleaming meat, if the electronic door were triggered and slid up. The Slades’ house, a ’fifties neo-colonial with garage and sunporch, on one of the newer post-war streets in Middle Falls, irritated him with its sanctimonious order, its many evidences of Henry’s careful carpentry and groundskeeping and of Vanessa’s efficient, traditional homemaking and of Victor’s exemplary progress at Choate. The Slades’ perversely solid marriage, built on some immovable mute foundation, rubbed him the wrong way. Didn’t Henry know what a slut his wife was? Didn’t his plodding, complacent obtuseness madden her? No, they seemed to have a perfect arrangement—every silver-framed photo of Victor and Garden Club prize ribbon and matching armchair and footstool in place, like the homes in Willow he had envied, with completely finished cellars.

“Ow,” Vanessa said, but without ire, accepting his rebuke as deserved.

“Sorry. I never thought of Alissa as fat.”

“Look at her some time. She hasn’t managed to lose her pregnancy weight yet, and the child is four years old.”

The child, Nina, walked and talked, pretty but somber, the levels of female subtlety in her multiplying, along with her little graces and pertnesses; in Owen’s eyes she reminded him more and more of his own first-grade photos, that willingness to please mixed with something skeptical. But people continued to say she looked like Ian: his square frowning brow, his keen-eyed squint. Until she became too big for the stroller the putative father would preeningly push her everywhere, at a run, his face reddening above his goatee. His skinny bare legs grew sinewy. Fatherhood and exercise were Ian’s way of coping with approaching fifty. Vanessa’s mention of the child frightened Owen, and she knew it. “You sound jealous,” he said to her. “Have you ever had a, you know, thing with Alissa?”

“We’ve had long girly chats, with more white wine than was good for either of our figures. What you don’t seem to realize, Owen, is that erotic pleasure comes in all sorts of shades short of fucking. Alissa and I have been cozy from time to time.”

“Is that why women go to bed with men, to be cozy?”

“You keep asking me that. The answer is, partly.”

“When you do it with a woman, really, what happens? You use your mouths, or a dildo, or what? Describe it.”

“Oh, darling Owen, I forget. Or let’s pretend I do. Do you want to fuck me again before you go, or not? You’ve shrivelled down to nothing, worrying about what everybody else does.”

“Don’t forget,” he reminded her, this complacent naked woman as thick-waisted and opaque as a plaster Venus, “you want me to deliver Trish Oglethorpe to you.”

“You want that. Two women serving you.”

“Actually, when I fantasize—can I tell you this?”

Vanessa said nothing.

“When I fantasize, it’s a woman and two men. I’m not sure a man can really handle two women, but a woman can certainly handle two men.”

“And you want to be that woman.”

“Ooh. That hurts.”

“It shouldn’t, dearest. It’s normal, or normally abnormal. Being your own sex is really rather boring after a while.”

“You smug cunt. You’re incredible.”

“And who’s to say,” she pleasantly went on, “where one sex ends and the other begins? When we’re tiny eggs we’re all females, then some lucky ones get that Y chromosome that turns them into tadpoles with a penis. It’s all rather mucky, like my cunt right now.