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

“Vanessa, you’re incredible. You’ll say anything.”

“Well, at least I’ve got you hard again.”

Sex was easiest to manage in his head, away from all the furniture, the disgusting marital spoor, the telltale slant of light at the window shades, the village bells tolling the hours, calling the children to school and back again. His favorite sight in Middle Falls came between seven-thirty and eight, the children going off to school, walking in packs or gathered at bus stops with their mothers, their backpacks and colorful synthetic garb at such a festive remove from the dismal knickers and dark cloth coats of ’thirties Willow, children trudging off as if to a blacking factory. At night, lying beside Phyllis in their queen-sized bed, she, to judge from her regular deep breathing, asleep, he could stage-manage himself and Vanessa and Trish Oglethorpe, her skittish runner’s body and her upper lip like a flesh-bud evolved to lure men into the chase. His intuition told him that Trish possessed an extra dose of that pliant, chasable quality; it went with the X chromosome. He and Vanessa could tie her up for more exciting access. He pictured mouths, and the orifices below, and vectorized patches of resilient skin, and three pairs of eyes widened in the general stretch and astonishment of it. Muck, Vanessa had said, the muck and the muddle, telling him he loved it, we all do, the mothering muck. Then, his brain losing images and recovering them while his hand kept his grip on his half-asleep prick, teasing and then seizing, Owen would come into a handkerchief spread where his ejaculation could hit. At the crest of sensation, sweat popping from his pores, he recognized that Phyllis’s proximate warmth was part of it, the muck, the coziness, as her rhythmic light breathing—light, as her speech was light, not wishing to force itself crassly upon the world—betrayed no sign of awareness of his thumping climax. But she was there, like the finite sum of one of Euler’s infinite series.

“Why don’t we ever make love any more?” she one day asked.

“Don’t we? I feel we do.”

“It’s been weeks. Am I getting bad breath or something?”

“Not at all. I’ve never smelled anything on your breath except peppermint and chamomile tea.”

“Well, then. Let’s go. The children are out of the house from eight to three-thirty. Why don’t you come back here at noon for lunch? I don’t mention the morning because I know you hate waking up.”

“You want this today?” He tried to think if anything was scheduled with Vanessa; there was no telling when Karen might drop by. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked, stalling.

Phyllis took no offense at the question, though she blushed—that movement of blood below her slant cheekbones that he associated with the student princess, offering herself to be carried away. “Nothing,” she said. “Just affection. You look so handsome lately.”

He saw a welcome opportunity to argue. “Oh, now and not ever before?”

“Before, yes, but, not to sound like Ian, you had a nerdy quality, as though it hurt your eyes to look away from the computer—as if we were all slightly unreal to you. You don’t have that so much any more.”

“Well, thanks. I guess.”

Now she did take offense. “Forget I said anything,” she said. “I was just trying to be wifely. I’m human, you know.”

“Baby!” He went to her, suddenly stung. An image in two dimensions in his mind had popped into the third; he had forgotten she was human, he admired her so abstractly, as an image from his past, a faded route to his present condition. He hugged her; her face, at near the height of his own, felt hot; both their faces felt on the verge of tears. “You’re superhuman,” he told her, hoping to break them into laughter. This failing, he said, “Let’s make a date. I think there’s a problem with today; I have to check my calendar at work.”

“You don’t want to,” Phyllis said, right as always. “I’m not superhuman, I’m a failure in every respect except that I bore four healthy children. But even they, I didn’t do much of a job. We’re letting them grow up like weeds.”

There was truth in this, but against it he could have set their myriad usual gestures of parenting: the help with homework, the tucking in at night, the rote prayer to get their anxious small souls through to morning, the family trips to Nantucket and Disney World and Expo 67 in Montreal, the summer rentals in Maine, the countless lessons paid for, the countless evening meals shared in something like hilarity. From the outside, seen through the windows of the warm and expensive house on Partridgeberry Road, judged from the swing sets and hockey skates and dollhouses and golf clubs to be found in the basement, Owen and Phyllis had given all the signs of parenthood, but they had not, like some—like Owen’s own parents, perhaps—lived through their children, making the leap out of the ego into the DNA chain. Ian and Alissa, for instance, after their rocky patch, had submerged themselves in the needs and deeds of Nina and her two older siblings. Owen and Phyllis were alike in that their pet child was the child within, who still clamored for nurturing. “Tomorrow,” he promised her. “I just remembered, today’s my day to have lunch with Ed. He’s full of gloom these days.”

“Tomorrow’s my day for tennis at the club with Alissa, Vanessa, and Imogene. Except Imogene can’t play and got Trish for a substitute.”

“The next day, then,” he said, “or at night, after Floyd and Eve are in bed.” Gregory was a sophomore at Brown, and Iris in her first year at Smith.

“At night I get dopey,” Phyllis said. “By the day after next I’ll have forgotten what it’s all about.”

“What is it all about?” he asked her.

“That I love you?” she offered shyly.

He turned her question into a statement: “And I love you.” To