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

“I’m around.”

“I mean see you to talk to.”

Apologetically, he said, “I guess we’ve been hunkered down for the winter.” We: he and Phyllis, man and wife, more and less than a real person.

“Wasn’t it awful! All that snow. Dwight says we should move to the Carolinas. Especially now that the local leash laws have become so strict.” Their rampaging golden retrievers, everybody knew, had been killing neighbors’ cats and raiding a riding stable a quarter-mile away, gorging on the horse chow in the manger.

Trish had a new, tousled hairdo; sparks flew from its cedar-red strands in the sunlight. Her polka-dot dress was short with an old-fashioned daring; her skinny legs descended into big-buckled duckbill-toed pumps of white patent leather. She looked like an escapee from a comic strip, and Owen had always had a fondness for comic strips. “What brings you here?” he asked.

“Didn’t you know? Vanessa got me to sub for someone on her Special Donations Committee who resigned. She’s a slavedriver, I can tell you.”

“So people say.”

“But she’s also a mother hen. It really is remarkable, how she does all she does.”

“Yes,” he agreed, trying to imagine just what she meant. Recalling their conversation at the Bisbees’ last fall, which Trish seemed to be resuming with an enthusiasm she had withheld at the time, Owen told her, “Speaking of women prison guards, now we have a woman party head.”

“Yes,” she said. “Too bad she’s such a conservative.”

“You’re against conservatives, now.”

“Only when they’re boring grocers’ daughters,” Trish said, turning her head to show him her profile, underslung and sexy. Her upper lip looked almost prehensile. Her style of talk, at least, had been loosened up.

“Speaking of boring conservatives, poor Ford. It’s just about over in Vietnam,” Owen said, not quite knowing how to stimulate this new, subtly radicalized Trish.

She ignored this offering. “Owen,” she said, poking his chest sharply. “You must see a movie called Shampoo, with Warren Beatty. Dwight and I loved it. It’s so outrageous!”

This was more like the stiff, herky-jerky old Trish. Yet she gave off the natural perfume, the easy animation, the sense of a deftly resumed connection, that a woman you have slept with gives off. Had he slept with her in a dream? Had his fantasies of a naked threesome somehow travelled to her through the village’s veins? She seemed in her dolly outfit to explode with self-delight, and to verge, shiny-eyed, on teasing him, like the girls on the walk to elementary school. He had to back off and consider this new factor in his life-complicating sexual equations. Had Vanessa, seeing his feeble initiative fail, seduced this coltish newcomer herself, and were the two of them waiting, glowingly nude yet primly upright, like the de Poitier sisters in Clouet’s double portrait, for him to find them? Villages have inglenooks, root cellars, attics where mattresses covered with striped ticking quietly wait for the orgy to begin.

The charitable crowd’s clamor rose as it soaked up more cheap champagne beneath the fifteen-foot painted phallic image, displayed for months on the hospital façade, of a thermometer whose red of pledges had finally mounted to the very top. Owen spotted the rueful face of Imogene Bisbee, in her Emily Dickinson hairdo, wistfully searching the crowd for someone who would quicken her life into romantic meaning. She would have to wait, he said to himself, for there was no more room in his life, with Trish apparently still on his hook. He scanned all the donor faces, sallow and giddy in their bath of cool spring sunshine, hoping not to find Karen Jazinski among them. Ed, a big contributor from the company’s funds, might have brought her along in an E-O entourage, and if sensitive spying eyes saw Owen and Karen standing together they would spot the magnetic current, the telltale electricity, between their bodies.

But he did not see her. Instead, Ian Morrissey came up to him, his goatee whiter and the hair on his head longer, befitting his recent decision to become an easel “art” painter and reduce magazine illustrating to his spare time—just the really tempting commissions, he bragged, from old buddies in the trade. He announced, “Alissa’s stuck at home with Nina, a fever of one hundred one, throwing up half the night.”

“How old is she now?” Owen asked, politely.

“Five, for Chrissakes. Makes you feel ancient.”

Owen suggested, ironically, “You should have brought her here to the emergency room.”

Ian didn’t hear irony, unless it was his own. “Naa, basically she’s healthy as a horse. Built like a little brick shithouse. The spitting image of my father, it turns out. He was a stonemason, I’m not ashamed of it.” Stale champagne flavored his breath, exploded bubbles.

Owen felt a pang, imagining Alissa and the small girl and this flatulent blowhard together, a holy trinity, like his parents and himself on those Sunday walks in Willow. “Well, I hope she feels better,” he told Ian.

“She’s bound to. Like I say, tough as nails. Both of my grandfathers lived to be ninety.”

“Tell Alissa we all missed her.” Just Alissa’s name, its kissy sibilance, gave a gentle jolt to Owen’s mind, and the image of a subcutaneously padded back divided by a spine with tender extremities. He had a feeling of comradeship, of consorting with other veterans of the same campaign, as he moved through this crowd, his fellow townsfolk for fifteen years, a loving and loved feeling that bounced back not just from the women he knew but from the downtown merchants in their slippery polyester suits, the jeweller and the liquor-store owner, the surefooted roofer doubling as bartender at a white-covered table, and the sturdy nurse, now retired, who eight years ago, when Owen had his appendix removed, would bestow upon him the mercy of more Demerol in the dead of the night. Hospital orderlies and receptionists brought some brown and olive faces to this festive throng. He couldn’t find Phyllis in it, though her fair head usually floated a few inches