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

with him on the couch, looking with her decisive brunette coloring less like Manet’s Olympia than Goya’s Naked Maja, he couldn’t open the door, and Karen, perhaps sensing the pair of held breaths within, didn’t come knocking again. Trish Oglethorpe, for some odd reason, led the local forces of indignation, and passed by Julia in the supermarket as if she had been a wilting head of lettuce. Roscoe and Imogene Bisbee snubbed the new couple at the Silver Spoon, an overpriced candlelit restaurant in Upper Falls, where Owen and Julia had thought they were safe from recognition, among the faceless tract-dwellers.

This interim of disjunction dragged on for a year, and then there was worse. You don’t want to know. The papers and news hours are full of family breakdowns and intramural murder. Within the broken marriages there were grieving, backwards-looking interviews, not without their exhilarations of drunken truth-telling and wry hilarity. At a later, more legal stage, there were bitter differences over the division of property—especially bitter for the Mackenzies, who had stumbled into prosperity and been quick to turn it into cultural artifacts. Each Oriental carpet, abstract painting, and fifty-dollar art book had been jointly selected or, in the case of the books, bestowed with loving inscriptions as birthday or Christmas presents. A copy of Finnegans Wake from Phyllis to Owen for his twenty-fifth birthday—a tall square-spined volume, the front and back of the jacket identical, with Joyce’s fifteen-page list of typographical errors appended to the 1939 text—prompted an especially bitter dispute, though neither of them had made his or her way through more than five pages of it. They had both thought it would be more mathematical than it was, the author being one of the few whose brain could rank with that of the great mathematicians; but the holy text was all music, the music of phonetically misspelled speech, in a broad Irish accent and all of Europe peeping through the puns. In the era of their courtship and marriage, this book had represented the epitome of culture—fanatically wrought, monolithically aloof.

For the Larsons, there was the problem of the parsonage. She and the children needed it, yet the church owned it, and part of Larson’s pay was the occupation of it. Christmas, most inconveniently, approached with its spate of holiday entertainments, from youth groups to Golden Agers, at which the minister’s wife traditionally presides. Part of a minister’s obligation, in those benighted days, was to provide a presentable wife, willing and able to second his social services to the parish. Julia fulfilled her duty so smoothly that not a punch cup was dropped or a single member of the junior choir cheated of his or her share of eggnog and ginger cookies, even as Owen and his bed in his dishevelled rooms on Covenant Street awaited her. When at last she arrived, still in the chaste gray knit dress of the parsonage hostess, she breezily explained to him, “A woman is used to living on several levels. Compartmentalizing is part of her biology. It’s not hypocrisy; it’s just plain decency not to show all of yourself at any one time. What a fussy, jealous boyfriend you are, Owen! It’s thrilling for me, to be associated with anyone so innocent.”

“After Arthur, you mean?”

“Well—don’t let this hurt your feelings, precious, but a clergyman is hard to shock. He hears the worst sort of thing, every day of the week. People love telling him, for some reason.”

To this period, perhaps, as Julia continued a show of cohabitation with her illusionless husband, could be traced the dreams that afflicted Owen even twenty-five years later, of her slipping away beneath the social web of the town, of his simply being misplaced by her as she went through the familiar motions of being a clergyman’s loyal wife.

It was the church itself, in its wisdom, that brought the awkwardness of the situation to the parson’s attention, and that came up with a solution: the head of the vestry, a retired and widowed former Providence banker, occupied a needlessly large mansion facing the Middle Falls Common; Reverend Larson was most welcome to stay with him until Mrs. Larson and the children could find suitable housing, preferably in some other town. When school finally ended, in June of the bicentennial summer, Julia and little Tommy and Rachel went to live with Julia’s sister in Old Lyme. This season of separation, during which Owen’s plighted mistress managed under her sister’s reproachful eye only a few hurried letters, may also have contributed to his persisting nightmares of losing her, of their connection simply breaking and falling silent as did those first delicate telegraph cables laid on the craggy bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Her letters, impeccably typed on blue stationery with an electric typewriter, worried him in their sunniness and ease; there were no second thoughts or confessed regrets, no careful ambiguities. She loved being back in sight of the sea. The river and its falls had been put behind her. Rachel was taking riding lessons and loving it; Tommy, always so timid of the water, was now able to swim the full length of the swimming pool at the funky little beach club. Arthur, who often came to visit, wasn’t sure, after this, he was going to continue in the ministry. Epiphany, though too polite to say so, was counting the days until he left. Despite Saint Paul’s advice against marriage, divorced ministers, at this stage of church custom, were hard to place, even in an inner-city parish. One of the vestrymen, a retired businessman, had told Arthur of wonderful opportunities, if he was willing to move closer to Manhattan, for former clergymen in public relations or company personnel management.

The Mackenzies, adrift on their wrecked marriage, marvelled at the way the sea parted for Julia: she was walking to the other shore on miraculously dry land. Even in separate residences, Owen and Phyllis shared the same mental space, a collegiate kind of space inherited from a big