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

into the living room and never left.” Is this what he was here for, to discuss furniture? “The main trouble with stuff,” he volunteered, to consort with her generalizing mood, “is that it outlasts people.” These interviews with Phyllis now that they were estranged gave him a pasty, humming sensation, a kind of return to his helpless love-stricken feelings before he got to know her at all—the other side of the bell curve.

She felt his longing to linger in these familiar rooms, amid repairs and readjustments he had once made, and asked, glancing away, “You have time for coffee? In the living room? I guess there’s still space to sit down in.”

“No, thanks, really, Phyllis. I must run and you must too. Just give Halloran these figures, they’re what he asked for. Davis and he can discuss them and come up with a new figure.” Davis was his lawyer, a cynic and, it seemed to Owen, a hard bargainer; he had to impress on Owen that, even where the woman was not at fault and did not seek the divorce, the man was the breadwinner and must not be financially crippled. Phyllis would become, as it were, Owen’s employee, on a fixed monthly salary, with an annual cost-of-living adjustment. Her duties were to raise their children and stay out of his private life. The house would become hers, but his capital, and the ability to generate more, should be his. Wanting to apologize for this inequity, yet not wanting to give his lawyer’s game away, he hung there in the center of his old kitchen, beside the drop-leaf curly-maple table that they had bought in New York, impulsively, on Seventh Avenue in the Village, and that in Middle Falls had been too small when all four children were home, so that they never all sat around it together at breakfast or lunch, taking turns instead, or bolting a sandwich at the kitchen counter. He thought of this regretfully now. For over a year he had not been in this house so early in the day. The rising sun shot a broad ray of light in through the nearly leafless lilacs, blinding the plastic face of the electric clock on the wall. When he moved his head he saw the time to be twenty of nine. Below the clock Phyllis had Scotch-taped new color photographs of Floyd and Eve, portraits taken at school; they looked like those hyper-realistic sculptures sardonically executed in enamelled Fiberglas.

Phyllis laid the numerical printout on the table, adding a little dismissive brushing motion with the back of her hand, as if to shoo it on its way. “Thanks for this,” she said, “I guess. He seems awfully hung up on details.”

He guessed she meant Halloran. “So does Davis,” he admitted.

“I feel as though we’re being processed.”

“We are, sweetie. They’re selling us down the river and want to get the going rate.” He felt this didn’t come across as a joke, and clarified, “They’re auctioneers who have to make way for the next slaves on the block.”

“Mine,” she said, after thought, “can’t quite understand why. Why we’re doing it.” The way she turned her face from his, gazing down at the corner of the maple table, was familiar to him, as was the accompanying gesture of tucking a strand of hair behind her ear; it was her manner of saying something important. She had agreed to marry him in the same slant style.

“The simplest, oldest reason in the world,” he told her swiftly. “Another woman.” He must be blunt. He must cut through this haze of many-layered sentiment, her old smoky allure, projected through diffidence.

“It’s hard for me,” she haltingly confessed, “to believe in Julia. She seems so fake.”

“She’s not fake, not in what matters to me.”

“In bed, you mean? A minister’s wife?”

He said nothing, wondering if it was that simple, and if life accordingly wasn’t too simple.

Phyllis went on, having waited for a reply, “Sorry if I let you down there. You seemed to expect alarmingly much. Of something that is, after all, just one of the things people do. I suppose I got stagefright.”

“You were and are beautiful,” he stated, in attempted farewell. “When you bothered to give it a try.”

She took this in silence and resumed speaking of Halloran. “He says we seem so fond of each other. The children say the same thing, and they’ve lived with us.”

“Please,” he begged. “Haven’t we said all this? For over a year we’ve been saying it.”

“I know, I’m being a bore. And a poor sport. But it bothers me that you, the creator of DigitEyes, can’t see what everybody in town can see, that she’s a con artist.” She laughed one soft syllable, retracted with an intake of breath as if before weeping. “A con artist, you tell me,” she said.

He had to smile at the pun—he was flattered she gave him credit for enough French to get it—but protested, “Everybody in town, as you call them, has their own stake, their own habits and arrangements to preserve. They like us as we are, we’re part of their furniture. But I don’t like us as we are. I don’t like what the marriage is doing to you.”

“Your ladies on the side, you mean? I know Faye wasn’t the end. But I took them as punishment for my inadequacies—my refusals, you would call them—and, this is horrible to admit, didn’t blame myself that much. I figured some of it was just male nature.”

“Quite right,” he hurried to assure her, seeing on her gleaming cheeks that there were tears, and hating to have her blame herself for anything, she who had been so above it all. “You’re always right.”

“No I’m not, that’s a copout to say that. But one of your charms, Owen, is that you’ve never quite grown up. You were so clever you didn’t have to. You could remain adolescent and still perform as an adult. Until lately, Ed says.”

He ignored the mention of Ed. She had