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

angered him, or he wanted to be angry. “O.K., if you say so, if you’re so clear in your mind where an adolescent ends and an adult begins. But I’m trying to grow up. I’m trying to get out of this phase we’re stuck in. For your sake as well as mine. You can’t see it, but my not quite loving you, my loving everybody else instead more or less, is grinding you down, sweetie. You can’t figure it out and it’s too simple to explain.”

“I never,” she said, to herself but letting Owen eavesdrop, “should have told you I didn’t love you yet.”

“Did that ever change, by the way? You never told me if it did.”

“I tried to show that it did.”

This fetched his tears. “Don’t,” he said, his voice scraping his throat. “Let’s just do this. There are the figures Halloran wants. I’ve told Davis to agree to most anything the other guy suggests. I’ll be generous, you know that. The children are mostly raised, and we’ll get the younger two through together. Just don’t try to talk me out of this any more. I had to have you, and now I have to have her. Then I’ll stop wanting; I’ll have had my quota.”

“Vanessa says Larson keeps offering to take her back. And find another parish, of course.”

“Vanessa! I wouldn’t trust her. She should have been a man. She wants to manage everything.”

“She lives in the real world, in a way you and I never have. If you want to know what I think of Julia, she reminds me of my mother,” Phyllis went on, skipping from woman to woman. Her cheekbones burned. “The professor’s wife, the minister’s wife, everything for show. It offends me intellectually, to be honest, that you can’t see it.”

“I see plenty,” he told her, relieved they had come to combat. “But seeing leads to paralysis, if you let it. Look, Phyllis. It’s now or never. You’re still young enough, still healthy and gorgeous—”

“Only you ever thought I was gorgeous. Jake Lowenthal thought I was a stiff Wasp stick. He laughed at me—my detachment, my inhibitions.”

“Let’s not worry at this point about Jake Lowenthal.”

“Young enough to catch another husband, is that what you started to say? Who? Who in this claustrophobic town? Ed? He must weigh three hundred pounds by now. He doesn’t need a woman. Stacey told me that. He just likes to eat and sit at his machines and make money. The only way she could get him interested in sex—”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. O.K., not Ed. Not anybody if you prefer it. I can’t live the rest of your life for you. I’m just trying to live mine.”

“Your, you, you—listen to the only child! There are more people than you in the world. There’s me and the children, for starters. No, Owen! I don’t want to go through with this, I just don’t. It doesn’t feel right. I won’t let you make such an idiot of yourself with that little con artist, with that cute little double chin you no doubt like to—what did people in the Middle Ages like to do?—chuck. Chuck her under.” Her father with his antique erudition was trying to rise from the dead and speak through her. They stood there hip-deep in ghosts.

Owen painfully explained, “Phyllis, I’m trying to reform. Julia wants to save me—”

He stopped himself. He shouldn’t have said that. Her eyes flared; her pale lips lost that frozen, immobile quality; she straightened to her full height in her navy-blue lawyer-seeing suit. “Save you!”

“She doesn’t put it like that,” he said hastily. “She says it’s as if you’re my mother and I’m defying you by—”

“Oh, spare me the amateur psychoanalysis; I can hear her voice, that pious little singsong. I’ll do the saving today, Owen. I’m going to drive right over to Hartford and tell Halloran to stop coöperating. I’m forty-four years old and sick of being everybody’s patsy. I’m not going to give you this divorce. I’ve invested too much misery in this marriage, too much humiliation.”

“You shouldn’t feel humiliated, the other women were jealous of you, how loyal I was to you, even when I wasn’t exactly faithful—”

She screamed, or made a shrilling mindless noise as close to a scream as she could come.

“Like I said,” he went on, “you didn’t seem that interested—”

“It was your job to make it interesting. You didn’t.”

“Look, Phyllis, O.K., O.K., no argument, all my fault, I’m a stupid klutz, but it takes two to tango—”

“No! I won’t do it! You and she can go straight to hell! You can tango there and not a minute sooner!”

Her fury was in part a relief for him. Having Julia as his wife—that compact, finely shaped silky body, those clear undoubting eyes, so striking that sometimes she made a gesture of covering them with a hand, like a lush woman trying to minimize her breasts—had always seemed a bit too good to be true. And he was flattered by Phyllis’s wanting to fight for him; he couldn’t remember a comparable show of passion. But he was in too deep. Julia was already there, on the far side of the Red Sea, high and dry, free, in Old Lyme, where it was getting colder and the children were enrolled in new schools, and he still was thrashing around in his old kitchen under the glassy stares of his photographed children. “It’s gone too far,” he said weakly, while chill autumn sunshine drenched the world outside, in the wake of last night’s rain. He heard a fit of querulous birdsong and the swish of a car passing on the winding road.

Phyllis came gently to his side; her breath was hot, like a crazy woman’s. “You don’t want to go through with it,” she told him. “I can hear it in your voice. You got trapped, Owen. It wasn’t your fault, it’s just the way you are. You’re too nice to people. I’ll get you out of it,