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

I promise. Don’t worry about her, she’ll be fine. You just sit tight. Maybe you should go away for a while.”

“No!” it was his turn to cry, his vision of a tidy, orthodox, normally sensual future swallowed up by this tall sandy-haired woman’s crazy confidence, not incorrect, that she was uniquely real to him. “I want a divorce. I really do.”

“She wants you to want a divorce. That’s not the same thing,” she said, with the complacence of a Q.E.D. Her light smile, that steady certainty in her level gray eyes—did his memory supply them in retrospect, or were they truly there that fresh morning? He had grown unused to looking at his wife; the same veil had come down that had hidden his mother’s nakedness. “I’m off, baby,” Phyllis said. “I’m late, by the time I find a parking space.” She forced a wet kiss on him, a deepening kiss that seemed to come from her innards, to his innards, the slimy red works we hide from all but surgeons. Pleased with herself, uncharacteristically efficient, Phyllis backed off and deftly wiped the evidence of her weeping from below her eyes. She checked her purse for keys, wallet, Kleenex, lipstick. “You sit tight and don’t worry,” she told Owen. “We’ll get you out of it. Don’t bother to lock the house. Leave Daisy in, she’s been chasing cars.”

She was out the kitchen door and her footsteps pattered off the side porch before he noticed that she had left his sheets of financial figures on the table. The Falcon door slammed; the gravel on the driveway spurted under her tires. Owen was dazed by the way she seemed to take his prospects and his troubles out of the house with her. The terrible metallic soulless taste of fatality, which had entered his mouth the day at this same table when Floyd had innocently imparted his school gossip, felt diluted. She’ll be fine. You just sit tight. The cats sneaked back to rub again against his ankles. He readjusted the position of the papers on the table and thought of scribbling a note to go with them but decided that their insistent presence there said enough. Instead of leaving at once, he wandered through the pantry, the living room, and the front hall to see what changes Phyllis had made lately, as a single woman. He could see very few—just the extra furniture, and the gaps in the bookshelves where she had let him have some volumes. He thought of stealing Finnegans Wake but decided against it. It would be a kind of flirting, misleading her. He tried to imagine returning to all this and couldn’t, quite. Houses you’ve left get too small to re-enter: a trick of perspective. He let himself out by the front door. In Pennsylvania, he remembered too late, it had been considered bad luck to enter by one door and leave by another. It was a pretty house, he thought, once outside, looking back at its clapboarded white sides, its shingled dormers, its black shutters and sinuous wisteria vine; but he had so long experienced the place as a confinement, a shell back into which he scuttled after a betrayal of its domestic pretense, that he felt the gaze of its windows as reproachful, like that of a forsaken pet.

He drove the Mustang downtown and was at E-O earlier than usual. He let himself into the back stairwell and went directly to his private cell. He needed to meditate. He wondered if he should call Julia in Old Lyme and describe Phyllis’s new mood. But, no, it would just distress her, and her efforts to combat this new development might do him more harm than good. There were enough energies at work; things had a way of working out, like his finding his glasses that time in the dew-soaked empty lot, or his discovering, as he was devising the algorithms for DigitEyes 2.1, that no matter how many 3D transforms have been nested, one branching from the other, the last coördinate space can be specified in terms of the first, with no more than a displacement vector and three basis vectors—a mere twelve scalars to be crunched. The intermediate steps can be consigned to the void. He was struck less by the possible impediment to the legal proceedings—Phyllis was basically too rational, she would give in, with an improvement in terms that Halloran would wheedle from Davis—than by the passion for him she had belatedly displayed. Or was it a passion merely for her old, carelessly bright and lovely self, of whose memory he had become the curator, now that her parents were no longer alive to bear witness? Not that they, or her kid brother, could have seen what her contemporaries saw—that flashing, loaded impression we make on those with whom we might mate. Her passion had not centered, he felt, on him. Wounded pride, threatened security, fears for the children had activated her. The old question remained unsolved, why do women go along with men? Perhaps it was a simple question of electrical engineering: in a world full of plugs, nature must provide sockets.

His locked door rapped, more loudly than Karen had ever rapped before. Owen called out, “Go away, Karen. It’s over.”

But a male voice said, “It’s Ed, O. You better open. We got trouble.”

Ed looked more than startled, he looked frightened when the sticky gray steel door revealed him in a rumpled business suit, his swollen flesh as colorless as a slug’s. He was breathing as if poisoned. “A phone call came for you at the company number. The cops. Your house didn’t answer and neither did your new digs. I said I doubted you were here but, son of a bitch, here you are. Let’s go. We better go together.”

“Go where, Ed?”

“Upper Falls. Old County Road. She was headed in the Hartford direction.”

“Who’s she?” But he knew.

Ed nodded, pushing ahead through the door leading down the stairs to the street, the secret