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

“What’s happened? How bad?” Owen asked, gulping, his palms and arms tingling, his body meeting resistance in this new medium of circumstance. This time he couldn’t just close his eyes and roll over and go back to sleep. His mother and father weren’t in the next room.

Ed, hurrying ahead, shook his head as if the question were a bee or horsefly buzzing at his ears. “They didn’t say. You know how cops are, they hide their stupidity by clamming up. They said an accident, and they wanted you there.”

They arrived at Ed’s car, a new bronze-colored Mercedes, in its numbered space on the asphalt factory lot. Ed had always been the one to act the role of company head; he had a mental image of the rewards and responsibilities. Owen had tried to shrug it all off, driving a red Corvette like a kid. The inside of the Mercedes, though, smelled of pizza and onion-laden takeout, along with fresh leather and assembly glue.

Owen’s face felt hot, as if looking into an oven. He said, “I just saw her, twenty minutes ago. She had an appointment in Hartford; she was late.”

“With that Irish lawyer?”

He knew he was Irish. Phyllis told Ed everything, or most everything, and Owen couldn’t resent it. “Yes.” Ed was loyal, Ed was big. Phyllis’s hands had flown apart, describing her lost boyfriend Hank as “enormous.” Owen hadn’t been quite big enough.

Ed was saying, “She hated that guy. One of these Mick fast talkers, she felt he was trying to con her. Micks’re all male chauvinists.” He drove with speed, but carefully; the car’s sheer weight made it seem a placid ride, four miles in less than ten minutes. The twisting back road, a short-cut to Hartford for those that knew it, was puddled with wet leaves knocked down by last night’s rain. The coruscating blue lights of several police cars were visible well ahead; a young cop controlling traffic through the remaining lane waved them through, until Ed talked to him, in words Owen couldn’t hear. There was a drumming in his head. He had already spotted the Falcon station wagon next to the woods beyond the shoulder, upside down.

His heartbeat had become so rapid it pushed him across events, missing whole sequences. He wasn’t aware of Ed’s steering and braking, only that the Mercedes was stopped. For the longest time he couldn’t figure out how to open the door: the handle was smaller and higher than in the cars he was used to. He saw that a door of the upside-down Falcon had been pried open and a gray blanket covered something long next to it.

His face hot, his legs watery, Owen struggled away from the Mercedes and across a grassy ditch gouged by something, muddy marks, not deep, left by some passing weight. Another policeman, older and more solid than the one Ed had spoken to, stopped him as he floundered toward the blanket where it lay neatly tucked this side of a low bed of blueberry bushes turned dull scarlet, beyond knee-high stands of white asters.

The older cop told Owen, “It looks like she was speeding, hit a patch of wet leaves, skidded, hit the ditch, and flipped.”

It sounded like a reasonable, orderly process, not too violent. “So she’s all right?”

“No, son,” the policeman said, though he may not have been much older than Owen. “She’s not. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt and when the car flipped she came down hard and broke her neck. That’s the way it looks to us. The coroner will be here to confirm. There’s no breath, we tried the mirror. What we need now is definite identification.” He touched Owen above the elbow, as if to prevent him from floating away. “Sorry to put you through this, Mr. Mackenzie. Would you rather have Mr. Mervine look?” He knew Ed’s name and knew Owen’s name, though this was Upper Falls.

“No, I’ll do it.” He took the remaining steps gratefully, the blanket had seemed so lonely. It was as when you check on small children sleeping at night, so alone in the crib or bed that there is that catch of panic until you hear them breathing.

“Let me lift this here. Tell me when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready.” His shoes and ankles were getting wet. The various grasses, the little shiny blueberry leaves, the gravel and grit of the roadside, with plastic flip-tops and cigarette filters slowly going back to nature: these data pressed on his retina as if to tell him that all was illusion, that the moment would be reversed and redeemed, that he was bending over and picking up his wet glasses case from the dew-soaked weeds.

The cop’s hand trembled, pulling back the blanket. Maybe he was older than Owen. Pale Phyllis slept, her sand-colored hair barely mussed and her head not noticeably awry. Her eyes were still open, which shocked him, but the face had already begun its transition to the inanimate, all those miraculously interwoven structures intact but lacking the spark, the current that gave them meaning and presence. The responsive skin along her cheekbones had lost its blush. She looked like a statue; but then she had been a statue in his mind for a long time.

A weight was bearing down on Owen: Ed leaning on him, looking over his shoulder as he knelt there in the weeds to view Phyllis. The weight on his back cancelled Owen’s impulse to bend down and kiss her lips, which had so lately kissed his, with belated passion. Ed breathed close behind his ear. “You did this, you fuckhead.”

“Did I?” Owen asked.

“She was the best woman I ever knew,” Ed said, his weight still bearing on Owen’s like a wrestler’s. “I loved her.”

“Me too. Ed, let me up. We’re both in shock, let me breathe.”

“I’ll let you breathe all right,” Ed said menacingly, but he backed off to let Owen stand. With space between them, and police listening, he told his