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

and they became, briefly, close, before the girl, at sixteen, drifted away into a woman’s necessary secrecy. It is a life-stage, Owen reflected, when one’s children become instructors in acceptance and sophistication—in rolling with the punches.

It had been Julia who had known of Haskells Crossing. Arthur’s first call, fresh from Andover Newton Theological School, had been as assistant minister to a failing Episcopal parish in Cabot City; the more sedate, more prosperous Saint Barnabas in Haskells Crossing had been envied, a kind of rich younger brother. From the perspective of Middle Falls—where the old riverside gun factory again stood empty, though the E-O Data sign stayed up above the loading platform, and a select few of its employees had found employment with Apple—Haskells Crossing seemed a fairy-tale abstraction, an ideally remote and obscure site for their new life together. But no village is remote and obscure to itself; its inhabitants occupy the center of the universe. After twenty-five years, Owen and Julia are woven into that center. Their relationship is loving but haunted. He thinks of Phyllis every day, though her image seldom troubles to invade his dreams; there is instead a generic oneiric wife-figure who, on his awaking, Owen is not certain had been Julia or Phyllis or yet another female. Sometimes she presides over a house whose corners and floorboards and scattered toys and chipped dishes are those of his first house, the home of Isaac and Anna Rausch on Mifflin Avenue in Willow. Everything in that house, every trivial little object and square foot of carpet, was supercharged with significance. His mother had existed in the house as a nexus of need, a wife, child, and mother all at once, hovering between Owen’s head and the ceiling, a constant voice in the middle distance, where the view from the window intersected with the dirty wallpaper.

Once, a dream of that house reminded him, his mother bought a wallpaper cleaner that consisted of a pink puttylike substance in a cylindrical container like the Quaker Oats box. He and his father were enlisted in rubbing a ball of this fleshy substance across the dingy pattern of big yellow roses and green thorny stems in his parents’ bedroom; when his childish turn came, he found the work strenuous and intimate, with his nose so close to the faintly rough, slightly paling grain of the hopeless immensities of paper. Invisible coal dust, wafted from thousands of chimneys, gradually turned gray the sweet-smelling, adhesive substance in his hands. The chore, whose enlistment seemed to mark, for little Owen, a step up into adult labors, remained in his mind as an instance of his mother’s heat—the friction of her resistance to the way things were. To his father and him, the wallpaper had seemed clean enough.

He wonders how suicidal Phyllis’s end had been. She had been delayed by her outburst at him and was speeding, to be sure, not even pausing to fasten her seat belt; but to arrange to skid on wet leaves, to achieve a rollover and a broken neck, seemed impossibly precise. And why end her life when she had a new mission, to save him from himself and Julia? No, the accident was just that, an absurd confluence of atoms in space-time, slipped through a flurry of unlikely odds. And yet she had become inconvenient to him, and Owen led, he was early convinced, a life charmed from above. God killed Phyllis, as a favor to him: from this blasphemous thought he seeks to shield himself with the fancy that Phyllis, the beautiful math major, had crossed herself out the way a redundant term is dropped from the denominator and the numerator of a complex fraction.

Julia consigned to a dark cupboard on the third floor photographs and slides containing Phyllis’s image, captured before the era of family videos, but his four children were allowed to have their mother’s photograph in their rooms. The photos are still there. Owen often studies them, not just colored snapshots but studio portraits of Phyllis’s virginal self, in a wasp-waisted, wide-skirted dress of the time, with her bangs sleekly brushed and a certain arch sideways glance invited by the photographer’s banter. He blames her ghost, who, unchanging, gathers strength as the living weaken, for his sexual failures with Julia. Five years younger than he, his wife is still needy; there is hardly a night when she doesn’t interrupt his going to sleep with a hug or an inquisitive caress. Yet, always a great believer in the health-giving value of sleep, he unchivalrously clings to the approaching oblivion. That oblivion may soon embrace him for good does not deter him. His heart still beats and his prostate gland is still intact, but his receptors for her signals have degraded. Nevertheless, he finds her frustrated attention a comfort and solace, and he hopes, each night as his bedtime book grows heavy and nonsensical in his hands, to do better. Sometimes, he does, and both are greatly gratified. How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!

Just recently he had a dream in which, in some kind of classroom setting, he was delegated by the teacher to take a pencil or a textbook to Barbara Emerich, who was sitting alone in a corner, at one of those chairs with a broadened arm of yellow oak to write on. As he obediently offered this pencil or textbook to her, she responded by curling more deeply into herself, sitting unresponsive, so that he had to urge himself closer, and sensed, out of the shadowy space between her lap and her downturned face, that she was willing to have him kiss her. She expected it but acted on the expectation only by maintaining a stubborn stillness, her mouth clamped shut on her sunny smile, with its single gray tooth. Barbara Emerich, he happens to know, has grown morbidly fat, and appears at class reunions hobbling with a cane, and her winsome gray