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

has become their dotage. “I hate it,” she tells him, “when you’re not in the house, even when you’re just off for golf.”

“How dear of you, baby. I hate it when you play bridge all afternoon. The house seems so large. When you’re here, it seems rather small.”

This is not entirely a compliment; Julia laughs at the jab, acknowledging that, yes, when he is in a room she finds an excuse to enter it; when he is closeted with his murmuring CPU, matching wits with the circuitry as it twirls an algorithm, at the rate of two hundred twenty billion cycles a second, through the AND and OR gates toward the conclusory IF … THEN … ELSE, she enters with a question about their health insurance or the yew and euonymus bushes waiting for him to trim them, as only he can do it, with his artistic eye—the lawn boys hack away, like bad barbers. They don’t take enough; they create holes and bald spots that never grow in. Or else she disturbs him on the terrace while he is trying for the hundredth time to render, with flake white, cobalt blue, ivory black, and a touch of Roman ochre, the look of rain clouds approaching above the sea’s horizon, their maddening near-colorlessness and their simultaneous elaborate structure and chaotic vapor, a mere brushstroke on wet paper in watercolor but in oils a labored accumulation of minutely three-dimensional touches that will be dry tomorrow. Since early childhood, Owen has sheltered from reality’s pressure and misalignments by focusing closely on a paper page, a plywood cutout, a blob of clay, or, under Buddy Rourke’s laconic guidance, a copper connection within a braid of color-coded wires. Julia sets up a human clamor against her husband’s exclusionary absorption in the inanimate.

He tells her, teasingly, of the house, “Maybe it’s too large and we should sell it.”

“Don’t torture me; you know I love it here. And love you. At times,” she tells him, “I look at you when you don’t know I’m looking and I get this shiver, a physical shiver.”

“After all these years?” he dutifully asks. Their infantile give and take, word by word, forms a music that never palls, scored for a thousand repeats.

“Oh yes,” she dutifully answers. “More, even, instead of less. Something about the way you look when you don’t think anybody’s looking at you.”

“So you don’t regret … us?”

“Oh no. Not really. I’m glad. Aren’t you?”

“Oh yes,” he says.

Yet she finds, he feels, more and more about him that panics her. “Don’t eat in the middle of the kitchen floor,” she suddenly cries, as if electrically shocked. “Eat over the sink if you must eat all the time. I never saw anybody eat so constantly; no wonder your teeth are always disgusting.”

As a child on Mifflin Avenue he had been afraid the food would give out, and would march through the house nibbling a celery stick or a dirty carrot fresh-pulled from the backyard garden. Phyllis had never appeared to notice his nervous habit of grabbing pretzels, nuts, cookies from the bread drawer, to fill a suddenly felt gap within him. He fights back: “I hate eating over the sink, it makes me feel like a dog at his bowl.”

“Well, the floor everywhere is full of crumbs and the cleaning ladies were just here.” Those bustling Brazilians with their broad bottoms: when they talk together the language is as full of shushing sounds as Russian. Owen suspects that big countries are unhappier than little countries: more responsibilities.

“And don’t slurp,” Julia will say, of hot soup. She rarely serves soup, as if to teach him a lesson. “You had such a terrible upbringing. What was your mother thinking of?”

“She was improvising. She hadn’t been a mother before. She was going for the big picture, not table manners.”

“Good manners are where it all begins,” Julia states, and he accepts the wisdom from her, who looks to be the last of a string of instructresses. “My father used to say, manners are a form of courtesy, and courtesy a form of goodness.” She goes on, “And that’s what I tell my grandchildren. You observe their manners, Owen, and they’ll help you. They don’t slurp.”

He searches the dump of odd information in his head for a self-defense. “It tastes better,” he explains. “In some societies, slurping is considered a compliment to the host and hostess.”

“Well, aren’t we glad we don’t live in such a society? And another thing you do that’s truly terrible—I noticed it the other night, at dinner with the Achesons. You don’t break your bread into little enough pieces and you dabble at it with your butter knife, pat pat pat. It drove me so crazy I wanted to grab the bread out of your hand.”

“Well,” he says, “that would have been a lesson in manners to edify everybody.”

“I’m sorry, but I love you so much, I can’t stand it when you eat like an animal.”

“Grrr.”

“Don’t try to be funny, dear. It’s not funny. It’s your one flaw. And please look at me when I’m talking to you.” If he glanced away—say, at the newspaper on the kitchen table with its horrifying headlines of international and domestic tragedy—it was in the constructive spirit of multi-tasking, as mainframe computers used to do in the heyday of timesharing. It does seem to him, as Julia explains details of their health insurance or their next trip to Europe, that the English language in her mouth has too elaborate a syntax, expanding a simple thought graspable by the mind in a few billionths of a second into a paragraph a number of minutes long. One of the boys older than he back in Willow, probably Marty Naftzinger, who made a study of such matters, confided to him this piece of village wisdom: “The more a girl talks, the more she’ll fuck. Their mouths and their cunts,” Marty theorized, “are connected by this long nerve down their spines.”

Experience bore it out. Phyllis had talked reluctantly, as if the language of numbers