Villages

by John Updike

  “Baby,” his wife said to Owen, “I know you’re having a wonderful time talking with our charming hostess, but we promised the babysitter six, and I need to see Eve. And she me.” Phyllis’s breasts embarrassed him, they were so big, stuffed with milk, straining against the top of the oversize cotton dress, plain beige, with which she had covered a body still somewhat distended by childbirth. Yet Phyllis had her princessly air still, and said loftily to Faye, “Such a glorious day, Faye, and such a good idea for May. ‘Sumer is icumen in.’ ”

  “Can’t you stay, then? Some people will, when most have gone. We have a ham. Please.”

  “Oh, darling Faye, we just can’t, for a dozen good reasons. We have too much going on at home. I can’t trust the sitter to feed the children anything but junk. But you’re sweet.” To Owen she said, in a lower, firmer register, “I’ll go say goodbye to Jock for us, he’s on the veranda, and see you at the car.”

  When she was gone, Faye said to him accusingly, “You complain, but you don’t see yourself when she’s pregnant or topped up with milk; you preen. It’s lovely.”

  “I’m sorry we can’t stay.”

  “Of course you can’t, baby. You heard your wife. Her tits hurt.”

  Owen took the first step, past her, to leave, and Faye turned with him, to walk him across her lawn, the sparkling new-mown spring green, down to the driveway. They walked through broad bars of late-afternoon sunlight, beamed between trees and tall-shadowed people standing conversing in the heat and boisterous freedom of a cocktail party two hours old. Her arm, surprisingly, went around his waist, and his, more smoothly than his inner shakiness revealed, around hers. Their hips slithered together as, faces downturned as if alert for treacherous footing, they walked to the edge of the grass, where the driveway pebbles began. Her waist felt solid and flexible under his hand. Faye was a good compliant height for him; Phyllis was a little tall. Through the filter of his inner tremble Owen saw himself and Faye, stepping down the lawn, as a couple in a Hollywood musical, about to complicate their steps as the background music soared, opening their mouths in duet, or, by camera trickery, taking off together up into the sunlight that lay in stripes at their feet like slippery golden stairs.

  The summer was to pass before they slept together. There was so much clutter to work around—children on school vacation, spouses with their own holiday plans, still-living parents to placate with a visit. Grammy had died, but Grampy lived on, sitting on his sofa, his head tipped up, waiting for the mail, which came later and later, since the route, once a matter of connecting the widely spaced mailboxes of rural delivery, was filling in with houses, one farm after another gone under to development. Owen and Phyllis visited the farmhouse, with the kids, once a year, but his wife and mother had never meshed, even their silences speaking in a different language, and Floyd Mackenzie, paler and thinner, stared with some dismay at the visitors, as if he had acquired six new dependents. He felt exploited and taken for granted by the old college classmate in Norristown who had rescued him from unemployment. Owen’s mother’s weight and blood pressure had gone up alarmingly. The first time she had met Phyllis, before the marriage had taken place, some socks and underwear of Owen’s that Phyllis, with innocent possessiveness, had washed in her parents’ Maytag emerged from her suitcase and gave her future mother-in-law a fit of sullen temper that never quite abated over the years, though grandchildren and Christmas presents and, eventually, faithful financial support came to her out of her son’s marriage. Without being especially religious or conventional, she was offended by Phyllis’s liberal assumptions, and her confidently casual clothes, and her lofty lack of discipline with the children. The two women made bad electricity in the crammed little house, and the half-welcome intruders sought escape in car rides and backyard games. His mother’s resistance to Phyllis, who unlike Elsie had no local instinct for the tussle, made Owen more loyal, during the brief duration of their visits, yet at a deeper level, back in Middle Falls, gave a blessing to his impending betrayal.

  With Lyndon Johnson as President, the old decorums and austerities were melting away. Johnson ordered bombing of North Vietnam after a U.S. destroyer was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin. In Philadelphia, over two hundred were injured in black riots protesting police brutality. Malcolm X called the American dream an American nightmare. Hit singles of the year included Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly!,” Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” the Supremes’ “Baby Love,” the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” and Dean Martin’s “Everybody Loves Somebody.” Owen and Faye met at the town’s numerous get-togethers, formal and casual, small and large, packing all their tension into mannerly brief exchanges and light touches which they imagined were unnoticeably discreet. If anyone noticed, that was all right; in this particular social setting it was to be expected that some men and women would like each other especially. Liking each other was what all of them needed, to get through the slog of child-rearing, of homemaking, of earning a living, hour by hour. It was what they had instead of what younger people had—the defiant scarecrow costumes, the drugs, the crash pads, the sleeping where you fell, into whosever arms. Up to a point even Jock and Phyllis approved, what they could see and guess, because to have your spouse desired increased your own desirability; it increased the value of what you brought to the table of general acquaintance.

  At a party at the Morrisseys’, where the illustrator’s cluttered, casually artistic decor encouraged latent recklessness, Faye told Owen, speaking in a clenched way as if her lips might be read, “My psychiatrist wants me to ask you something.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Guess.”

  His mind obediently flitted about, startled by the news that she saw a psychiatrist, but settled on nothing. “I can’t.”

  “It’s so obvious, Owen. He wants me to ask you why you don’t want to sleep with me.”

  He felt his whole body blush, as if plunged into hot water. “I do, of course. But—”

  “But there’s your lovely wife.” Faye’s small face with its big features looked feral, drawing her lips back over these last words.

  “I was going to say, But how do we arrange it?”

  She opened her mouth to laugh but in her tension nothing came out. She too felt the hot water. “And you so clever, they say, arranging the insides of computers. Can you use the telephone, or is that too simple?”

  Yet this was not simple: the phone at E-O Data, his desk just separated by a chest-high cubicle wall from Ed’s desk, offered no privacy, and if Phyllis was out of the house there were still Gregory and Iris, who were eight and nearly seven, with sharp ears and childhood’s guileless curiosity. Phoning Faye was a grave, irrevocable step compared with flirting with her; there was no misconstruing it, or passing it off as part of normal life. He stalled for days, walking through the motions of normal life with a tingling body and a numbed, guilty head—guilty chiefly in regard to Faye, for ignoring her unambiguous overture. When he lay down beside Phyllis to sleep, his head churned with bits of this other woman—the inner curves of the two shy, shallow breasts that a certain low-cut dress revealed; the glazed bold stare of her muddy-green irises when she’d had one drink too many; the nervous dampness of her hand when it touched his; the look her face acquired when excited and amused, of being all eyes and mouth, and then the wry crimp of the lips, clipping shut a smile. He had trouble sleeping, and blamed Phyllis. He felt that if only Faye were beside him he could fall asleep in an instant. It was like wanting to stretch out beside Ginger Bitting on the top of the playground shed.

  There were phone booths dotted about Middle Falls; he finally resorted to one on the edge of town toward Upper Falls, in the strip of highway, once orchards and dairy farms, now filling in with fast-food franchises or low cinder-block buildings selling discount carpeting and tiles. Trucks kept roaring by, drowning out the faint scratchy words at the other end of the line and blowing late-summer road dust into Owen’s lungs. “Hello?”: it was Faye, he was sure;
her voice, disembodied, had a contralto timbre he had never noticed, a cello color at an opposite pole from the high bat’s cry of her laugh.

  “This is Owen Mackenzie,” he said, in case there was someone else there listening. If there was, her stiffened voice would tell him, and he would ask if by any chance he had left a pair of reading glasses there the other night, when the four of them, on an impulse after volleyball, had had pizza with their children. It was a long shot, his phone call would go on, but he had tried everywhere else, and it was driving him crazy. In her silence, he began, “I’m calling to ask if by any chance I left a pair of reading glasses—”

  “Owen,” she breathed. “Well, at last.”

  “You told me to call.”

  “And then you didn’t. For a week!”

  “I was scared.”

  “Why? It’s all so natural, Owen. It happens all the time. You hurt my feelings, not calling before.” Her contralto had a singing, lullaby quality he had not noticed before.

  “I’m sorry. Like I said, I—”

  While he tried to think of how not to repeat himself, Faye interrupted. “You want to see me?”

  “I do. God, I do.”

  “Can you get away next Tuesday?”

  “Next Tuesday! What about right now, now that I’ve got you? Are you going to be home?”

  “I am, but somebody could drop by any minute.” She paused, and then her voice hurried, laying down rules. “I want it to happen, but not in my and Jock’s house. Not the first time.”

  “Oh? It, as you call it, doesn’t have to happen at all; I just want to hold you a minute. To see you, and make sure you’re real.”

  “I know. That’s what they all say.”

  “Who does?”

  “Men. Don’t do your naïve act, Owen. Now, listen. I have a sitter coming Tuesday at ten. I’m seeing my shrink in Hartford and then supposedly going shopping at G. Fox and Sage Allen and then looking at what’s on at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Could you get away from Ed for a few hours? Say you have a dentist appointment. We’ll have a picnic. I know a place. I’ll meet you at the new mall, parked in front of Ames. You know the car—a maroon Mercedes. Call me Monday if there’s a problem. If somebody else answers, tell them you found your glasses.”

  “It’s all so cold-blooded!” he protested.

  This made her laugh. “Owen, you must learn,” she said, solemnly, “to be practical. Life isn’t some dream you can just wander through.” She was being a teacher; he loved that.

  The picnic spot was a twenty-acre nature preserve called Whitefield’s Rock. The great evangelist was supposed to have preached from there, but scholars now doubted it and thought, from the topography, he must have preached from a similar outcropping of ledge some miles away. The rock itself, worn smooth with footsteps and its crevices littered with cigarette filters and Popsicle sticks, was not their destination; they found an open space, well off the path, sheltered from the September breeze and, they trusted, from any stray walker’s sight. The preserve, with its religious taint, was never crowded and after Labor Day virtually deserted. People, over the summer, had found this secret space before them; a beer can glinted beneath a bush, and the grass, soft and yellowish in the way of constantly shaded grass, showed matted patches. She had brought a blanket and their picnic in a well-stocked basket but neither Owen nor Faye had an appetite, even for the Portuguese rosé in a squat round bottle with a twist-off cap. They fell into each other as if to hide from the other’s gaze. He could not believe the monstrous miracle of it, a woman not Phyllis kissing him, licking his ear, sighing in his arms, not resisting when he began to unbutton her blouse.

  Faye had dressed for Hartford, in a suit of light pimento tweed, over a cream-colored silk shirt, with two-tone high heels that she had changed, in the car, for old loafers, to hike in. She moved the picnic basket off the blanket to give their bodies room. He undid the blouse and, as she lifted up on one arm to let him get at the hooks and eyes, her bra. Her back was bonier than he was used to; to slacken the bra a second her shoulder blades dipped inward, as if in sitting-up exercises. Her shoulders were brown with summer’s merged freckles; her flat midriff showed a tan where Phyllis was sallow and stretch-marked. He wanted to cry out as Faye’s breasts, smaller and tauter than his wife’s, came free, to be touched by his trembling hands, his careful lips. The trees around them formed green walls, twitching and rippling in the breeze, showing leaves’ silver undersides, with here and there a maple or beech leaf already turned yellow.

  When they were done with her breasts she lifted her hips up from the blanket matter-of-factly. “The skirt, too,” she directed. “It’s getting rumpled.” He tugged the tweed, but her hip bones, wider than her shoulders, didn’t let go. “The buttons at the side!” Faye said, in the urgent, ungentle tone in which his mother had once said, Don’t touch it!

  He undid the buttons, the skirt slid down, and then, with the faintest gust of genital scent, the silk underpants, paler than her bra. They slid down, as with Elsie, but that was in the deep dark and this moment was awash in daylight. Revelations were coming too fast to take in, like presents at a speeded-up birthday party. Faye’s pubic hair was scanter than Phyllis’s; two gauzy waves met in a coppery crest down the middle of her mount. He wanted to see her face, to watch her watching his face as for the first time he saw this essence of her, this crux of her femininity; however long or short their future stretched from this moment, there would never be another such first time. Her face looked sleepy, complacent, her eyes halfway lidded, as if she were drinking in with him the sight of her, the top of her cleft visible through the scant reddish hair; she was drinking in the sight of him drinking her in, her expression proud and skeptical both. He loved her for her innocent lewd vanity. Faye enjoyed, he was discovering, being naked, even here in this precarious open, while his ears strained for a broken twig or a suppressed rustle in the forest around them. Her skin was a blinding pelt, not quite hairless and pricked by stray pink dots and threadlike capillaries. Bare but for her barrettes and loafers and a ring or two, she knelt to unzip him, his wits too slowed by listening for forest sounds to assist. He recovered his manners enough to ease his unbelted corduroys and Jockey shorts around his prick, already thumpingly erect. She gazed down at it as if into a baby’s face, touching it with the same fingertips that had gently rested on his wrist at the other end of summer. “Sweet,” she said. “Scary.”

  He was average, he had always supposed, from what he saw in locker rooms and, at MIT, stag movies. There was now a new roominess in his and Faye’s relationship, space into which he expanded. His voice had grown husky and murmurous, a seducer’s. “You can handle it, I think. But”—in more his own voice, too light and tentative—“do you want to? You don’t have to. We’ve already done a lot, for a first date.”

  “Owen,” she scolded, “I want you to make love to me. I’ll be very angry if you don’t.”

  “O.K., wonderful. I brought this for us.” He rummaged, so awkwardly he began to blush, in the pocket of the corduroys, still rumpled and caught around his knees. In a square foil packet, brought from the bathroom cabinet at home, where one wouldn’t be missed from the box of them.

  “Oh, darling. I’m on the Pill, isn’t Phyllis? No wonder you two keep making babies.”

  A flock of crows, six or eight, raucously rasping at one another, thrashed into the top of an oak on the edge of the square of sky. The heavenly invasion made his heart race; he looked down at his prick, silently begging it not to be distracted; his mind fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows.

  Faye took him in hand. He slipped in. He became an adulterer. He went for the last inch.
She grunted, at her own revelation. His was that her cunt did not feel like Phyllis’s. Smoother, somehow simpler, its wetness less thick, less of a sauce, more of a glaze. It was soon over. He could not help himself, he was so excited, proud, and nervous. When he was done, he opened his eyes, and saw this stranger’s face an inch from his, seemingly asleep, the closed eyelids showing a thin pulse, her long lips curved self-lullingly. “Sorry, sorry,” Owen apologized. “You never had a chance. Next time I’ll do better. If you’ll give me a next time.”

  “You were lovely, silly,” she said. “So intense.”

  “I was?” She could compare; she had had other men, he knew from the practiced way she had managed this meeting.

  “Yes.” Now she was feeling her nakedness as vulnerability; her mouth made its little deprecating crimp, and her eyes moved from side to side, taking in their green, breeze-rippled surroundings.

  But he felt in no hurry to get off her. “Tell me about it,” he idly demanded, in a soft growl that rubbed his throat like a purr. “About my coming.”

  “It tells me that this is important to you.”

  “Isn’t it to every man?”

  Faye frowned, perhaps at his weight still being there, upon her. “No,” she said. “To some …” She shrugged and didn’t finish. Owen guessed that Jock was one of the some.

  She told him things. She saw him as living an unnaturally proper and aloof life with Phyllis, and needing instruction. “You should drink more,” she once told him, as if his moderation were a diet deficiency. She wanted him to join her on the muddy earth, to be more like Jock. Yet she appreciated that he was not like Jock. She told him, later, of this day, that, after dropping him off on the parking lot in front of Ames, as she drove around in her Mercedes with its uneaten picnic lunch and then home she cried to think that she could never have him, except for a time in this illicit, doomed fashion.

  Later still, years later, he would wonder why he had loved her so much, flashy and hard-nosed and shallow as Phyllis explained to him Faye was. For some months he dreamed of marrying her, so as to have her always at his side, and everything touching her—her two skinny, wan children, her rambling Victorian house, her jauntily improvised costumes, her casual mix of furniture (Jock’s inherited antiques, her faddish sling chairs and airfoam sofas), the photographs of her in her attic that she showed him, herself as a girl, as a college freshman, as a bride in white lace—everything touching her seemed holy. She tinged the world a new color, an iridescent stain in her vicinity, giving even the gritty parking lots where they met for a tryst a sparkling, poignant glory. Later he would come and stand on the spot where their cars had parked, one driver furtively becoming a passenger, and he would feel a hollowness spreading around him. Like strong sunlight she faded once-important sections of his life—his children, new wrinkles in programming code, E-O Data’s growth and struggles, even the news, as freedom marches wracked the South and a distant sliver of Asia took more and more front-page space—so that he moved insensible through these realms of former interest. This tinge, this sweet sickness of love, lingered in his system for years, an imbalance that was precious to him. Faye had dwindled to an inner sore, but that bitter remainder he pressed deeper into his sense of himself. She had given him, at thirty-one, a freedom that others (Marty Naftzinger, say) had long known, a freedom of the body. He was grateful but could not repay her—had ill repaid her. The women, including Phyllis, who advised him told him he was making too much of it. Women took their chances, their gambles, and sometimes lost. Faye had lost.