Villages

by John Updike

  But what only he could know was that he had failed a kind of child. Naked, Faye showed round white hips and thighs, though she was lean and bony above the waist, with a face her features seemed to be struggling to escape. She was experienced, sexually, more than he, but adultery had left her innocent. Sex with her was straightforward, with none of the elaborations others were to demonstrate. The grip of her vagina had something infantile about it, something heartbreaking, like a child’s shy, hopeful question. She persuaded him he had the answer. During the months of the affair his lovemaking with Phyllis became more confident and insistent. He spoke more loudly and warmly to his children, when they materialized to him through his mists of being mentally elsewhere. Photographs from that time show him as mussed and manicky-looking. He felt fonder of the world at large—the old mill town with its services and cheerfully laborious local characters and the winter weather with its scrape of plowing and their cozy circle of friends. He felt especially fond of Jock; he wanted to hug the man, red-faced Jock with his baked-on alcoholic grin, for feeding and sheltering such a marvel of beauty and concupiscence. He could hardly contain the wonder of it—this well-cared-for woman, in such expensive and amusing clothes, taking such risks to perform for him acts that Phyllis performed reluctantly, ironically, looking to one side, in her own safe home, with all society’s sanctions backing his thrusts.

  Why Faye would behave in such a reckless and adorable way—why any woman would—was still not clear to Owen. He assumed that she had wanted something in return, him as husband, and that he had failed to give it to her; the heat of his failure annealed her image to him. He would show loyalty where he could, in his inner theatre. He would always remember how she looked at certain moments, wistful moments, her generic female beauty married to something specific and complicated happening in her face, an awareness of cross-currents and half-lies and underlying sadness. “Well, I’m glad it was you,” she said at the end, trying to make a life-stage of it, a lesson learned.

  Toward the end, they were getting careless. Once, trying to find privacy down a dirt road, they got her heavy Mercedes stuck in the March mud and had to phone for a tow truck from the home of the owner of the property they were trespassing upon. Tired of sleazy motels and furtive excursions, they would sneak him into her house, with Jock off and the children at school and no plumber or cleaning woman scheduled to show up. To bring them, after a while, something to eat or drink, she would wander naked through the winter-bright rooms, like a deer at home in the camouflaging forest. Returning to him where he lay languid in the wrecked guestroom bed, she would laugh at something, something utterly marvelling and grateful, she saw in his face. She would laugh, and her mouth would stay open a second longer as the girlish high sound died away. Even now, an elderly resident of Haskells Crossing, looking both ways before judiciously forcing his creaky body to cross the street, he feels his heart skip when he sees a young woman of a certain taut, bony-faced type emerge from the 7-Eleven or wait in front of the new Starbucks, giving someone she suddenly spots on the street a big grin, exposing her gums as well as her teeth, as Faye used to greet him at one of her and Jock’s parties. She has come back to him.

  ix. Convalescence

  It was Faye who ended it, by telling her husband. She let Owen know over the phone. When he, knocked nearly breathless by the betrayal, asked her why, she was vague. “Oh—my shrink thought I was getting confused. It was too much, Owen. I didn’t know what you wanted, and it was killing me, frankly. I’m sorry. If I hadn’t loved you so much, I could have handled it better.”

  “But you never told me any of this. You were always so gay, so—so giving and cheerful. Like this was all you wanted. Even that time we got stuck, the cool way you offered to pay the man for repairing the ruts, after using his phone. You were wonderful, Faye.” Meaning wonderful in everything, and said very softly. Owen was at his desk, with Ed in the next cubicle and their employees passing by with coffee and folders. He murmured into the receiver with his back turned and his chair, an ergonomic swivel on a five-roller chrome pedestal, facing the wire-webbed window. If he stood up he could have seen the Chunkaunkabaug, most of its rocks concealed beneath the fast-running meltwater, heading for the falls.

  “I was terrified that man would tell Jock,” Faye was explaining, a tiny voice caught in the receiver, like an insect under a water tumbler. “Or that somebody would see us in a car together. It could have happened at any time, and then Jock would have had me over a barrel—he can be very tricky, about money. This way at least he found out from me: the errant wife confesses. Owen, I can’t talk forever about it; we were awake all night, except for a couple of hours, and he just went out of the house to go buy cigarettes and the Wall Street Journal. Watch out for him downtown.”

  Owen was not sorry to think that the conversation would be short. The workaday world around him had become realer, for the first time in seven months, than that illicit annex into which he was pouring his voice, through this little electronic hole at his lips. “Still,” he said, seeking for leverage in the sudden shift, “you should have discussed this with me.”

  “You would have argued and got me more confused.” Faye laughed—a disagreeable yelp, a high-pitched sound a child would make when pinched. She said, as if reading the words from a card, “Men don’t think beyond their next piece of ass.”

  Was she deliberately trying to offend him, to soften this blow? He said, angry anyway, “Is that what Jock tells you?”

  “It’s what I tell him. You’ll get over it, Owen. We all will. People do.”

  Those showy clothes of hers, that babylike happy nudity, those wide-open hazel eyes, that voice with its stagy range from high to low, all slipping from him, into the abyss of forever. “Thanks a lot for those comforting words,” he said, so sarcastically that she hung up.

  Ed, visiting Owen’s cubicle in the next hour, took a look at him and said, “You want to go home early? You look like you’ve been socked in the belly. You look like shit.”

  “I think I’ve caught a spring cold. I never know how to dress this time of year.” But he did leave the factory early; he couldn’t get home fast enough. To their surprise, he dragged Gregory and Iris out into the threadbare, muddy yard to play a little softball. Their puzzled efforts to please him, to find the ball with their wild swings, broke his heart. Without their understanding it they were trying to work an exoneration for the sinner turned back into a father. He would have liked to stay in the yard on and on, enclosed in the bubble of family life, never telling Phyllis and never answering the phone, but the afternoon grew dark and cold, and they all went into the warm house, where Phyllis was making the dinner, putting the meatloaf into the oven and fluttering her nearly invisible pale lashes to rid herself of the tears from, he guessed, having chopped onions. She was not quite herself; there was something stale and studied about her cheerfulness as she chatted at the table with the children and fed little Eve, in the high chair, her applesauce and creamed carrots.

  When, that evening, with the four children at last in their beds, he began to confess, she cut him off. “I know. Jock came over this afternoon and told me. Well, do you want a divorce?”

  “No.” The softball game with the two older children, taking their determined stances at the imaginary plate, imitating the gestures of ballplayers on television, cocking the bat so it pointed straight up at the fleecy, tossing April sky, and then so touchingly striking out, had erased his recurrent dream, a kind of fever dream, of a life with Faye.

  “Well, you better tell them that, before they go ahead and get one.”

  Of the subsequent agitated palavers—the four of them at one grim, eventually drunken conference in their house, where he had more than once been an illicit guest, and then in scattered tête-à-têtes, as the increasingly public aftermath unfolded, between Jock and Phyllis, Jock and him, Phyllis and him, Faye and Phyllis, every pairing except the one it was all about—Owen had the defective memory of the severely embarrassed.
He didn’t want to remember it. Moments continued to stick in his mind as contexts melted into forgetfulness: Jock asking him, across the booth in the old-fashioned aluminum roadside diner toward Lower Falls, “Did she have climaxes with you?”

  Owen took the question as rude aggression, some kind of cuckold’s gibe, and refused to answer it, but in hindsight imagined a watery earnestness in Jock’s eyes, their strained, pickled whites. What would the honest answer have been? It was too embarrassing—Owen wasn’t sure. Faye had been so loving, so smiling, and had bestowed upon their trysts (pathetically rare, in retrospect) such a glad aura of excitement and relief, that he had assumed so without any more evidence than his own easily obtained satisfaction. She would lie under him with her eyes closed, a little pulse in the lids, and when she opened them give him her gorgeous big grin and speak in a higher, shyer voice than usual. Phyllis, though he thought of her as cool and not often interested, gave clearer signs of orgasm. But, he reasoned, on this matter where so much of his education was yet to come, female sexuality must have many styles; he pictured it as a kind of harp whose strings, always faintly murmuring, were of widely different lengths and thicknesses. Yet the notion that Faye had been faking climaxes, or unprotestingly feigning contentment without them—that she had been, beneath her flashiness and show of ardor, frigid—wounded his sense of her; she had been deceiving him.

  Phyllis, too, in the long aftermath, contrived to diminish his image of Faye and reconcile him to his loss. “Didn’t you kids,” she asked him, “ever seriously discuss divorce and remarriage?”

  He could not exactly remember. He had more than once said how lovely it would be if she were his wife, but this wasn’t a proposal, was it? It was a dream, an alternate universe.

  “It seems obvious,” Phyllis went on mildly, considering the problem like one in topology, “that she wanted it. Jock takes good care of her financially, but as a husband I think he’s exhausted her capacity to romanticize him.”

  “Did she romanticize me?” He had felt, merely, that she had assigned him his true value. Their whole affair, from the first event in the woods by Whitefield’s Rock, had taken place under the sign of truth—fresh truth, fresh seeing. A smeared window had been ammoniated and wiped clean. As he plodded through one of E-O’s contracted applications programs for an insurance company’s records and logarithmized risk margins or a Danbury hat factory’s cost accounting, payroll, and stock control, he was aware of a lessened ability to link and combine logic chains, a fuzziness in his neurons brought on, perhaps, by their saturation in memories and anticipations of sex with Faye. But he was confident that eventually a new mental strength would result from this dip into sexual adventure. His marriage to Phyllis, when new—just lying beside her sleeping body, in unconscious partnership with her breathing and her dreams—had brought on brainstorms of which DigitEyes was the final, precocious product. After a few years, however, many rival such programs entered the market, while his vision of a graphic computer-user interface remained frustrated by the limits of the hardware, and the hardware’s high cost.

  High cost—what it came down to, perhaps, was that Faye had seemed too expensive for him; he could time-share her but not own her.

  “Of course, it’s what people do,” Phyllis told him, wearily, even tenderly, out of that ambient Cantabrigian wisdom she had absorbed as a girl. “Romanticize. Otherwise it all seems gross. Fucking,” she clarified. There had been a time when she wouldn’t have used the word, but the counterculture had changed that. Phyllis liked the faux-pauvre costumes of the young, their lack of makeup, their attachment to radical causes, their theoretical bent and belief in contentious discourse; it felt like home to her, something she had been part of before E-O Data had brought her to middlebrow Middle Falls. “Not that you needed much romanticizing; you’re an attractive man, Owen.”

  “Now you tell me.”

  “I told you from the start, the best I could. I can’t gush the way Faye does. Attractive, and she took you for rich, too.”

  “If she did, she was wrong. The new version of DigitEyes is selling very slowly. Sketchpad, out of the Lincoln Lab, has taken away market share. Also Ed is worried about this new minicomputer DEC is putting out for only eighteen thousand, the PDP-8. Everybody can own one and the market for standardized programs will take off. Contract programming like we do will become obsolete.” With their marriage revealed as an abyss beneath them, he was happy to shift their ground to technology. She was, too, for a few moments.

  “Really? That’s not what Ed tells me. He says the more people own computers the better for the software business all around. And anyway Faye didn’t know any of that. She wanted you for a husband, darling, like one of her cute new costumes. It’s the tragedy of women, isn’t it? The only thing we can trade on is fucking, and with the Pill now the price has gone way down.”

  “Please, stop talking so tough. It isn’t you.”

  “I thought you liked women tough. Or at least crass. It is me, Owen. It’s what you’ve made me, with this sleazy town of exurban misfits and this grotesque infatuation with Faye. First I had to put up with your deceit, and now with all your adolescent post-facto mooning. My mother was right: you weren’t for me. You were too much of a boy. My father was the one who liked you, though I never heard the two of you exchange more than six words. After scuttling Hank, I suppose he felt he owed me one.”

  Color had risen to her cheeks, through her throat; her level eyes, silvery in some lights, flared in rare indignation. He suppressed an admiring snicker: Phyllis had a lonely talent for seeing through things, to their bleak bones. Poor Faye, yes, she had told him to be practical, and had given him what lessons she could, but now her practical value to him was as a conquest, a badge he could wear in their little local society, where sex was less and less a household secret. True, he ached in her absence, but having her day after day would have brought with it daily life and its tedium, and sickly children with half of Jock’s genes, and a wife who thought half like Jock. “How could I marry her?” Owen asked his wife, plaintively, anxious to discuss this with somebody impartial. “I have four children, the youngest a year old!”

  Phyllis told him, “That wouldn’t have stopped some men. She saw you as reckless, Owen, because you’re creative, but in fact you’re very self-protective, very Pennsylvania-Dutch one-step-at-a-time. She rushed you, and you hate being rushed.”

  He took these observations for compliments, or at least for knowledgeable attention, and said with pleased sulkiness, “Ed says the trouble with programming is it’s been too creative. The need now, with the basics in place and all these new chips piling up hardware capability, is to make it less of an art and more of an engineering discipline.”

  “Does that scare you?” Phyllis asked him, ever a wife. In spite of the domestic horrors of the spring—scandal, possible breakup—she had found time to sunbathe in their big back yard, down by the lily pond with its rebuilt bridge, and the tip of her nose was pink.

  “No,” he said, relaxed again into being a husband, “E-O has younger people for the nitty-gritty, the coding and debugging, it comes like second nature to them; they don’t know there was ever a time before FORTRAN and COBOL. My task is more to dream, to dream big. I have my theories. I think graphics is the way into a huge market. If you can find a way around all these line commands that have to be memorized, and use simple intuitive images as the interface, everybody can use them. You can have games.”

  “Do people really need,” Phyllis asked, looking over her shoulder as she left the room, “even more ways to waste their time?”

  The Dunhams had a family lawyer, and Jock for a while talked about suing Owen for alienation of affections, or making the Mackenzies move out of town, but they produced a lawyer of their own, and in the end the most desirable thing seemed to be for the Dunhams to sell that rambling place with its veranda and move closer to the city, to Norwalk or Wilton, where the schools would be better for the children, and Jock would be close
r to where the Dunham money was managed over three-martini lunches, and Faye was fifty minutes away from Manhattan’s stores and shows and display cases. Owen thought of her striding through the city he had left five years ago, sinking happily into its glitter, and felt a jealous relief. He would always love her, she was his one fling into the dreamland of sexual happiness, but it had not been practical, and it gave him a metallic taste in his mouth, a touch of dread, to know that he had intervened in the lives of others, dislocating them, causing something as serious as a change of address and a change of schools for the two bewildered, delicate Dunham children. Marrying Phyllis had occurred under the supervision of adults; engendering his own children—a blunt intervention in the world’s statistics—had occurred under her supervision. But fucking Faye had been his idea, or an idea of hers that he had readily adopted, alone with her beneath the square sky that day, with the crows, and the bed of soft grass behind the holy rock.