by John Updike
“Trapped?” Owen asked, offended. “Who’s doing the trapping?”
“Nobody, sweetie—it just happens. Used to happen. Are you going to pass that joint or just hang on to it in that foolish way?”
“Do you really think Owie is foolish?” Stacey asked in her slowed, sweet Texas voice. “I don’t think he’s foolish, he’s just stunned.” The last word elongated in Owen’s mind like a lasso. When had women started to talk about him as if he were absent? Nearly being sued for alienation of affections had given him a sort of Exhibit A status.
“You mean …” Phyllis began, and let the thought trail as she relinquished the joint and passed it to Ed, who held the smoking thing up before his nearsighted eyes and studied it as if it were a distasteful puzzle.
“Drugs,” he announced, “eat up your brain cells.”
“Yeah,” Owen agreed, anxious as always to preserve male solidarity, “but so does aging. Brain cells die all the time, and still the brain has more than it needs, for most purposes.” Completing so extended a thought seemed a miracle, like a strand of DNA.
“Listen to them,” Stacey said to Phyllis, “worrying about the size of their brains. Isn’t that macho?”
“Men,” Phyllis offered, “are into quantification. Did you mean,” she went on, in her lovely light laid-back style—he had always been drawn by her diffident voice, from the days at MIT, when he had to strain to overhear it—“that Owie, as you call him, is still stunned because of that affair he had ages ago with that ridiculous woman? I forget her name.”
“Faye Dunham,” Ed supplied, taking a very gingerly hit from the joint, which was becoming a roach. In these Sunday nights all the Middle Falls gossip came out, bringing Stacey up-to-date, including Owen’s affair, mostly as presented by Phyllis, as a pathetic breach not only of marital vows but of self-respect and enlightened self-interest. Stacey seemed interested, to Ed’s discomfort, which he expressed by withdrawal into silence or laconic pronouncements. “Faye was O.K.,” he said. “Just easily bored. She was at a restless time of life, married to a lush like that.”
Stacey crooned to him, “Don’t you ever get to that time of life, honey.”
“How could I?” he asked.
Nobody knew the answer. Did he mean he was too fat? Or Stacey was too perfect a wife? The women were in clothes now. Stacey sat on the floor, on a large Navajo rug she had brought as part of her dowry. Its stripes, black, red, green, and clay-color, vibrated around her. She sat in the yoga position, her miniskirt hitched up her thighs and barely hiding the crotch of her underpants. Phyllis was erect on the pale sofa beside a slouching Ed; her long neck stretched as she sucked down the smoke on a deep inhale. Owen sat in the ample, cunningly made Danish teak armchair that was probably Ed’s when there was no company. They were drinking watery bourbon-and-sodas, with a beer for Ed. Phyllis passed Stacey what was left of the joint. From the floor Stacey cried, “How’d this poor little thang git so wet? Who’s been slobbering, honey?”
“Not me,” Ed said. “I passed.”
“Now I’ll need to make another,” his wife complained.
“Not for me,” Phyllis said. “I feel funny.”
After what seemed quite an interval, Ed said, “You need air. Let’s go walk around.”
“How funny?” Owen asked.
There seemed to Owen to be a curious double quality to time in the room: very slow when people spoke, yet speeded up in the silences, with many hurried pulse beats crowded into seconds.
Phyllis refined her statement: “I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, and asked the air, “Who would have thought this country would wind up dropping napalm on a lot of Indochinese peasants and children?”
“That’s no worse than what we did to the Indians,” Stacey said.
“Is that all they are?” Owen asked Phyllis, as if at home they didn’t have time to exchange views, which in a way was true. “Or are they also Viet Cong, who are burying village chiefs, head-down, and trying to force a grotesque style of misgovernment on the South Vietnamese?” “Good question,” Ed admitted.
“Poor Owen,” said Stacey; her face seemed to swim in her hair as she sat on the floor at Owen’s feet, beside the glass coffee table, through which he could see one of her deeply tanned knees. “He’s such a patriot. He reminds me of the true-blue men in Texas.”
Phyllis stood, with a tumult of cloth and audible breath that brought back to Owen how sizable she was, what a catch she had been. “I need air, I guess,” she said, “and, Owen, we both need to go home and rescue the babysitter.”
“Right,” he agreed, but with no intention of moving. Life was too good here, with this hopeful new couple, in high bourgeois comfort. He wondered where the joint had gone and hoped it wasn’t burning a hole anywhere. He put the glass of weak whiskey to his lips and sucked, the glass’s rim making a cool brittle arc in his mind.
Ed had stood, laboriously, in delayed synchrony with Phyllis. There was a discussion among them as opaque and irrelevant to Owen as consultations among his parents overheard when he was three or four. He could have listened and understood, with the half of his mind that was clear and cold, but his attention was turned to the other half, which was experiencing an extraordinary happiness befalling him, permeating him like the fog of neutrinos that pour by the trillions out of the sun, even during, as now, nighttime. This was bliss: the slick texture of teak under his fingertips; the black and red and clay and cactus-green Navajo zigzags of thick wool under his eyes; the very grain of wood in the broad bleached floorboards, testifying to cycles of growth within a distant spruce forest; the clean white plane of the ceiling meeting the white-painted bricks of the Mervines’ exposed chimney; the horsey scent of Stacey’s damp hair, not far from where he was sitting; the soft, pecking sounds of adult conversation; the very feel of his awareness along the length of his body, as if consciousness were a silken robe tapping his skin wherever he chose to direct his attention; the enclosed air of this room, this parallelepiped clipped from the trillions of cubic feet of domestic space in America, snugly but freely full of human love, his for his wife and for his partner and now his partner’s partner, whose deeply tanned knee no longer showed beneath the glass coffee table because she had moved closer to his Danish armchair. These details, animate and inanimate, arrived on his neuronal structure with that lost purity, that flat enumerative wonder, of childhood illness, when one is confined to bed and relieved of every duty but the one to exist, to survive, to continue to be. How could he have so long mislaid so basic a treasure, this dimension of bliss in things?
Parental voices mixed in the hall; the sounds of a door opening and closing were followed by those of a car starting and receding. “What’s happening?” he asked Stacey, whose face had come closer to his own knees.
“Phyllis asked Ed to take her home. She felt like she might be sick.”
“Couldn’t she be sick here?”
Stacey’s face looked broader than he had ever noticed, and more intelligent, with kindness molding every molecule of the curving, insouciant lips. They had known each other for going on two years and he had never noticed this encompassing, angelic quality of hers before. She said, “And she’s worried about the babysitter.”
“Who’ll drive the babysitter home if Phyllis is so sick?”
“Ed will.”
“What about me?” Owen asked. “Why am I left out of all this?”
“You weren’t, you dear baby. She asked you to come home with her and you refused.”
“Refused?”
“Well, you didn’t say anything. You just sat there stoned, and I guess she felt too funny to stay and argue.”
“I was thinking about how lovely everything is, here among the four of us. She has a negative side, Phyllis.”
“I know she does, darling Owen. I know she does. I know all about you both. Ed talks about the two of you all the time. Phyllis wouldn’t let you have Faye and you’ve given up inside. May I be frank?”
“Yo
u may be frank.”
“It makes me sad”—“sayud”—“to see the way you’ve given up. Owen, you’re jes’ gone through the motions.”
“Am I truly? How do I know? I mean, I don’t feel I’m just going through the motions. It’s like everybody asking if computers think. Well, do people? All you can say about people is that they think they think.” He was fending; her assertions about him seemed self-serving, his cold half-brain saw, but overall there might be something in them.
“Oh yeass,” Stacey said. “You pore, pore beautiful prisoner.”
Her warm wide face had moved even closer, to between his thighs as he slouched dreamily in Ed’s teak armchair. She leaned her face against the inside of his thigh so that when she smiled he felt the bulge of her cheek press lightly through the khaki cloth. “Prisoner?” he asked, trying to coördinate the word with these surfaces, the walls and furniture that he had felt to be such repositories of bliss not many seconds ago. The clear half of his brain felt like a splinter in the flesh of this bygone revelation. “When is Ed coming back?” he asked. People were in the wrong places and he had to straighten it out.
“Not quite yet, you sweet thang,” Stacey said, still smiling, her perfect white California-Texas teeth biting down on the lower lip as if to taste her own smile. “I want to do something, Owen. Now, you’ll just have to bear with me.” With her middle finger and thumb pinched as if to untie a bow, she pulled the tab of his fly zipper down. “Don’t you get nervous, I just want to see him, all by myself,” she explained soothingly, with a touch of petulance.
The windows were black, Wilson Drive outside was clean of traffic, it was late on Sunday night. They were, in a sense, alone, but, then, Owen half-saw, the world, all those atoms and neutrinos and electrons, is always with us. Her clever hand had found the fly of his boxer shorts and the little limp sleeping thing was in the open and then in her warm soft mouth. He felt himself begin to harden, and said, “No.”
“No?” she repeated in puzzlement; her mouth, backed up an inch or two, was still shaped, it seemed, by what had been in it, being wetly warmed. She was a different generation, Owen thought from a distance, and this was less of a deal for her. Cocksucking was just friendly. The smell of her damp horsey hair swelled in his nostrils. “Because of old Phyllis?” she asked.
“And Ed,” he pleaded. “Think of Ed, we can’t do this to him. To Phyllis either. She needs your friendship, Stacey; she really can’t talk to these other women around here. The only time I see her relax is when she’s over here with the three of us. She likes you a lot.”
“Really?” His prick, not listening to him, had woken up and was getting harder. Stacey saw this and said, “Look at that dear friendly jimmy. Faye used to sing his praises to her girlfriends, they do tell me.”
He found this hard to picture and stopped trying. “We don’t want to make a mess of things,” he insisted. “E-O Data and all that.”
Rebuffed, sitting back on her bare heels, Stacey began to explain herself: “Owen, I just felt so fond of you, like you were going to waste—it must have been the pot.”
He had talked himself out of a pretty good deal, he saw, sickeningly. He was wilting, listing to one side. “You could do a little more if you wanted,” he suggested, “it’s just that in the long run—”
“Oh, no, darling. You put him right back,” she said, and floppily pushed herself to her feet, tugging down the miniskirt to ease out the wrinkles, rocking back and forth for balance on her long brown feet and staring angrily around at her own room, as if the walls had been witnesses to her rejection. Her mouth had shocked him with its warmth; now he felt a chill.
“Listen,” he began, “that was terrific but—”
“Owen, you are one hundred percent right, I don’t know what I was thinking of.”
“You were feeling sorry for me,” he reminded her.
“Or something like that. But, honey, you shouldn’t tease a girl. We are going to be friends. And whenever I get a tingling in my pussy I am going to tell it, You shut your big mouth.”
He laughed, working his disheartened penis back into his resistant pants, and zipped. “You’re sounding more and more Texan,” he told her.
“I try to keep it down, it embarrasses Ed. He’s very insecure.”
“I never noticed that about Ed.”
“Oh yes. He doesn’t like being fat but, I tell him, it won’t go away by itself.”
“Feed him salads,” Owen suggested. The half of his head that was not icy and lucid was being squeezed to one side, above his right ear. “And lots of loving.” Or did he just think that last phrase? Stacey registered no reaction, moving about the living room clearing glasses and ashtrays. Was he really such a homosexual, Owen asked himself, that he was trying to provide for Ed’s sex life? When Stacey came off her high she would see she’d been spurned, and be pissed off. Already she was moving in and out of the room, back and forth into the kitchen, with an excessive, closing-up-shop energy. He could not stop thinking about her loose warm mouth, with regret and a sour sense of righteousness. She was Ed’s, Phyllis was his; did things have to be that simple?
Stacey’s housekeeping would have soon come down to how to get him out of here, but the other couple pushed at the front door and were back. “What happened?” Owen asked them, looking down to make sure his fly was zipped.
Phyllis followed the direction of his glance but was in her stately mood, above it all. “Ed drove me toward home but then, just being out, with the car windows down, I felt better and thought we should come back. Didn’t you two miss us?”
“We did,” Owen told her. “We felt abandoned. We had run out of conversation.”
“Then let’s go home, dear. Are you too stoned to drive? I still feel too detached.”
Ed and Stacey were murmuring together, so that Owen felt cruelly excluded from the couple. He rose, hunching a bit in case anything still showed. He had uxoriously extricated himself from his partner’s wife’s mouth, but her aggression had reopened him to possibilities. Polymorphous life beckoned. The dark gods were in fashion. Everyone was sinning, including the government. He resolved in his heart to become a seducer. He would never treat his poor prick that cruel way again.
It was 1967. Walt Rostow averred, “Victory is just around the corner.” Robert McNamara, not sure this was so, resigned the office of Secretary of Defense to become head of the World Bank. H. Rap Brown claimed of the black riots in Newark and Detroit that they were a dress rehearsal for revolution. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West. Lunar Orbiter V was launched, to obtain a complete mapping of the moon’s surface, including the dark side. Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali announced, “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” In San Francisco, an estimated hundred thousand hippies claimed “Haight Is Love,” and Golden Gate Park played host to a giant “Be-In.”
x. Village Sex—V
In his dream, Owen is back in Middle Falls, moving between his house on Partridgeberry Road and his central desk at E-O Data and the little retreat room, with a DEC PDP-8 and a CRT and a desk and telephone and an imitation-leather sofa, that he rigged at one end of the old arms factory on the Chunkaunkabaug. Between these stations of his life lay a network of village streets and vendors—the three restaurants, the two banks, the Woolworth’s, the dry cleaner’s, the shoe-repair shop, which was beginning to do a nice business in hippie-style leather sandals and clogs. The town, pre-CVS, had multiple drugstores, the oldest of them, Amory’s Pharmacy, on the hill, still holding some back shelves of patent medicines with faded Victorian labels and displaying in its window the two traditional oversize vials of emblematic liquid, iodine-red and litmus-blue, that since medieval times have advertised pharmacological healing. On another, more personalized level of the net were the family dentist; the doctor, taciturn and unsympathetic with any but the most dramatic complaint; the pediatrician, for the children’s many minor ills; the eye doctor, a tall bald Jew who winced with
back pain when he leaned over to administer his pupil-dilating drops twice-yearly; and, at an annual appointment, the tax accountant, a pointy-nosed mole of a man who waved his hands in agitation when Owen threatened to confide information he didn’t want to hear. There were the schools—the public schools until Gregory turned thirteen—which involved periodic teacher conferences and recitals, playlets, choral performances, and team-sport events, usually in the rain. And there were committee meetings—the Chamber of Commerce and the School Building Needs Committee for Owen, the Garden Club and the Downtown Betterment Society for Phyllis, along with her madrigal group and yoga classes.
Somewhere in this thick net, he dreams, there is his rapidly burgeoning relationship with Julia, compact, firm, decisive, surprisingly sexy Julia, but he keeps losing her, it is just too hard to keep up the precarious secret connection—the hurried, hard-breathing phone calls, the panicky trysts where the edges of this town merge with the edges of another—and weeks go by, in his dream, without any connection being made, and his love object sinks deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the everyday, the respectable thick weave of citizenship and work and parenthood, and this relationship, forged in such a summer lightning of passion and mutual discovery, is cooling to nothing, like a holiday bond between children dissolved when vacation is over. Julia, uncontacted day after day, is withering smaller and smaller, and is falling through the network, to become forever lost beneath the barren busy-ness of “normal,” licit life. Panic wakes him; Owen awakes bereft, bewildered as it slowly dawns upon him, along with the wallpaper and the merciless seaside sunlight already burning in the chink beneath the windowshade, that it is Phyllis who is lost, sunk beneath the surface of things, and that he and Julia, long and lawfully married, have been for over twenty years living together in Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts.
Among the checkpoints of Middle Falls had been the beach of imported sand at Heron Pond. Here in summers the young mothers of Owen’s acquaintance, nearing the midpoint of their three score and ten but still lovely in his eyes, took their children for an hour’s easy entertainment in the middle of the day, a quick lunch, and then home for a nap, sometimes reappearing in the shadowy afternoon, the slow time sloping toward the children’s dinner after five. Gregory, at twelve, and Iris, at ten and a half, had outgrown the tepid brown water, the tetherball on its rickety pole in the center of a circle of dust, the jackknife-initialled picnic benches and tables, the oil drums painted green and labelled TRASH, the corroded aluminum water-slide close to shore, the lifeguard chair still occupied by the principal’s straight-haired mahogany daughter, no longer a teen-ager. Her plumpness had become denser, even menacing, with a hint of mustache above the lips white with zinc oxide, and her thick legs conspicuously hairy—a statement presumably political. Among the young, hair had become an emblem; armpits flourished, boys’ ears vanished. Gregory became a mophead, a miniature Beatle, protesting haircuts as if they were a form of assault, a vaccination that would hurt. Little Floyd, a second grader, and Eve were still docile visitors to the pond; when Owen would run over there at lunch in the red Corvette Stingray he had decided, as of 1968, that he owed himself, he would come upon them and their mother as if in fresh discovery. He liked seeing his wife in a bathing suit—a white bikini that set off her pale, pinkish tan. So close to nude yet still stately, she seemed the Phyllis he had hoped for, and the whole sleepy, scruffy beach by the pond recalled a lost paradise, with its brown-legged tomboys. The mothers spread blankets on the grass and picnicked with their children, Alissa Morrissey making her usual jokes about the caloric dangers of Marshmallow Fluff. She was short enough that any extra pound showed; but something anxious, nervous, and double-edged about her whittled away and kept her plumpness in check. Her husband, Ian, was getting to be difficult, it was said. Against the trend of the times for long ironed hair, she had hers, snuff-brown with induced highlights, cut short and brushed back as if she were speeding by on a motorcycle. She wore glasses rimmed in flesh-colored plastic, even when lazing at the pond; her eyes—dull blue, abraded like much-washed denim—shifted his way, Owen thought, more than his strict share. Men were a rare sight at Heron Pond. When Alissa smiled at something he said, her smile curved to enclose him; it was as if she read his mind and knew about the murky incident with Stacey, and the clear resolution that had followed. He was available.