Villages

by John Updike

  He discovered in himself the capacity to be cool in sex, cold even, watching their sweating bodies from a distance, freezing his own orgasmic curve with deliberately unsexual pictures—a calm Caribbean harbor at sunset, or a smartly executed double play. When Alissa reached her inner divide, and the summit within her was irreversibly attained, he could give her what he had been effortfully holding back; he could steady her ass with two hands and sock it to her upwards without thought of delicacy or mercy. Her whimper, coming from the territory beyond her own climax, renewed itself in the higher register; he wondered, amid his own sullen blood-thump of release, if she might faint. Then her hand on his shoulder blade slowly ceased fluttering and she covered his face with weak kisses.

  Her gratitude for his learning to make love to her, in the deep but narrow furrow of stimuli that her nerves accepted, included a license for him to ask of her what he would—but, again, within limits. Rapt fellatrice though she was, Alissa did not want him to come in her mouth, “like men do with prostitutes,” and if an impulsive flutter of her tongue brought him too far she took his ejaculation on her chin or chest, where his gob gleamed embarrassingly. But fucking her a second time on days with a few extra minutes to the tryst, as she knelt on the bed or floor, was allowed: an image that lingered long after she was no longer available to him was the gleam of her coccyx, a bit of hard tailbone catching the light just above the creamy spread of her buttocks. From his vantage, at the other end of the spine cleaving her back into two plump and golden halves, her cervical vertebrae peeped touchingly from beneath fluffy tufts of her snuff-brown hair, cut short in her style. This is the neck, Owen thought, the executioner sees. On the day of this thought the light fell from the single high factory window, sifted through grime and reinforcing wire. His cell at E-O, with its oily scent of former industry and its walled-off hum of many-bodied intellectual activity, excited them both to a breathless, whispering shamelessness, a fascination with their bodies as thorough, perhaps, as that which hospital patients receive and bestow in the days before death.

  But he, too, had a squeamish side, a limit. He couldn’t suppress his surprise and disgust when, in a stolen half-hour in a parked car, his exploring finger came out from under her skirt bloody, the thin redness of such blood like a medicinal coating and abhorrent to him. He resented her failing to warn him that she was having her period—it seemed a betrayal of decorum even worse than his semen puddled above her breast like an explosion of snot.

  He failed, Owen saw in retrospect, to use her compliance, her spells of tranced utter slavery, to the hilt. Though both confessed to being nervous, needy masturbators, they never masturbated for each other, though it would have been easy, it seemed to him in the darkness behind his eyelids, as he lay beside Phyllis missing Alissa. But in actuality their genitals, when the opportunity was there and the love-flush was hot upon their skins, seemed made to be hidden, as it were, one by the other, their warmth and wetness merged.

  Though innocent herself, a few years over thirty and never having cuckolded Ian before, Alissa tried to ease Owen away from the certain strangeness he felt in inhabiting a body at all. Once, in a flash of shyness soon after becoming her lover, kneeling between her spread legs, he put his hands over his flaming erection, and she said, slightly offended and gently directive, “Don’t hide yourself, Owen.” “Yourself”—this sore-looking blue-veined thing was himself. These hair-adorned nether parts, closely fitted into the sites of urination and defecation, were seats of being, ugly and odorous in external contemplation but in sensation exquisite. This high value was altogether inward and had to be taken by others on faith. The daze of sexual excitement bestowed this faith but then left Owen uncertain as to why—the question he had asked himself behind the playground shed—women put up with it. So much risk, so much potential for disgrace and abasement. Abasement was part of the bliss, perhaps: being lowered like a bucket into the black well of biology while knowing that the rope was still attached, the daylight of society waiting above.

  He could have talked her, he imagined when it was too late, into swallowing his semen. He could have coaxed her, too, into letting him kiss her between the legs until she came. Elsie had allowed this, that last summer, when both were angry because their love was coming to nothing. So he gave her a treat for a virgin. Hitched forward on the car seat with her skirt around her waist, she came with a snap, an unmistakable inner percussion. His back and shoulders ached from bowing his face into her lap, there on the bench seat of her father’s Chrysler. He liked it, being in touch with her another way from watching her face and hearing her voice. Alissa said she had never come that way and never would. He should have insisted. She would have remembered him for it. But sexual events easy to stage in the privacy of his skull encountered obstacles in reality, limits in the psychology of the other.

  A sexual transaction was a psychological transaction—one must feel the other, however ideally submissive, has a psychology, a mind registering events somewhat in parallel. Otherwise we are stuck with the sordid pathos of the inflatable female bodies, with usable mouths and vaginas, advertised in the back pages of Hustler. There must be a who, not a thing—another consciousness. With otherness a political dimension enters the psychological. He could relax into Alissa’s blowing him because she had breasts; his joy in a sensation another male could equally well have administered was sanctioned by her vagina, that rosy badge of her authority to service the male. And she, she needed to arrange him strictly, tongue and prick and hands, like a child arranging pillows and stuffed animals around her before she could go to sleep. Her dull blue eyes when she was making love, and a minute after, became as bright and dark as wet ink. Then they faded back, as she allowed him to untangle their arrangement so he perched by her knees and she reposed, like Manet’s Olympia, semi-reclined the length of the three cushions of his Naugahyde sofa in his E-O aerie. Her breasts, minutes ago tipped with erectile sensitivity, sank against her chest. He lit a cigarette, a Parliament, for her, and they searched their heads for things to talk about.

  That was the problem: what do you do with the bodies afterwards? A man and a woman like-minded enough, with physiologies and sexual educations roughly matched, agree to meet and use each other for an hour; then what? After the melodramatic disaster of his breakup with Faye, Owen was determined not to fall in love next time, for everybody’s sake. Alissa seemed to accept this emotional prophylaxis, as fitting her own situation. She was loyal to Ian if not faithful, and he to Phyllis. Yet it was a strain; Alissa was so lovable, so much wantonly his in their cozy crimes, his body cried out to possess her forever.

  He even felt cozy enough to ask her his question: “Why do women fuck?”

  She laughed, her cigarette smoke coughed away before the inhale. “Why do men?”

  “It’s obvious. Women are so beautiful.”

  “And not men?”

  “Not. As far as I can see.”

  “How unflattering to me, Owen. I thought I had loved that idea out of you. You’re gorgeous.”

  “Oh, you, sure; you make me feel good about myself. But you could do that by flirting at a cocktail party.”

  “Well,” she said, “screw you.”

  “You know what I mean,” he insisted. “You get this thing poked into you and have the risk of making a baby or if you’re a hooker or the girlfriend of somebody primitive of getting killed. Every day in the paper you read about some poor girl killed because she fucked some simple-minded guy who couldn’t let go.”

  The word “fuck” and its cousins bore in this era a pleasurable charge of decided intimacy. Also in this era, incredibly, sex was thought of as safe. At worst its consequences were easily reversed, by a shot of antibiotics or a trip to some more enlightened land where abortion was legal. Women were on the Pill or contained an IUD; crabs were something that happened to hippies, as part of their good-humored, anti-bourgeois life-style, and herpes was not yet a proclaimed problem. Itches were passed from vagina to penis to vagina and n
obody in polite society mentioned it except to the doctor, who provided an ineffective salve. Sex was then thought to be innocent even if its practitioners weren’t. Owen and Alissa were explorers in a terrain, adultery, not totally strange but far from deeply familiar to them. They had been driven into this wilderness by annoying or neglectful traits of their spouses, and the film of guilt that attached to them was, like the secretions of lovemaking, something to be wiped off before they went back out into the street. Like those secretions, it was part of it, part of its defiant health.

  “Making a baby mightn’t be so bad. But don’t kill me, Owen.”

  “I know how it happens. I get crazy with jealousy sometimes, lying in bed at night picturing you and Ian in bed together probably screwing.”

  “Do you and Phyllis always not?”

  “Not quite always, no.”

  “Well, then. We’re married and this is extra and let’s not think too closely about it. You ask why do people do the things they do. People don’t know, it’s deeper than the brain. It’s pheromones and all sorts of programmed behavior, like the nest-building instinct. Haven’t you ever watched birds building a nest and wondered how they do it, just the right twigs and so on? They don’t know either.”

  “Welcome to my nest,” he said, of the bleak tall brick room around them, feeling uneasy. Ed might be needing him—some little crisis or other, some scramble nobody else could sort out.

  “Women need attention,” she explained. “They don’t have a lot of a man’s ways of getting it. So they do what they can, with what they’ve got.”

  “You fuck just to get attention?”

  “When you put it like that it sounds silly, but, yes, sort of. For this time with me you are paying attention, though I can feel you beginning to wonder how you’re going to ease me out of here and get back to work.”

  “Not at all. I’m crazy about you.” A substitute for that poisoned chalice of a phrase I love you. He didn’t say it to Elsie and now not to Alissa. Faye had believed it and so had he and they had done damage. “Give me twenty minutes and you’ll see how much.” He pictured her on her knees on the hard floor, or back on the sofa: the curly downy bits at the nape of her neck, the glossy knobs of her spine.

  “I appreciate the thought, kind sir,” she said, and jackknifed her flashing legs together around him, so she sat up and her bare feet rested on the floor. “But I must go shopping for Ian’s dinner and pick up the cleaning before school gets out.” Alissa and Ian had two children—Norman, who was ten, and Neysa, whose entry into the first grade had freed her up yet left her, she had told Owen, at enough loose ends to begin her affair with him. Her lips had trembled, after laughing at this comic connection. Though this was November her body still bore the gold-and-silver disparities of her summer tan. Having made the effort to rise, she slumped back on the squeaky imitation-leather cushion. “I don’t think it’s good, by the way,” she volunteered, “for a woman’s health, to screw like mad and then jump up and do errands. We’re supposed to harbor the seed, or something.”

  He would treasure such casual glimpses into what it was like to be a woman, which Phyllis rarely afforded him; she knew she was female but didn’t deign to dwell on it, whereas Alissa was something of a village philosopher on the subject. “A woman would rather be hit on the head than ignored,” she once told him. He couldn’t imagine ever hitting her on the head, but the idea of it fed the brutish tenderness with which he contemplated her back as he pumped away at her on his smarting knees. After their little contretemps with her menstrual blood, she confessed, “When I was just, you know, coming into womanhood as a teen-ager I imagined that would be the time when I would be most attractive to men, when there was the blood.”

  It was such an intimate illusion for her that she trailed away shyly, and he hardly dared pursue the subject. “What did you think,” he asked, “men would do with it?”

  His mistress blushed. “Oh, I don’t know, Owen, don’t keep after me; it was just a feeling. It’s like giving milk, it feels very feminine. It’s exciting.”

  “Even with the cramps?”

  “The cramps aren’t so great,” Alissa admitted, “but they establish a woman’s relation with pain. You have it, and you hide it. Everything, come to think of it, that makes you you is hidden. Including,” she went on, melancholy overtaking her nudity and with it a need to lighten the mood, “your savage lover,” and jabbed him, not just in play but with enough animus to shorten his breath and give him pain, there in that defenseless pocket just under the sternum. Seeing the shock on his face, she looked away and sighed. “There are so many claims on me, or on any woman, Owen, that it’s a relief to know that when I’m coming to you it’s for one purpose. There’s not that awful vagueness there is in marriage—will we or won’t we, and if so shouldn’t we be getting to bed before we get any sleepier? At least with you I know we will, you’ve been counting on it, dreaming about it; I feel focused. Sometimes down on River Street, before or after seeing you here, I can’t get the smile off my face, and it frightens me that everybody out there in the sunshine will guess, that I’ve been fucked or soon will be.”

  “Do you feel that way after Ian?”

  “Don’t fish for compliments, darling. It’s unbecoming. I’ve already told you, we’re sleepy. Sometimes one of us falls asleep before we finish, we’re so bored.”

  “Ian can be boring, lately,” Owen pointed out, with tentative cruelty.

  “He’s boring,” his wife explained, “because he’s trying to explain away in general terms what he really feels is a personal failure, a loss of creativity.”

  “I know the feeling,” Owen said, in a tone that said they were done for the day.

  For a year and a half more they carried on furtively, hardly believing their good fortune. Ian and Phyllis didn’t appear to know, and although the village knew—not just their set of friends but pedestrians who saw her smiling on River Street and the lady at the desk at the motel on the highway toward Willimantic—it isn’t a village’s way to tell. A village is woven of secrets, of truths better left unstated, of houses with less window than opaque wall. She and Owen might have gone on longer, meeting never more than once a week and in summers less than that, until the pressure of deceit deformed one of them beyond what the other could love; but Alissa became pregnant. Her wistful talk of naïvely expecting her menstrual flow to be admired had actualized into a panicky wait for the flow to recommence. Many hurried phone calls confirmed that it had not.

  “But whose is it?” That was the question, once her period was three weeks late and she was waking up nauseated. “Who did you make love to at the right time?” He was shouting over the pay phone beside a highway, straining to hear, his finger poked into one ear and clouds of last winter’s salt and sand, pulverized by rushing tires to a fine dust, billowing into his face. He said “make love” instead of their usual frank verb as if a telephone operator, that obsolete eavesdropper on village life, were listening.

  “Neither of you,” came the faint answer.

  “Oh my God. You’ve been seeing somebody else?”

  “No, no, you silly. I mean it could be either of you, but I don’t see how. The Pill was making me feel bloated, so I went back to the rhythm method, but Ian and I used it successfully for years before he let me have Norman. He said he was an artist and children were hostages to fortune.”

  “It must be me,” Owen said gamely, “the great way we fucked.”

  “Darling, it doesn’t take great to make a baby. If it did the population crisis would be no problem.”

  “I’d rather believe, of course, it was Ian. I thought you said he was impotent.” This was a slip: he remembered that it was Phyllis who had said it.

  “Did I say that? I may have said he was discouraged. But he’s only forty-three, he’s not ancient.”

  “Don’t tell me about it,” Owen begged. It was repulsive. Her blood, Ian’s semen, his own. His insides were feeling watery; he was on the edge of the do
om that waits, bottomless, where the skin of the humdrum tears. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What do you want me to do?” He had to repeat the question; an eighteen-wheeler had been roaring past.

  “Can you get an abortion?” he shouted, there by the dirty highway.

  “I don’t see how,” came the faint answer. “How would I explain it to Ian? He knows about my period already. Where would I go without telling him?” Her faintness was increasing; she was getting smaller, sinking down into the transparent depths, away from him, forever away. “Owen, I’m going to have the baby,” she called. “We must never see each other again.”

  Perhaps these revelations and determinations did not come all at once, in one noisy, dusty conversation over a roadside pay phone, but in repetitious, relentless snippets; her abrupt withdrawal from his life did him so little credit that he repressed the details. By late summer Alissa was visibly pregnant. Why hide it?—that was clothing designers’ new thought on this perennial fashion issue. Her snug and unconcealing jerseys and loose-waisted miniskirts and even, at Heron Pond, adjustable bikini curved around a new center. Her plumpness was freshened. With dimpled smiles she received the pleased notice of their friends. Pregnancies among them were thinning out. Owen was horrified by the paternal ambiguity of this growing fetus, yet the tiny complicating creature, whom he would have gladly killed if he could, was ever more securely wrapped in Alissa’s body, and in social acknowledgment of its being. A village is a hatchery, cherishing its smallest members. A fresh birth votes for the status quo, validating the present and assuring the future.