Villages

by John Updike

  She said she wanted to show him something beautiful and suggested he rent a car. He said it was six in the morning and no rental agencies would be open.

  “They all will,” Mirabella said. “This is Vegas.”

  Las Vegas was her Sherwood Forest, it seemed to his hopped-up head, and it was just as well he forgot to ask her what computer company she worked for. Or if he had, he had forgotten her answer. But she was right: they rented cars right off the main lobby of the hotel—was it the Dunes?—and in his confused, extremely happy state he chose tangerine when it was offered because he figured it wouldn’t get lost in a parking lot. He drove east into the sun, and the cars coming toward him with what seemed electronic speed were black silhouettes, shapes without people, dangerous imperfections in the great clean pane of the morning. After they stopped for coffee and eggs, with the inevitable hash browns, at a place she seemed to know, Mirabella, fed and sleepy and playful, went down into his lap and undid his fly and pulled up his shirt and started to suck him off. He was sensitive enough there it felt like a bite; he asked her to stop but she giggled and didn’t, and it occurred to him that some women did sex because it was what they could do, just as he could write programs for payrolls and pension plans. It was what they were programmed to do, there was no mystery. Why had he ever thought there was a mystery? The sun was getting higher, burning down through her spun-sugar curls, so her scalp felt warm where his free hand lightly massaged it, and the backlit mountains in the distance were giving up more and more of their shadows, and her lips and fingers were doing this sweet tugging number on him, and he came, came upward into the cozy pink darkness beneath all those bobbing shellacked curls as a long side-slatted truck roared by in the opposite direction, and she gagged. He loved her gagging. He would drown her in his jism.

  In his imperfect memory, the truck had shuddered past with a load of white-faced cattle looking out between the slats. But how could he have seen them? He was concentrating on keeping the little Camaro on the road; he must have observed the cattle truck at some other point in that glorious, wide-open morning. The vast alkaline sky with its translucent towers of cloud, the purple-tinged pastures stretching on either side of the highway. Mirabella lifted her head from his lap and raucously asked, “Where do you get all that stuff? I’d have thought you’d be pumped out by now.” Her face was shining with sweat from the close quarters she had been working in. She sat up, and with a thumb and finger wiped the corners of her mouth. Batsy. She settled back, leaning her skull on the padded headrest. She looked tired and not as young as he had thought. Her profile against the hurtling lilac desert showed a double chin, and a ripple of collagen around the cheekbone.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “You excite me.”

  “I’ll say. You should get a wife.”

  “I have one, thanks.”

  He was getting a headache, where the transformative, clarifying icicle had entered. When they came to the beautiful sight Mirabella had promised—a huge blue lake, there in the middle of the desert, created by a federally financed dam—it seemed part of his headache, another unnatural intervention, with speedboats and a tacky marina. Owen later wondered if she in fact was a hooker who had been primed by pals of his at the conference to say she was a childhood fan of DigitEyes. But he couldn’t believe it, she seemed too computer-savvy, and she charged nothing for the sexual services, though she did say he owed her six hundred dollars for the cocaine.

  xii. Village Sex—VI

  Back in Middle Falls, in the ’seventies, the path to illicit sex had grown shorter; the skids were greased. The scent upon Owen had ripened, the scent that told women he was in the market for what only they could provide. Not every man was. Some in Middle Falls were more interested in the next drink than in the next woman—Jock Dunham had been like that. Some, like Ed Mervine, put their passion into their work—the machinery, the payroll, the bottom line, the buccaneering of chancy enterprise in a fertile but mined field. Certain husbands, of whom Henry Slade appeared to be one, were simply too dry, too stiff, too consumed by the drab business of earning a living and husbanding his property, to play the love game. His bureaucratic post in Hartford, in one of those colorless marble boxes that sprawl around the spiky, turreted basilica of a capitol building, with a gold dome as narrow as the band at the top of a pencil, defined him and fulfilled him, so that what he brought to the social life of Middle Falls was a mere residue, compared with his wife’s many involvements. Not that Henry was absent at weekend get-togethers; on the contrary, he was, with Vanessa, at every cocktail party and Heron Pond kiddy swim meet and informal picnic and formal benefit dance. He gave no sign, save a dry chuckle, of enjoying social life, or of not enjoying it. He smoked a pipe and nodded as he listened, seldom replying with more than a word or two, knocking out his pipe or pinching his lips together, with shifty sideways motions of his eyes before granting that word. He gave the impression of hesitating between brands or flavors of wisdom within his capacious available store; after over a decade of acquaintanceship Owen decided that Henry instead of silently wise was stupefied by years of meticulous drudgery in the service of Connecticut’s most picayune regulations. He was a swarthy man, not tall; he walked as if a board were keeping his back straight, thrusting his pipe and head forward while he plodded along, like a villager under a load of fagots.

  Vanessa was a bit younger than he—she had been an underling in his Hartford office—and had a brusque, ageless quality, moving too purposefully to count the years. Her plain, androgynous face, tanned by the sun in every season—for she was a keen skier as well as golfer, tennis player, and gardener—was exceptionally frontal; that is, where Owen thought of Henry as always in profile, preoccupied and heading off somewhere, Vanessa looked people in the eye, as if daring them to blink or smile in nervousness. With the same faintly challenging authority, she ruled the several town committees she served on, as well as her bridge circle and the Garden Club. She was an impressive sight in her own garden, gloved and long-sleeved in protection from rose thorns, up to her trousered hips in delphiniums and phlox and well-staked peonies, a loosely woven straw hat throwing her watchful, unsmiling face into a shade evenly speckled with sunlight. The flowers, it seemed to Owen, softened her, adding a feminine element missing in her confrontational gaze, blunt manner, and husky tenor voice. The Slades were a one-child couple, which made them unusual, and hinted at something foreclosed and firmly settled in their marriage. The child was a solemn, olive-skinned boy, Victor. Amid the many couples the Mackenzies had come to know in Middle Falls, the Slades were not unusual in that the man of the couple was a comic figure but the woman was not. The women had competence, mystery, and at least a hint of beauty. Vanessa was not beautiful—she hardly bothered with makeup, and her upper teeth, like Owen’s own, had come in crowded, pushing her eye teeth forward—but she was dignified and matter-of-fact. How matter-of-fact Owen did not realize until she came to sit beside him on an antique two-person sofa covered with striped satin—a love seat, they used to be called—on the fringe of an improvised dance floor at a party given by the couple, Dwight and Patricia Oglethorpe, who had bought the old Dunham place. Vanessa seated herself and said to him, keeping her voice low, “We ought to have lunch some time.”

  Too startled to stall, Owen asked, “Why?”

  She gave a slow, constrained smile at this gaffe. Vanessa’s uneven teeth had led to a curious source of power, the rarity of her smile. “There’s usually only one why, isn’t there? To see if we want to have lunch again.”

  Stalling now, distracted by the sight, not ten feet away, of his tall, long-necked wife dancing with Vanessa’s hunched-over, rhythmless husband, he asked, “Is that the way things are done?” Phyllis was gazing stoically over Henry’s head; Heaven knew what she was thinking.

  Vanessa expressed impatience with a stab of her cigarette, an extra-long Pall Mall. “Owen, why do you always play innocent? You’re not innocent.”

  “No? I still feel I am. How d
o you know I’m not?”

  “Everybody knows, you silly.” Her mannish voice became gruff. “Don’t put me on, or we won’t get anywhere.”

  “You mean Faye?”

  “After Faye, more. Faye was a starter. We all need a starter.”

  “You too?”

  Vanessa said nothing, just inhaled smoke and let it cascade from her nostrils, above her slow smile. He began to see her—her small neat cat’s nose; her thick dark eyebrows, unplucked, level above her eyes; the crowded mouth tweaked at the moment by a smile in spite of herself. He felt abruptly admitted to a too-large intimacy, in which he was in danger of merely rattling around. He said, to say something and seizing on what lay uppermost in his mind, “I suppose you wonder how could I have ever looked at anybody but Phyllis, who’s so lovely.”

  “We know you think she’s lovely, it’s rather touching. And I suppose she is, but she’s not my type, frankly—too bluestocking. She never left school. But nobody around here wonders about what you mentioned. She doesn’t give you shit. Or anybody else, really, except her children, up to a point. She is about the most insulated person I’ve ever seen.”

  “Insulated.”

  “Wrapped up in herself.”

  This was fascinating to Owen—a road map out of his guilt, being offered by a woman he hardly knew. Other people, seeing by their faces that their conversation had reached a heated depth, avoided approaching them. He said rapidly, “O.K., let’s have lunch some time. Way out of town, and not in Hartford. What does Henry think?”

  “About what, dear?”

  “About Phyllis and me and whatnot.”

  “Henry and I don’t talk about anything. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “I’ve often wondered,” Owen admitted, “what the beauty of it was.” He liked his so quickly, dryly saying this; he felt that, in a few furtive minutes, he was learning to dance with this woman.

  “Likewise,” Vanessa said, tapping the ash from her Pall Mall, as the music stopped and their spouses approached. Henry and Phyllis were laughing in relief that that was over and squinting blindly, out of the flickering strobe lights that the Oglethorpes, overanxious to please, had installed for the evening.

  The lesson Owen learned from Vanessa was a surprising one: masculine women give great sex. It was perhaps no accident that it had been the tomboy Doris Shanahan who had let him look up the leg of her shorts. Sex is more up front, so to speak, with them. They go at it straight out, pouncing on orgasms like a hawk on a baby quail. Though Vanessa rarely (unlike giddy Faye, unlike dimpled Alissa) smiled during the process, she often laughed, gruffly, her low husky laugh. In her customary thick-fabricked, wide-shouldered clothes, her ass and chest both looked flat, minimal; undressed, she showed charms enough. Her body, neither fat nor bony, had below her brown face the eggshell smoothness of a plaster cast, an even tone that neither her dusty-red nipples or chestnut-brown pubic hair markedly interrupted. She brought to sex a certain serious playfulness; like a man, she was willing to consider the event basically physical, a meal of sorts, and, like a good cook, was conscious of the need for variety. In a graceful, short-nailed hand she would hold his erection as if it were the stem of an oversize wineglass, her extended little finger resting ticklishly in his curly hair at its base, and study it, the blue-veined stalk and empurpled glans, from inches away, pondering what to do with it. Like a good craftsman she thought about the task while away from the workbench, so she could greet him, at their next tryst, with a fresh idea: “I thought today you could come between my breasts, if you’d bring me off with your mouth first.”

  “What a divine agenda, Vanessa. But shouldn’t I be inside you at some point?”

  “Where inside me, dearest? There are choices.”

  “Oh, God, don’t drive me crazy with choices. Just rape me, can’t you?”

  The feminine side he had suppressed when Buddy Rourke rejected his fancy Monopoly arrangement was coming back to him under Vanessa’s tutelage. She said, “That’s one of the beauties of being a man—you can’t be. You can be aroused against your will, but you can’t be raped without your prick’s consent.” Vanessa was a considerable connoisseuse of the advantages of being a man, and frequently mentioned them.

  “Except,” Owen pointed out, “by the back entrance.”

  “Oh. That.” She thought a moment. When she thought, her eyes, the amber of a lioness’s, darkened a shade, as had Alissa’s abraded-looking blue irises when making love. Vanessa didn’t afford him Alissa’s feeling of an infinitely soft, furry, moist socket to hide himself in, a safe dirty place where a terrible tension was resolved, but she could briskly arrange a buffet of other treats. “Would that turn you on?” Her voice had roughened in her throat.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, and his own voice sounded high and fragile in his ears. “How about you?”

  Owen had never had, at the adolescent moment when it would have been useful to his growth, a male friend with whom sex in its mysteries could have been, however ignorantly, discussed. Now, twenty-five years late, Vanessa was that frank friend. She answered, after reflection, “It didn’t do terrifically much for me, the few times I tried it. It felt like the wrong way. But that was not unexciting, I suppose. The wrong way as the right way.”

  He was roused. She knew more than he; he could still catch up. “Let me do it to you, then.”

  “O.K.,” she said. “Just to get it off your list. If I do it to you first.”

  “With what?” he asked, fearfully.

  “My tongue?” Vanessa suggested. “Then a finger, wearing a surgical glove. Then—we’ll see.”

  “This is getting to be,” Owen had to admit, “a rather repulsive conversation.”

  “Yet, dearest, look at how hard you are! You’re so hard you’re bending backwards, staring into your own navel.”

  “Suck me,” he begged.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Her serious mouth made a pouting little moue, as Phyllis used to. “First let’s think what you can do for me.”

  Her cunt, those livid wrinkles looking like lava folds, had become his to contemplate, to finger, opening the petals to their peony-pink inner side and bringing his mouth to breathe on the clitoris, to tongue that gleaming wet nub. Don’t touch it. Don’t tell me what to touch. Between her legs her plaster-pale body took on color and gave up its stately evenness of tone. Her stern face softened as she sat on the edge of the bed and toyed with his hair, the boyishly soft brown hair into which gray was being sifted one strand at a time. Then as if in sudden surfeit she flung herself back on the motel bed, with a violence that jolted into his head an image of what she saw—through the cloudy small window above their bed a glimpse of green leaves flung upside down as in a hurricane. She rested her thighs one on each of his shoulders, her eyes shut against the daylight to be alone with her sensations as Owen knelt there at her service, laboring in his own trance of mounting attention. Vanessa eventually released a throaty grunt and in a spasm clamped his head between her thighs as Elsie had once done; his hot face felt then so imbued with her juices that for twenty-four hours he tried to avoid coming close to Phyllis, even for their courtesy good-night peck. No amount of soap or aftershave quite quenched the smell of one woman in another’s nostrils.

  She had been with women, Vanessa admitted to Owen. She and her girlfriend in high school did things, and then there were others the year she went to the state university in Storrs before family finances—she had brothers who needed the tuition money more—forced her to switch to what was still called secretarial school, in Hartford. She became an office manager’s assistant in the bureau where Henry worked. She learned efficiency. The manager she assisted was a woman, unusual back then, and had tried to talk her out of marrying Henry and into coming to live with her instead. But, no, Vanessa had known she needed men, clumsy and simple as they were. She needed marriage, for a base. She had intuited about Henry that she could always get around him. He was older, he would take her on her own terms. He had never m
istaken her for one of the cute clinging girls he could have had. She owed him one child—a son, as it nicely turned out—and after that he gave her her own space. He didn’t pry into her day. Weekends, she was his.

  “What’s it like?” Owen asked her. “Being with a woman.”

  He saw her amber irises alter, as shuttling interior pictures activated them. “It’s like being with a weak man,” she said. “Why be with a weak imitation when you can be with a real one? It’s all a matter, isn’t it,” Vanessa went on, perhaps unconsciously echoing that buried Bible never quite scrubbed from our brains, “of being known. You want to be known better than you know yourself.”

  “You kill me,” he told her, “so casually mentioning these others you’ve had. I want you to be all mine.”

  “No, Owen, you don’t. You’re like the rest of us. You like the muck and the muddle.”

  “When was the last woman you slept with?”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell you.”

  “Then it was recent.”

  “No comment, dearest.”

  “Is she around here? She must be. You must tell me about it; could I watch? Could we all do it together?”

  She contemplated his still-importunate penis and in a flick of amused indulgence licked the tip of it quickly. Her tongue was grainier than other women’s, it seemed to him, and more triangular, coming to a more muscular point. “I think not,” she told him. “If you want a threesome, the third is up to you to provide. What a wicked man you turn out to be, you funny dear. You’re such a puppy.”