Villages

by John Updike

  “Sorry. I never thought of Alissa as fat.”

  “Look at her some time. She hasn’t managed to lose her pregnancy weight yet, and the child is four years old.”

  The child, Nina, walked and talked, pretty but somber, the levels of female subtlety in her multiplying, along with her little graces and pertnesses; in Owen’s eyes she reminded him more and more of his own first-grade photos, that willingness to please mixed with something skeptical. But people continued to say she looked like Ian: his square frowning brow, his keen-eyed squint. Until she became too big for the stroller the putative father would preeningly push her everywhere, at a run, his face reddening above his goatee. His skinny bare legs grew sinewy. Fatherhood and exercise were Ian’s way of coping with approaching fifty. Vanessa’s mention of the child frightened Owen, and she knew it. “You sound jealous,” he said to her. “Have you ever had a, you know, thing with Alissa?”

  “We’ve had long girly chats, with more white wine than was good for either of our figures. What you don’t seem to realize, Owen, is that erotic pleasure comes in all sorts of shades short of fucking. Alissa and I have been cozy from time to time.”

  “Is that why women go to bed with men, to be cozy?”

  “You keep asking me that. The answer is, partly.”

  “When you do it with a woman, really, what happens? You use your mouths, or a dildo, or what? Describe it.”

  “Oh, darling Owen, I forget. Or let’s pretend I do. Do you want to fuck me again before you go, or not? You’ve shrivelled down to nothing, worrying about what everybody else does.”

  “Don’t forget,” he reminded her, this complacent naked woman as thick-waisted and opaque as a plaster Venus, “you want me to deliver Trish Oglethorpe to you.”

  “You want that. Two women serving you.”

  “Actually, when I fantasize—can I tell you this?”

  Vanessa said nothing.

  “When I fantasize, it’s a woman and two men. I’m not sure a man can really handle two women, but a woman can certainly handle two men.”

  “And you want to be that woman.”

  “Ooh. That hurts.”

  “It shouldn’t, dearest. It’s normal, or normally abnormal. Being your own sex is really rather boring after a while.”

  “You smug cunt. You’re incredible.”

  “And who’s to say,” she pleasantly went on, “where one sex ends and the other begins? When we’re tiny eggs we’re all females, then some lucky ones get that Y chromosome that turns them into tadpoles with a penis. It’s all rather mucky, like my cunt right now. But come in, darling, please. Fuck me up to my eyeballs.”

  “Vanessa, you’re incredible. You’ll say anything.”

  “Well, at least I’ve got you hard again.”

  Sex was easiest to manage in his head, away from all the furniture, the disgusting marital spoor, the telltale slant of light at the window shades, the village bells tolling the hours, calling the children to school and back again. His favorite sight in Middle Falls came between seven-thirty and eight, the children going off to school, walking in packs or gathered at bus stops with their mothers, their backpacks and colorful synthetic garb at such a festive remove from the dismal knickers and dark cloth coats of ’thirties Willow, children trudging off as if to a blacking factory. At night, lying beside Phyllis in their queen-sized bed, she, to judge from her regular deep breathing, asleep, he could stage-manage himself and Vanessa and Trish Oglethorpe, her skittish runner’s body and her upper lip like a flesh-bud evolved to lure men into the chase. His intuition told him that Trish possessed an extra dose of that pliant, chasable quality; it went with the X chromosome. He and Vanessa could tie her up for more exciting access. He pictured mouths, and the orifices below, and vectorized patches of resilient skin, and three pairs of eyes widened in the general stretch and astonishment of it. Muck, Vanessa had said, the muck and the muddle, telling him he loved it, we all do, the mothering muck. Then, his brain losing images and recovering them while his hand kept his grip on his half-asleep prick, teasing and then seizing, Owen would come into a handkerchief spread where his ejaculation could hit. At the crest of sensation, sweat popping from his pores, he recognized that Phyllis’s proximate warmth was part of it, the muck, the coziness, as her rhythmic light breathing—light, as her speech was light, not wishing to force itself crassly upon the world—betrayed no sign of awareness of his thumping climax. But she was there, like the finite sum of one of Euler’s infinite series.

  “Why don’t we ever make love any more?” she one day asked.

  “Don’t we? I feel we do.”

  “It’s been weeks. Am I getting bad breath or something?”

  “Not at all. I’ve never smelled anything on your breath except peppermint and chamomile tea.”

  “Well, then. Let’s go. The children are out of the house from eight to three-thirty. Why don’t you come back here at noon for lunch? I don’t mention the morning because I know you hate waking up.”

  “You want this today?” He tried to think if anything was scheduled with Vanessa; there was no telling when Karen might drop by. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked, stalling.

  Phyllis took no offense at the question, though she blushed—that movement of blood below her slant cheekbones that he associated with the student princess, offering herself to be carried away. “Nothing,” she said. “Just affection. You look so handsome lately.”

  He saw a welcome opportunity to argue. “Oh, now and not ever before?”

  “Before, yes, but, not to sound like Ian, you had a nerdy quality, as though it hurt your eyes to look away from the computer—as if we were all slightly unreal to you. You don’t have that so much any more.”

  “Well, thanks. I guess.”

  Now she did take offense. “Forget I said anything,” she said. “I was just trying to be wifely. I’m human, you know.”

  “Baby!” He went to her, suddenly stung. An image in two dimensions in his mind had popped into the third; he had forgotten she was human, he admired her so abstractly, as an image from his past, a faded route to his present condition. He hugged her; her face, at near the height of his own, felt hot; both their faces felt on the verge of tears. “You’re superhuman,” he told her, hoping to break them into laughter. This failing, he said, “Let’s make a date. I think there’s a problem with today; I have to check my calendar at work.”

  “You don’t want to,” Phyllis said, right as always. “I’m not superhuman, I’m a failure in every respect except that I bore four healthy children. But even they, I didn’t do much of a job. We’re letting them grow up like weeds.”

  There was truth in this, but against it he could have set their myriad usual gestures of parenting: the help with homework, the tucking in at night, the rote prayer to get their anxious small souls through to morning, the family trips to Nantucket and Disney World and Expo 67 in Montreal, the summer rentals in Maine, the countless lessons paid for, the countless evening meals shared in something like hilarity. From the outside, seen through the windows of the warm and expensive house on Partridgeberry Road, judged from the swing sets and hockey skates and dollhouses and golf clubs to be found in the basement, Owen and Phyllis had given all the signs of parenthood, but they had not, like some—like Owen’s own parents, perhaps—lived through their children, making the leap out of the ego into the DNA chain. Ian and Alissa, for instance, after their rocky patch, had submerged themselves in the needs and deeds of Nina and her two older siblings. Owen and Phyllis were alike in that their pet child was the child within, who still clamored for nurturing. “Tomorrow,” he promised her. “I just remembered, today’s my day to have lunch with Ed. He’s full of gloom these days.”

  “Tomorrow’s my day for tennis at the club with Alissa, Vanessa, and Imogene. Except Imogene can’t play and got Trish for a substitute.”

  “The next day, then,” he said, “or at night, after Floyd and Eve are in bed.” Gregory was a sophomore at Brown, and Iris i
n her first year at Smith.

  “At night I get dopey,” Phyllis said. “By the day after next I’ll have forgotten what it’s all about.”

  “What is it all about?” he asked her.

  “That I love you?” she offered shyly.

  He turned her question into a statement: “And I love you.” To himself he thought, I am ruining this woman’s life.

  “It’s this damn town,” she said, petulantly. “Everywhere you turn, it’s there, interfering.”

  “It’s just a town,” he said.

  “No, Owen. It’s not. Its people don’t have enough to do, except make mischief.”

  “Well, that’s prosperity,” he told her. “You’d rather have Communism?”

  For some time Owen had been thinking he must break with Vanessa before that affair exploded and repeated the mess after Faye. He couldn’t look far into the Slades’ strange marriage but believed that, like his own, it would not accommodate open infidelity. This was no hippie commune, no rock-ribbed Republican swap club in the snowbound fastness of the upper Midwest. A tactful skein of attraction and undeclared liaison lay over these Easterners. Owen had lately been attracted to Imogene Bisbee, a significant drinker with a raucous whiskey-cracked voice and graying raven hair pulled back strictly from a central parting, as in a daguerreotype of an ancestor. She had blue blood, and an injured grace. Her family had the money that supported Roscoe’s ineffectual little lawyering in town, a matter of friends’ wills and a slight grip, won through long-term residence, on Town Hall’s business. In the late stages of a party Imogene had begun to bump up against him. Once she had blearily grabbed one of his thumbs and asked, with that affecting crack in her voice, “What don’t you like about me, Owen?”

  “Nothing,” he had answered. “I mean, there’s nothing I don’t like. How is Roscoe’s new snow-blower doing?”

  Trish Oglethorpe came up to them, intruding possessively, though he had not slept with her and his visions of enlisting her in a threesome with Vanessa had ebbed. But some afterimage of his flirtation, and some faint resonance from his masturbatory fantasies, carrying across town at night through all the sleeping television aerials, drew her to him, hovering at his side attentively, as if waiting for his next move. Both women looked at him with a kind of vexed expectancy. He said, “I’ll let you two talk tennis,” and backed away and sought Phyllis in the kitchen, perched high on a beechwood stool, talking with Ed and Henry Slade as in the old MIT days he would find her ensconced in a smoky Chinese eatery with Jake Lowenthal and Bobby Sprock.

  If Owen was going to make a serious move on Imogene, he needed to be quits with Vanessa. But would he ever find another woman like her, such a frank sexual friend, so unblinkingly frontal, with such imperturbable matte skin and a clitoris that functioned like a prick, doing the attacking for him? The same effrontery and energy made her locally omnipresent; she was co-chairperson, as they called it, of the fund drive to build an annex—more office space, less for doctors than for the proliferating administrators and bookkeepers of health insurance—on the United Falls Hospital, which was located in town but also served the rude hamlet of Lower Falls and those residents of semi-suburban Upper Falls who did not want to make the drive into Hartford. Most everyone wanted to see the local institution thrive and survive, as medical costs and the efficiencies of greater volume were thinning out small-town hospitals—the same economic trends that were exterminating small-town movie theatres and unaffiliated banks and independent office-supply stores, toy stores, and book shops. Shopping had shifted to the areas between towns, to malls that gobbled up several farms at a time. Even the gold-lettered Woolworth’s, the sundries-packed River Street outpost of a corporate empire as presumably enduring as the Ford Motor Company and American Tel and Tel, had become depressing: only a few muttering, demoralized parakeets and canaries remained in the pet section, which once had twittered like a jungle, alive with the husky odor of birdseed and droppings and with the rustle of gerbils in their squeaky wheels and pungent nests of wood shavings.

  The hospital, like the still-unregionalized Middle Falls High School, held memories for the citizens. The Mackenzies’ youngest, wistful, sensitive Eve, had been born there, and when Phyllis at forty had her cancer scare (a benign cyst, whose removal barely left a scar) and Gregory at fourteen his broken ankle and Owen at thirty-four his nearly burst appendix, the hospital had taken them in and ministered to their pains and fears. The intense mutual involvement of their particular set of friends did not preclude identification with the larger community. Owen loved the aging commercial clutter of River Street, and saw his firm as a chapter in the town’s industrial history. He and Phyllis many times, on the excuse of a child participant, had cheered at high-school sports events. One cheer, driven home with many lusty arm-pumps and pom-pom shakes from the white-socked cheerleaders, went, “Not too lean and not too fat, Middle Falls is where it’s at! Not too big and not too small, Middle Falls beats one”—index fingers raised, wagging—“and”—expansive arm gesture, fingers spread—“all!” Since the time when Owen had been a partisan teen-ager at Willow High, some slithery dance moves, a legacy of the ’sixties, had been included amid the exhortative flailing and spread-eagled leaps of the young maenads in their pleated skirts and bulky sweaters, but the essential conservatism of youthful rites struck him—the same dwindled outdoor shouts, the same melancholy scent of torn earth carrying into the sidelines from the gridiron or soccer field, the same tribal hope that victory today meant victory forever, in life’s great game.

  The fund drive had been successful, subscribed across the village’s social spectrum. There was a triumphant wind-up mêlée in the hospital’s courtyard, in fortunate April sunshine. It had been a gamble to hold the party for workers and significant contributors outdoors; but there were so many, and the dusty function room upstairs at the town hall would have seemed drearily official, and the downstairs rooms of the three-story Georgian Federal mansion that housed the historical society too elitist. In the sunstruck late-afternoon crowd Owen instantly spotted Trish Oglethorpe. Even as he turned to avoid her, she hurried up to him. “Owen! I never see you any more!”

  “I’m around.”

  “I mean see you to talk to.”

  Apologetically, he said, “I guess we’ve been hunkered down for the winter.” We: he and Phyllis, man and wife, more and less than a real person.

  “Wasn’t it awful! All that snow. Dwight says we should move to the Carolinas. Especially now that the local leash laws have become so strict.” Their rampaging golden retrievers, everybody knew, had been killing neighbors’ cats and raiding a riding stable a quarter-mile away, gorging on the horse chow in the manger.

  Trish had a new, tousled hairdo; sparks flew from its cedar-red strands in the sunlight. Her polka-dot dress was short with an old-fashioned daring; her skinny legs descended into big-buckled duckbill-toed pumps of white patent leather. She looked like an escapee from a comic strip, and Owen had always had a fondness for comic strips. “What brings you here?” he asked.

  “Didn’t you know? Vanessa got me to sub for someone on her Special Donations Committee who resigned. She’s a slavedriver, I can tell you.”

  “So people say.”

  “But she’s also a mother hen. It really is remarkable, how she does all she does.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, trying to imagine just what she meant. Recalling their conversation at the Bisbees’ last fall, which Trish seemed to be resuming with an enthusiasm she had withheld at the time, Owen told her, “Speaking of women prison guards, now we have a woman party head.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Too bad she’s such a conservative.”

  “You’re against conservatives, now.”

  “Only when they’re boring grocers’ daughters,” Trish said, turning her head to show him her profile, underslung and sexy. Her upper lip looked almost prehensile. Her style of talk, at least, had been loosened up.

  “Speaking of boring conservatives, poor Ford. I
t’s just about over in Vietnam,” Owen said, not quite knowing how to stimulate this new, subtly radicalized Trish.

  She ignored this offering. “Owen,” she said, poking his chest sharply. “You must see a movie called Shampoo, with Warren Beatty. Dwight and I loved it. It’s so outrageous!”

  This was more like the stiff, herky-jerky old Trish. Yet she gave off the natural perfume, the easy animation, the sense of a deftly resumed connection, that a woman you have slept with gives off. Had he slept with her in a dream? Had his fantasies of a naked threesome somehow travelled to her through the village’s veins? She seemed in her dolly outfit to explode with self-delight, and to verge, shiny-eyed, on teasing him, like the girls on the walk to elementary school. He had to back off and consider this new factor in his life-complicating sexual equations. Had Vanessa, seeing his feeble initiative fail, seduced this coltish newcomer herself, and were the two of them waiting, glowingly nude yet primly upright, like the de Poitier sisters in Clouet’s double portrait, for him to find them? Villages have inglenooks, root cellars, attics where mattresses covered with striped ticking quietly wait for the orgy to begin.

  The charitable crowd’s clamor rose as it soaked up more cheap champagne beneath the fifteen-foot painted phallic image, displayed for months on the hospital façade, of a thermometer whose red of pledges had finally mounted to the very top. Owen spotted the rueful face of Imogene Bisbee, in her Emily Dickinson hairdo, wistfully searching the crowd for someone who would quicken her life into romantic meaning. She would have to wait, he said to himself, for there was no more room in his life, with Trish apparently still on his hook. He scanned all the donor faces, sallow and giddy in their bath of cool spring sunshine, hoping not to find Karen Jazinski among them. Ed, a big contributor from the company’s funds, might have brought her along in an E-O entourage, and if sensitive spying eyes saw Owen and Karen standing together they would spot the magnetic current, the telltale electricity, between their bodies.

  But he did not see her. Instead, Ian Morrissey came up to him, his goatee whiter and the hair on his head longer, befitting his recent decision to become an easel “art” painter and reduce magazine illustrating to his spare time—just the really tempting commissions, he bragged, from old buddies in the trade. He announced, “Alissa’s stuck at home with Nina, a fever of one hundred one, throwing up half the night.”