Villages

by John Updike

  His face hot, his legs watery, Owen struggled away from the Mercedes and across a grassy ditch gouged by something, muddy marks, not deep, left by some passing weight. Another policeman, older and more solid than the one Ed had spoken to, stopped him as he floundered toward the blanket where it lay neatly tucked this side of a low bed of blueberry bushes turned dull scarlet, beyond knee-high stands of white asters.

  The older cop told Owen, “It looks like she was speeding, hit a patch of wet leaves, skidded, hit the ditch, and flipped.”

  It sounded like a reasonable, orderly process, not too violent. “So she’s all right?”

  “No, son,” the policeman said, though he may not have been much older than Owen. “She’s not. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt and when the car flipped she came down hard and broke her neck. That’s the way it looks to us. The coroner will be here to confirm. There’s no breath, we tried the mirror. What we need now is definite identification.” He touched Owen above the elbow, as if to prevent him from floating away. “Sorry to put you through this, Mr. Mackenzie. Would you rather have Mr. Mervine look?” He knew Ed’s name and knew Owen’s name, though this was Upper Falls.

  “No, I’ll do it.” He took the remaining steps gratefully, the blanket had seemed so lonely. It was as when you check on small children sleeping at night, so alone in the crib or bed that there is that catch of panic until you hear them breathing.

  “Let me lift this here. Tell me when you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready.” His shoes and ankles were getting wet. The various grasses, the little shiny blueberry leaves, the gravel and grit of the roadside, with plastic flip-tops and cigarette filters slowly going back to nature: these data pressed on his retina as if to tell him that all was illusion, that the moment would be reversed and redeemed, that he was bending over and picking up his wet glasses case from the dew-soaked weeds.

  The cop’s hand trembled, pulling back the blanket. Maybe he was older than Owen. Pale Phyllis slept, her sand-colored hair barely mussed and her head not noticeably awry. Her eyes were still open, which shocked him, but the face had already begun its transition to the inanimate, all those miraculously interwoven structures intact but lacking the spark, the current that gave them meaning and presence. The responsive skin along her cheekbones had lost its blush. She looked like a statue; but then she had been a statue in his mind for a long time.

  A weight was bearing down on Owen: Ed leaning on him, looking over his shoulder as he knelt there in the weeds to view Phyllis. The weight on his back cancelled Owen’s impulse to bend down and kiss her lips, which had so lately kissed his, with belated passion. Ed breathed close behind his ear. “You did this, you fuckhead.”

  “Did I?” Owen asked.

  “She was the best woman I ever knew,” Ed said, his weight still bearing on Owen’s like a wrestler’s. “I loved her.”

  “Me too. Ed, let me up. We’re both in shock, let me breathe.”

  “I’ll let you breathe all right,” Ed said menacingly, but he backed off to let Owen stand. With space between them, and police listening, he told his partner, “You and I are through, buddy. The sight of you makes me puke. I was going to marry her, you know.” His upper lip did that chimp thing, as if to clean his teeth, in sheer aggression.

  “No, I didn’t know. Did Phyllis know?”

  This gave Ed pause. “I didn’t want to crowd her, when there was still a chance to patch it up with you. She adored you, you miserable piece of shit.”

  Owen could have resented the way Ed was trying to steal his grief from him, there in front of the police, but he was thinking of a larger reality: the abyss that had yawned beside his childhood windows, the black lake of awful possibilities, had widened and risen to engulf his life. But he was still functioning, his brain still working, making more connections per split second than he could articulate, reorienting him in fresh circumstances, his perceptions quick and dry within the lake even as he drowned.

  xiv. Village Wisdom

  Village wisdom recommends that a building should not have thirteen stories, nor an histoire thirteen chapters. Its dictates tend to caution and conservatism: toss a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder, and knock wood after claiming good health; keep your opinion under your hat, and don’t stick your head above the crowd. Haskells Crossing is a good place for lying low. It is Julia who ventures out, to shop and to join women’s groups, to have massages and manicures, while Owen cowers in the house, tinkering with the Internet—a frustrating mass of peremptorily severed connections and blithely illiterate misinformation, offered on what it would be kind to call a junior-high-school level—and with oil painting. He has taken it up. He keeps trying to capture on canvas their view of Massachusetts Bay, his own yew and euonymus bushes in the foreground and in the middle ground scattered islands and tilting sailboats and in the distance a horizon where a few oil tankers ply their viscid, geopolitically critical wares; but the harder he stirs the oils on his palette to get the exact colors, the muddier and more muted they become. The atomic brilliance of reality, its reserved but implacable pop-up quiddity—this effect Nature keeps to itself. With the last of his little Boston consultancies disbanded, he and Julia live comfortably on the proceeds of the sellout of E-O Data that Ed arranged in 1978 with the infant Apple corporation of Cupertino, California. Owen’s pioneering work on graphical interfaces was rolled into the Atari-derived visuals of Apple’s early microcomputers and into the Alto interface employed in the triumphantly successful Macintosh of 1984. The shares which Ed Mervine had accepted in part payment partook of this triumph, and he presciently unloaded at the right time, and in a curt note advised his old partner to do the same. Owen, ever passive, took this wise advice; Apple’s early elegance glimmered out as the chilling shadow of Microsoft overcast the entire computer world. As a program, Windows was kludgy and a chip-power hog, but its hold on IBM and its clones could not be broken, any more than the inefficient, left-hand-favoring early typewriter keyboard could, once lodged in thousands of machines, be changed.

  Owen arrived in his new village as a mysteriously comfortable stranger, who had filched a little fortune from the early stages of an increasingly less exotic business. He was superstitiously viewed as a kind of alchemist, but he knew that the alchemy of Babbage and Turing, Eckert and Mauchly and Von Neumann had long since become mere chemistry, a province of dronelike quantifiers and disagreeable smells. For a time he pecked away at his customized, power-boosted iMac, hoping to come upon another next thing, perhaps a form of browser program with a few corners ingeniously cut, while knowing in his heart that he was amusing himself; the room for individual invention had been squeezed from an egregiously “mature” and vulgarized field of exploitation, a practically infinite sprawl of e-mail, pornography, spam, half-baked data, digital photos and videos, pirated music—all the importunate demotic trash that in Owen’s youth had been mostly confined to the print medium, to bales of recyclable newspapers, magazines, catalogues, and flyers. So-called cyberspace was being stifled by the lowly appetites to which capitalism must cater. In engineering as in the arts, the dawn time, before all but a few are still asleep to the possibilities, is the time for leaps of creation. The computer’s engineering marvels, like those of the automobile earlier in the departed century, are buried in a landslide of common use: any bank teller can summon up currency quotations from Hong Kong, just as any auto driver can push on the pedal for more gas. And, just as platform countries have stolen the auto and textile industries from the American worker, so software is more and more outsourced to India, Russia, China, the Philippines. It is too sad. But progress is sad, change is sad, natural selection is very sad. Small wonder that Owen, in his old age, now that the last of his and Julia’s combined six children are out of the house, has taken up painting—its silence, its long association with the sacred, its odor of patiently purified essences and minerals.

  The children, as children must, adjusted. Rachel and Thomas Larson, aged nine and seven a
t the wedding (a simple, bare-bones service in the Lower Falls Universalist Church), deferred to the four Mackenzies chronologically arrayed above them; they sheltered in their blood mother’s presence even as Julia put the bulk of her maternal effort—a heroic output of empathy, patience, and affection—into the traditionally suspect role of stepmother. Owen’s children, two of them in college and all four imbued with the stoic sophistication of a generation to whom family dysfunction is common TV fare, didn’t much blame their stepmother for what had befallen them. Only little Eve kept her distance, those first years. Then, as sexuality caught up with the child, she had no mature female to turn to but Julia, and they became, briefly, close, before the girl, at sixteen, drifted away into a woman’s necessary secrecy. It is a life-stage, Owen reflected, when one’s children become instructors in acceptance and sophistication—in rolling with the punches.

  It had been Julia who had known of Haskells Crossing. Arthur’s first call, fresh from Andover Newton Theological School, had been as assistant minister to a failing Episcopal parish in Cabot City; the more sedate, more prosperous Saint Barnabas in Haskells Crossing had been envied, a kind of rich younger brother. From the perspective of Middle Falls—where the old riverside gun factory again stood empty, though the E-O Data sign stayed up above the loading platform, and a select few of its employees had found employment with Apple—Haskells Crossing seemed a fairy-tale abstraction, an ideally remote and obscure site for their new life together. But no village is remote and obscure to itself; its inhabitants occupy the center of the universe. After twenty-five years, Owen and Julia are woven into that center. Their relationship is loving but haunted. He thinks of Phyllis every day, though her image seldom troubles to invade his dreams; there is instead a generic oneiric wife-figure who, on his awaking, Owen is not certain had been Julia or Phyllis or yet another female. Sometimes she presides over a house whose corners and floorboards and scattered toys and chipped dishes are those of his first house, the home of Isaac and Anna Rausch on Mifflin Avenue in Willow. Everything in that house, every trivial little object and square foot of carpet, was supercharged with significance. His mother had existed in the house as a nexus of need, a wife, child, and mother all at once, hovering between Owen’s head and the ceiling, a constant voice in the middle distance, where the view from the window intersected with the dirty wallpaper.

  Once, a dream of that house reminded him, his mother bought a wallpaper cleaner that consisted of a pink puttylike substance in a cylindrical container like the Quaker Oats box. He and his father were enlisted in rubbing a ball of this fleshy substance across the dingy pattern of big yellow roses and green thorny stems in his parents’ bedroom; when his childish turn came, he found the work strenuous and intimate, with his nose so close to the faintly rough, slightly paling grain of the hopeless immensities of paper. Invisible coal dust, wafted from thousands of chimneys, gradually turned gray the sweet-smelling, adhesive substance in his hands. The chore, whose enlistment seemed to mark, for little Owen, a step up into adult labors, remained in his mind as an instance of his mother’s heat—the friction of her resistance to the way things were. To his father and him, the wallpaper had seemed clean enough.

  He wonders how suicidal Phyllis’s end had been. She had been delayed by her outburst at him and was speeding, to be sure, not even pausing to fasten her seat belt; but to arrange to skid on wet leaves, to achieve a rollover and a broken neck, seemed impossibly precise. And why end her life when she had a new mission, to save him from himself and Julia? No, the accident was just that, an absurd confluence of atoms in space-time, slipped through a flurry of unlikely odds. And yet she had become inconvenient to him, and Owen led, he was early convinced, a life charmed from above. God killed Phyllis, as a favor to him: from this blasphemous thought he seeks to shield himself with the fancy that Phyllis, the beautiful math major, had crossed herself out the way a redundant term is dropped from the denominator and the numerator of a complex fraction.

  Julia consigned to a dark cupboard on the third floor photographs and slides containing Phyllis’s image, captured before the era of family videos, but his four children were allowed to have their mother’s photograph in their rooms. The photos are still there. Owen often studies them, not just colored snapshots but studio portraits of Phyllis’s virginal self, in a wasp-waisted, wide-skirted dress of the time, with her bangs sleekly brushed and a certain arch sideways glance invited by the photographer’s banter. He blames her ghost, who, unchanging, gathers strength as the living weaken, for his sexual failures with Julia. Five years younger than he, his wife is still needy; there is hardly a night when she doesn’t interrupt his going to sleep with a hug or an inquisitive caress. Yet, always a great believer in the health-giving value of sleep, he unchivalrously clings to the approaching oblivion. That oblivion may soon embrace him for good does not deter him. His heart still beats and his prostate gland is still intact, but his receptors for her signals have degraded. Nevertheless, he finds her frustrated attention a comfort and solace, and he hopes, each night as his bedtime book grows heavy and nonsensical in his hands, to do better. Sometimes, he does, and both are greatly gratified. How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!

  Just recently he had a dream in which, in some kind of classroom setting, he was delegated by the teacher to take a pencil or a textbook to Barbara Emerich, who was sitting alone in a corner, at one of those chairs with a broadened arm of yellow oak to write on. As he obediently offered this pencil or textbook to her, she responded by curling more deeply into herself, sitting unresponsive, so that he had to urge himself closer, and sensed, out of the shadowy space between her lap and her downturned face, that she was willing to have him kiss her. She expected it but acted on the expectation only by maintaining a stubborn stillness, her mouth clamped shut on her sunny smile, with its single gray tooth. Barbara Emerich, he happens to know, has grown morbidly fat, and appears at class reunions hobbling with a cane, and her winsome gray tooth has long been replaced with an unconvincing, ivory-white bridge; but in his dream her body was still lissome, in the simple pale-flowered cotton dress, buttoned in the front, such as girls wore to elementary school in the ’thirties. She wore a little girl’s dress but was mature, with long white legs and a supple abdomen and an adult capacity to sit still, waiting. The space subtended by her bosom and lap was shadowy with tense expectations; this space was a pool in which he yearned to dip his face, to be greeted by warm lips. He wakes knowing—his erection proves it—that he is still sexually alive, though sex with Julia must compete with his senile desire to sleep.

  The dream of Barbara Emerich brought back to him the aura, the climate of a woman, the cloud her presence makes as you walk along a street beside her, haunch to haunch, her long hair and skirt symbolizing the primordial difference, a difference concealed by clothes and fig leaves yet advertised by a wealth of external signs, such as her finer skin texture and lighter, quicker voice. At MIT, in their student years, unmarried, he and Phyllis, simultaneously weary of studying, might of an evening decide to go to a movie, in Central Square or on Boston’s Washington Street by way of the “T,” and there was sex in this, the impromptu joint flight into escapism, an attempt to extend the rapport their genitals timidly sought into the village domain of open entertainment and street life: he loved her then, the atmosphere of her flowing beside him down the sidewalk, hurrying lest they be late, and her consensual silence as she dipped her hand into the shared bucket of popcorn—though much less was made of popcorn in those days, concession profits were not so crucial to cinema houses—and let her attentive face be licked by the electric flashes, like so many short circuits, of The Caine Mutiny or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or Rear Window or La Strada or Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.

  A piece of village wisdom he was slow to grasp is that sex is a holiday, an activity remarkably brief in our body’s budget compared with sleeping or food-gathering or constructing battlements for self-defense,
such as the Great Wall of China. The unfaithful man and woman meet for a plain purpose, dangerous and scandalous, with the blood pressure up and the pupils enlarged and the love-flush already reddening the skin: is there not a praiseworthy economy in this, as opposed to sex spread thin through the interminable mutual exposure of a marriage?

  Phyllis’s finding that patch of slick leaves on Old County Road to take flight on, landing upside down there by the buzzing, frothy edge of the woods—this had seemed directed at him, with one of her characteristic sly backward glances, though he knew with the rational fraction of his brain that accidents are accidents and demonstrate only the vacant absurdity of everything that is. Yet we seek to impose patterns of meaning around ourselves, interlocking networks vectored back to the ego, le point de départ if not the Archimedean point that lifts this heavy, tangled, cluttered world into a schematic form we can manipulate.

  Middle Falls, in the years when he lived there, was mapped by the location of the homes of women in whom Owen was interested. In that house lived one he had slept with; in another, a woman he fantasized about sleeping with; and in the houses in between them were blank, uninhabited, empty spaces such as used to mark the interior of Africa, and Arabia Deserta, and the South Seas. Driving or walking in Middle Falls, then, gave Owen the happiness of orientation, of his position being plotted on a specific cartography, of being somewhere. There are fewer and fewer somewheres in America, and more and more anywheres, strung out along numbered highways. Even those who live along the highway do not always know its number. Though Owen has lived, driving and walking, in Haskells Crossing longer than at any other address, it remains unmapped in his mind, or mapped as vaguely as the Americas were in the sixteenth century, a set of named harbors and approximate coastlines enclosing wild hopes of El Dorado as well as many infidel savages to be exterminated.