Villages by John Updike (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📗

stoicism. Women are shining moon-creatures, who hurt us when they withhold themselves, and again when they don’t.

xi. Developments in Hardware

Seduced and seducing, Owen now bore upon him the scent of love. He had established himself, at the level of pheromones, as a man with a taste for what women can give. Discreetly, by way of murmurs and hand-squeezes, teasing and flattery, they flocked around him. Time was pressing on their generation, though they still considered themselves in their primes, with an infinity of options still open. He slowly got used to the sight of his former mistress, once so privately wanton, publicly pregnant; she complained so all could hear of the pains the child was bringing her, her legs, her back—her beautiful bare back. In the last months she had to spend hours in bed to keep from losing this intricate invader of her body. When the child was born, only three weeks premature, it was a girl, who everybody said looked just like Ian. The little preemie, not quite six pounds, had Ian’s sharp shrivelled features and his artist’s squint, peering up from the vanilla-colored carrycot where she lay as if into too bright a light. Owen had been sure it was going to be a boy; a weight of seriousness felt lifted from his shoulders.

“A chip off the old block,” Ed said in his ear. Ed was leaning on Owen from behind, there among the guests crowding around on the Slades’ sunporch to view the infant, now three months old, with her red face and scanty fine hair. It was Easter of the new decade; an unfiltered sun cut through the bare trees onto the wicker porch furniture and off the noontime cocktail glasses and into tiny Nina’s squinting eyes. The Morrisseys’ willingness to toy alliteratively with their children’s names struck Owen as crass and cast a baleful backward light upon the joys of his affair. Alissa still carried her baby weight. Her breasts, which had been just the right size for him—round handfuls—strained with their new burden against the silk underblouse and purple jacket of her Easter outfit. People had dressed up, even though few of them went to church, even on Easter. The Slades, the squarest couple in this set, did go and had fallen into the habit of giving this brunch party; it had come to be expected of them, as part of the set’s annual festive cycle. This year, the baby came, as if to replenish the children who were growing too old to engage in the Easter-egg hunt that the Slades dutifully staged. Owen could see nothing of himself in the infant with her florid little face and wide-open steel-blue eyes. There was an annoying heaviness of meaning in the touch of Ed’s hand on his back; Owen turned to relieve himself of it, facing his partner.

“Hard to see the goatee,” he said.

Ed barely smiled. He too, away from Stacey’s salads and sprouts, had put on weight. Stacey had left him and gone back to California. A bachelor again, traipsing from house to house as a dinner guest, Ed presented it as a simple matter of her being too young, and a member of another culture. California wasn’t another state, it was another country. Connecticut had never seemed real to her—too green, too quaint, everything too close together—and, with the hours he had to keep at the plant, she was lonely. Thus he reframed what must have felt to him as a shameful failure—a lack of juice, of enough entertainment value to a young woman. If only they had produced a baby, he speculated to Owen, it might have been different. He had wanted one, she hadn’t. Owen often thought back to the night they had smoked pot and Stacey had stayed on the floor. He wondered if her offer of a blow job had been unique to him or been repeated more successfully with others around Middle Falls. He was sorry she was gone, because he would accept the offer now. He understood it better now: it had been no big deal. She had had an expansive Western nature and Ed was an emotionally cramped nerd from the Bronx, where a gangster tact and taciturnity ruled the streets. To know more than you say was part of Ed’s code, here in Middle Falls, where the game was gossip; he somehow knew about Owen and Alissa and the baby, but would keep the secret.

Phyllis, three glasses of white wine to the good, wanted to hold the baby. She had dressed, showing her contempt for this most Christian of holidays, in tight blue jeans, small pearl earrings, and a man’s striped shirt folded back at the cuffs as if to expose the thousand-dollar Swiss watch Owen had given her for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. “It’s been so long,” she explained, bending her tall, slim-hipped body down through the shards of porch sunlight and in her hands quickly gathering up the little blanketed body from the carrycot. Alissa couldn’t conceal her alarm—her glasses flashed—and she rose in her chair and almost reached out, but Phyllis gently beamed down upon the mother a gracious smile of reassurance. “I haven’t forgotten about the head,” she said, and showed how she was supporting it with her left hand. “How hot their little skulls are!” she said, and gazed into the infant’s face as if searching out a meaning there, a riddle, in the unfocused wide stare. “Oh, Alissa,” Phyllis went on in that soft yet somehow commanding voice that Owen had once strained to overhear, “she’s exquisite. Owen,” she went on, finding his face in the clustered, hushed group, “we must have one more, before it’s too late.”

“We’ll talk about it,” he said, bewildered when this stopgap of a reply sprang laughter among their friends.

Phyllis with her eerie dreaming appropriation of the child had created a tension. Only the infant did not feel it. Her blue eyes, darker than her mother’s abraded color, had