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

Owen spotted Antoinette working the booth for Cray Research, a new company for high-performance computers up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She had black hair that looked hurriedly cut by a child’s plastic scissors, and an electric aura of grievance that boded well. He homed in on her at the boozy reception hosted by the city’s newly created Association of Electronic Industries. Very quickly, it seemed to him, she was confiding to him a tirade against a fellow employee, slightly her superior, an “asshole” whose “shit” she was tired of putting up with. The words made squeamish Owen wince, but there was a promise of intimacy in them. He curbed his repugnance, telling himself that this was a passionate woman, who lived like him in a small-town Falls, and that they were thrown together in the heart of this great, free country. They went on from the reception to a celebrated steakhouse a cab ride away. Her tale continued: “This absolute, stuck-on-himself shit, Eric by name—and can’t you just bet that anybody called Eric is going to be stuck on himself?—kept dumping on me in these subtle ways that nobody could fault him for but that I could certainly sense, saying these bogus-polite things like ‘I’ll let you’ and ‘Would you be an angel’ and yatata-yatata, when what was involved was literally all night going over the machine code, matching it number by number against a master, twenty-plus pages of dot-matrix with hardly any ink on the ribbon, it’s a wonder I didn’t go blind. And in the morning, you know what the peckerhead did?”

“No, what?” said Owen, nursing his second beer, which he hoped might dilute two stiff bourbons at the reception, in case he would have eventually to perform. He was learning to pace himself in these matters, on the principle of deferred gratification.

“He said, ‘Thanks—thanks, Antoinette’—that was all the scumbag said, taking the printout I’d marked up, number by number, circling the possible bugs, it killed my eyes, I need to get a new prescription and I bet that’s the reason. ‘Thanks,’ he had the nerve to simply say to me, ‘you’re a dear,’ and put it on the other papers on his desk as if it was the merest little five-minute favor in the world, knowing fucking damn well I’d been up all night.”

“That does seem rude,” Owen said, his brain beginning to feel puffy, lifting him up out of guilt and the worry that Phyllis was telephoning his hotel.

“At the same time he’s constantly pulling these chauvinist tricks, he’s talking a great game of what a terrific IQ I must have, so much quicker to spot redundancy and garbage than he is, I actually should have his job—can you imagine, he had the crust to admit it, I ought to have his job?—if there was any kind of a level playing field. He’s one of these guys who thinks being a great women’s libber is an easy way into your pants. What a prick, truly. What a conceited, smarmy, phony prick.”

“My wife is brainy,” Owen shyly told her. “Or used to be.”

Antoinette didn’t hear him. She told him more about Eric, how he dressed for work oh-so-casual and boyish and yet pulled out his comb twice every hour, he had this wavy reddish hair he was really vain of, and wore these broad belts and cowboy buckles to show what a flat stomach he had—he ran five miles a day and only drank soda water and white wine to keep his figure, just like a woman. She suspected he was gay, in fact. “When he walks, he seems conscious of his ass, the way a woman is—this skinny little ass of his, and his long lanky legs. Why would any guy but a queer wear such tight jeans, he must use a shoehorn to get them on? And not blue jeans, either, they would be too common, he wears black jeans, with the white stitching on the hip pockets. God, what a pompous turd.”

Even in Owen’s hotel room, Antoinette out of her clothes and slithering through the shadows like an agitated white snake—her skin cold against his, the very chill of her hostility exciting, something to overlook and overcome—she continued to express her venom toward her colleague, who thought he was too hot a shit to come to this miserable so-called fair and sent her instead, expecting her to be grateful for this nonexistent favor. Even as she was being fucked, her tongue ran on about how some people just get under her skin, she knows she shouldn’t let them, it’s exactly what they want, mega-pricks like that, her girlfriends tell her to rise above it and not give the creepy bastard the time of day, and even as Owen came in her—she was one of these circus-performer types, bringing her legs way back like she is being shot from a cannon, he didn’t see how her clitoris was getting any contact but then she should know—it occurred to him that she was in love with this hateful Eric and felt spurned by him, and was using Owen to make him jealous. She thought that Eric could see her, that he was with her every moment. She was obsessed with him and was angry because, drunk as she was, she could feel Eric not caring; hanging up there like a bat in the corner of the ceiling, he didn’t care who she was acting like a circus performer with.

She awoke, finally, as they lay beside each other overheated and disappointed, to the dim reality of him, Owen, as opposed to that of the man tormenting her self-esteem back in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She announced, in a different, sobered voice, “Hey, whatever your name is. You’re not so bad. Thanks for listening. My girlfriends think I’m crazy on the subject.”

“Well,” Owen said, mild and acquiescent as he tended to be, “we are crazy. People in general. Eric sounds like an interesting