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

“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