Villages by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307417640
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T06:00:00+00:00

x. Village Sex—V

In his dream, Owen is back in Middle Falls, moving between his house on Partridgeberry Road and his central desk at E-O Data and the little retreat room, with a DEC PDP-8 and a CRT and a desk and telephone and an imitation-leather sofa, that he rigged at one end of the old arms factory on the Chunkaunkabaug. Between these stations of his life lay a network of village streets and vendors—the three restaurants, the two banks, the Woolworth’s, the dry cleaner’s, the shoe-repair shop, which was beginning to do a nice business in hippie-style leather sandals and clogs. The town, pre-CVS, had multiple drugstores, the oldest of them, Amory’s Pharmacy, on the hill, still holding some back shelves of patent medicines with faded Victorian labels and displaying in its window the two traditional oversize vials of emblematic liquid, iodine-red and litmus-blue, that since medieval times have advertised pharmacological healing. On another, more personalized level of the net were the family dentist; the doctor, taciturn and unsympathetic with any but the most dramatic complaint; the pediatrician, for the children’s many minor ills; the eye doctor, a tall bald Jew who winced with back pain when he leaned over to administer his pupil-dilating drops twice-yearly; and, at an annual appointment, the tax accountant, a pointy-nosed mole of a man who waved his hands in agitation when Owen threatened to confide information he didn’t want to hear. There were the schools—the public schools until Gregory turned thirteen—which involved periodic teacher conferences and recitals, playlets, choral performances, and team-sport events, usually in the rain. And there were committee meetings—the Chamber of Commerce and the School Building Needs Committee for Owen, the Garden Club and the Downtown Betterment Society for Phyllis, along with her madrigal group and yoga classes.

Somewhere in this thick net, he dreams, there is his rapidly burgeoning relationship with Julia, compact, firm, decisive, surprisingly sexy Julia, but he keeps losing her, it is just too hard to keep up the precarious secret connection—the hurried, hard-breathing phone calls, the panicky trysts where the edges of this town merge with the edges of another—and weeks go by, in his dream, without any connection being made, and his love object sinks deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the everyday, the respectable thick weave of citizenship and work and parenthood, and this relationship, forged in such a summer lightning of passion and mutual discovery, is cooling to nothing, like a holiday bond between children dissolved when vacation is over. Julia, uncontacted day after day, is withering smaller and smaller, and is falling through the network, to become forever lost beneath the barren busy-ness of “normal,” licit life. Panic wakes him; Owen awakes bereft, bewildered as it slowly dawns upon him, along with the wallpaper and the merciless seaside sunlight already burning in the chink beneath the windowshade, that it is Phyllis who is lost, sunk beneath the surface of things, and that he and Julia, long and lawfully married, have been for over twenty years living together in Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts.

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