Villages Read online

  “You did?” His face went hot, abruptly immersed in his life, his only life.

  “Well, darling, aren’t we? You’re always talking about it.” Her eyes, with a shade of nervous challenge, sought his.

  In trying to persuade her of his devotion he had often imagined aloud their married life together. But he did not remember exactly proposing; he had feared he would be rejected and his hard-won advances into her enchanted terrain negated.

  “Well, I guess we are,” he admitted. “That’s thrilling.” What would his mother say? What would Elsie? Well, serve them right. Nature is flux and transformation, MIT had taught him.

  vi. Village Sex—III

  In his junior year Owen had met her parents a number of times. Their house was on a shady Cambridge street, no doubt once quieter than it had become since rush-hour traffic had discovered it as a short-cut between Garden Street and Mass. Avenue. It was a typical big house on a small lot, with an alarming weight of books everywhere, bookcases even climbing the stairs and filling the hallways of the third floor. The rooms on this third floor had been rented out to Harvard students until five years ago, when Phyllis’s maturing had made the irruption of young males uncomfortable for her parents. Until her young brother, Colin, went off to Andover, he had appropriated one of the previously rented rooms as his lair, adding to the mattress and bureau and yellow-oak desk already there his own little radio of white plastic, a 45-rpm record player, some glue-it-together models of obsolete war machinery, a scattering of faintly redolent sweatshirts and basketball sneakers, and, in several unpainted pine bookcases, a tumble of Batman and Plastic Man comics, science-fiction magazines, paperbacks of baseball stats, Shady Hill textbooks, and a child’s encyclopedia in fifteen volumes whose spines moved through the rainbow from violet to red but were jarringly out of order. Owen’s mother had owned a few books and also borrowed them from the Alton Public Library, travelling in from Willow on the trolley car; in this house books were a monstrous growth, a fungus of reading matter encrusting every surface.

  Phyllis was taller than both her parents; the sight of her blushingly towering over them, holding her head at an angle that indicated a wish to shrink lower, Owen found erotic. She was slender but ample-breasted, with abundant dirty-blond down at the nape of her long neck and in her moist places—a hormonally replete body sprung from these two dainty, dry people. Their bodies seemed the last things the senior Goodhues thought of. They dressed almost interchangeably in layers of mousy wool. Mrs., named Carolyn, wore nubbly straight skirts and low brown heels and unbuttoned cardigan sweaters of which one half always hung noticeably lower than the other. Her washed-out coloring and air of distraction linked her to her daughter, but there was an impatience, a habit of interrupting utterances she felt were too slow or obvious, which gentle-spoken Phyllis did not share. “This house—” Owen said, looking about him the first time he entered it, marvelling at the wealth of varnished stickwork, knobs, and moldings, the massive double doors, the walnut-dark staircase forcefully thrusting up to a landing where tall leaded windows cast tinted shadows.

  “—has too many books. I know. I keep telling Eustace, but he says they’re his tools, and he never knows which ones he’s going to need. A book can wait untouched for twenty years, and suddenly, in the middle of some dreary scholarly article, he desperately needs it. It’s horrible—think of the dust mites. I try to get the cleaning women to dust them once a year and they quit instead.”

  “They get frightened, Mother,” her daughter softly interposed, glancing apologetically in Owen’s direction.

  But there was no need to apologize. All parents embarrass their children. Owen’s had seemed to him impossibly sad, putting on a quarrelsome show of discontent and maladjustment for all on Mifflin Avenue to see. Phyllis’s, in comparison, seemed model residents of Cambridge, as obedient to their grooves as the little interlocked figures that jiggle on the hour out of a Swiss clock. Owen liked this quick small lady of the house, with her clipped gray hair and upper eyelids collapsed upon her lashes. His experience with small women—Grammy, Elsie—had generally been good.

  “Phyl tells us you’re quite brilliant, over there at the other place.”

  “Oh, no, I’m just another plodding electrical-engineering major. It’s your daughter who—”

  “—outsmarts the professors,” Carolyn Goodhue finished for him. “We find it so strange, Eustace and I—mathematics, we thought for years it was a phase she was going through, an awkward age. Girls do, of course, and unlike boys they find such devious ways to rebel, all the time with these sweet smiles so you can’t fault them. But, seriously, dear”—to her daughter—“your father and I are immensely proud. We boast. We put on brave faces when our friends tease us, asking why would a girl who could have waltzed into Radcliffe, or Wellesley or Bryn Mawr if she didn’t like boys, why would she want to go down the river to a place so—”

  “Grubby,” Owen finished for her.

  “Mother,” Phyllis intervened. “We’re grubby because we have to stay up all night, memorizing facts, and most of the boys do things with their hands.”

  “Not too many things, I hope,” Mrs. Goodhue snapped, blinking rapidly when Owen laughed: he had never heard an off-color joke from Phyllis, they somehow didn’t enter her head.

  It was from Professor Goodhue that Phyllis had inherited her shy slouch. His posture, though, was not trying to hide any excess of beauty but was the organic product of a life at a desk or curled in a chair reading. Chin on chest, he had lost all semblance of a neck, and had swollen in the middle like an old-fashioned clay jug, his head tipped forward as if to pour forth a lecture. His voice was reedy and faint, producing its sound on the intake of his breath, with the same pulmonary motion as sucking on a pipe. He was, in Owen’s limited view of him, more intake than output, though an occasional chuckle, like the snap of dried glue in an old binding, could be taken as an agreeable signal. He acted bemused by Owen’s appearance at his house and dinner table, and even made a point of this bemusement, demonstrating as it did a preoccupation with higher things. Elsie Seidel’s father had stridden forward in his feed-and-hardware store with too toothy a smile under his little sharper’s mustache and too fierce and friendly a handshake, signalling hostility and a manly knowledge of what Owen desired of his succulent daughter. Eustace Goodhue’s approach was much less confrontational, hardly an approach at all—an amiably baffled air like that of a man who works in a greenhouse with a stuffed-up nose and cannot understand why all these bumblebees keep flying in the window. Phyllis had attracted boy visitors before; her father seemed unaware that she, her college career ending and the professional prospects for a female mathematician being exceedingly slight, had arrived at an age of decision and eternal pledge. The age was reached early in Eisenhower’s America; women bred as if supplying a frontier, in that era of pioneer consumerism. To set up a household and breed and buy was to strike a blow against our enemy, those dowdy, repressive anti-capitalists behind the Iron Curtain. Owen was ready to serve, believing that he had found the woman for him—the mother of his children, the nurturer of his career, the presiding angel of a home better-equipped than the threadbare shelters the Rausches and Mackenzies had managed to provide in leaner, less electronic times.

  Owen rather despised Professor Goodhue for not putting up a stiffer defense of his treasure. In the more than twenty years in which he and the man were members of the same family, the older becoming a grandfather in perfect synchrony as the younger became, repeatedly, a father, the first ten saw little respect tendered by Owen, a son-in-law exposed fully now to the shadowy, pampered role the professor played in his own household. True, in the last analysis its weight of books and eclectic, picturesque furniture rested on his intellectual labors, which had also wrested from the world a summer cottage in Truro and European travel every other year. But he seemed to dwell too much in the world of books, its conceits and fictions, to make much of a dent on this one.

  In the second de
cade of this close acquaintance, Owen, his knowledge of the world deepened, could better appreciate his father-in-law’s sly withdrawal from the front line of family life, and the learned passion that had produced so many lectures and carefully pondered little articles, bound first in buff-colored academic quarterlies and then collected in fat, chaste volumes from the same university presses that issued the professor’s several anthologies and his critical biography of George Herbert. Those years saw little change in Eustace Goodhue, as he went from mid-life to retirement, and much change in Owen, progressing from naïve youth to experienced mid-life. They became two men roughly equal, with the companionable affection between them of any who have survived a hazardous voyage together. Owen, himself the father of two daughters, at last saw how weakened, by biology and by humanity’s village wisdom, the bond becomes: every cell in the aging father’s body yearns to pass her to another man, a man of her generation who can without taboo perform those elemental acts the cycle of generation demands.

  There was in Professor Goodhue’s absent-minded complaisance something as yet dimly glimpsed by its beneficiary—the dubious pleasure taken in the sexual transactions of others, a polymorphous sharing noticeable not only at weddings, where the weeping parents and awestruck flower-girl unite to consign the bride to the connubial mysteries, but at polite adult parties where custom seats husbands and wives not together but beside the spouses of others, tempting potential confusion and exogamous trespass. Copulation, in short, is so powerful and highly prioritized an event that we take pleasure not only in our own but in that of others, even of a daughter or wife as she draws away from us into the sexual seethe. Phyllis in all her aloof beauty was a fruit with a stem more weakened than was apparent; she fell to Owen rather confoundingly, her fall resisted less than he had expected or, at some deep level, hoped.

  All this could be glimpsed only in long hindsight. At the time, as her return to her home gave them more opportunities for intimacy than 120 Bay State Road or Bexley Hall had offered, they felt daring and furtive; in their minds it would have shocked their parents to see them and shocked God as well, if He had deigned to watch. Owen, with the furtive religiosity inherited from his pious grandparents, was not sure that He was not watching, much as He had watched over the house in Willow, in its snow globe of safety. Now, like the vibrant green beam of a science-fiction ray-gun, or like the ruby-red lasers that in science-fact would be developed in the next decade, God’s gaze perhaps penetrated through the Goodhues’ dormered roof into the third-floor room still flavored by her brother’s dirty socks and ratty comic books.

  Phyllis liked, Owen discovered, having the back of her neck, with its sweaty pale tendrils, stroked; it loosened her up. And the bluish inner sides of her arms, turned submissively uppermost, and the backs of her thighs, his fingers curled to lightly scratch the goosebumped skin with his nails. He tussled her into advanced déshabille, to the goal of pink-faced nakedness, but he clung to her virginity, as something sacred, a threshold he could still retreat from. Not that he wanted to retreat; she was his prize, his captive princess. She was taller and slimmer than Elsie, with that same breathtaking give to her waist and bigger breasts, so big she made motions to disown them, fighting her hands as they fluttered in instinctive cover-up. When his mouth became too busy at her nipples, she pulled back, deflecting his rapturous smothered comments as if they were the asides of a bumbling lecturer. Product of an academic environment, Phyllis could produce an academic frown, a mental sniff of disapproval. She held him against her, however, with a certain skill, gripping his buttocks; she had done this before, let a boy come against her pelvic region, though her hands felt gloved in tentativity. When it came to mopping up, though, Phyllis participated efficiently, their hands intertwining with his handkerchief as it pursued the puddles of semen on her belly and in her pubic hair, curlier and darker than the hair on her head. On the night of their wedding, surveying the moonlit field of flesh of which he had taken legal possession that afternoon, at a ceremony as watered-down yet graceful as the Unitarianism of Cambridge could make it, he knelt between her legs and combed her luxuriant pussy, now his, as if preparing a fleecy lamb for sacrifice, until she irritably took the comb from his hand and tossed it away from the bed; it clattered against a baseboard over beneath the window.

  Rejected again. He scarcely dared ask why she had done that—dismissed his currying, his proud adoration. “What was wrong?” he asked. “Did it hurt?”

  “It began to feel funny,” Phyllis admitted. “Tickly. Theatrical. Like you were showing off for somebody. Let’s just do it.”

  “Do you want to? We don’t have to. I can wait until you want to. Maybe tomorrow, when we’re not so tired and jazzed up by other people. Weddings are killing, aren’t they?” They were in a cottage, the Truro cottage, lent to them for a week by her parents. He had graduated in the top third of his class; she had spent an unhappy year at graduate school desultorily taking advanced courses in number theory and topology and groping for a thesis topic and not getting along with her advisor. They were to go back to Cambridge for the summer, she to pick up a few more credits at summer school and he for an eight-week internship with Whirlwind that the department of electrical engineering had arranged. They could hear from afar surf breaking and withdrawing on the beach at the base of its sand cliffs and smell the stunted pitch pines. The sound and the smell, which would be there whether they were or not, gave the dark outside a vastness their newly joined lives could never fill. “Why is everybody supposed to like champagne?” he asked, timid of her silence. “To me it always tastes sour.”

  He could not read her expression, only see the lean arabesque of her jaw and the long tendon of her neck as she turned her head toward the window. A three-quarters moon was framed and bisected by the sash; its light picked out the tab of an earlobe in the obscure mass of her hair. What was Phyllis doing, with her motionless gaze? Saying goodbye to the moon? This small bare house, strange to him, to her was full of girlhood summer memories and quaint souvenirs—books, shells, immature watercolors fading in their dime-store frames—of a bygone family life. The cottage’s briny, musty odors would be murmuring a language to her brain. Still kneeling, possessed of the privileges of a husband, his brain sapped by the flight of all his blood into his erect prick, he surveyed the glimmering moonlit wealth of her—the crescents of round hard shoulder and the collarbone jutting above its slant pockets of shadow and her breasts flattened on the fragile splay of her ribs. She turned her head back to gaze up at him.

  “No, let’s do it,” her voice came, softer. “Why buck tradition?”

  “Did you say fuck tradition?”

  “That’s not funny, Owen.”

  His impression grew that he was looking down at someone somehow slain. The weak moon-shadows of window muntins cast a net over her white form. Her sunken eyes seemed unseeing. His poor prick, so hard it ached, emitted an anxious little stink. Then a white hand drifted from her side and lightly grazed his glans and shaft, testing. She lifted her knees, assuming the exact pose of the drawing gouged into the back of the playground shed, and as if idly, with cool fingertips, she guided him in. He met an obstacle, and pushed through it. What he had not expected, it hurt him as well as her. He finished, and it was not clear that she had even begun. Her mucous warmth had seared him. As if back in the bed of his adolescence, he had had a sensation of his inner world somersaulting, the sensation less pure and violent than when produced with his left hand. Phyllis had submitted, and that was a start. All tension had fled his muscles, and he marvelled at how many times ahead of them they would do this together, each time better, the two of them both less clumsy and shy.

  In the bathroom, a resiny salt scent pressed against the window screen; trees were growing right here, live breathing things, scrub oak and bayberry bushes as well as the pitch pines. He washed his genitals of blood and semen and called in from the lit bathroom into the dark, “What shall we do about the sheet?”

  “Didn’t
you notice? I put a towel under my hips.”

  “Oh my God, I didn’t,” he said, stricken with tenderness, as if this proof of her calm prudence and foresight opened Phyllis to him wider than fucking her had. He rushed to return to her, to see the towel with his eyes, to make some kind of relic of it. Others—Hank, Jake—would have coveted such a relic. She still assumed the position of the drawing on the shed, the obscene M-shape, looking back at the moon. Perhaps herself dazed, she lifted her hips enough for him to ease the stained towel away; he kissed the terrycloth, pressed his face into it, its receding clash of flesh and blood.

  “Owen, really,” she said. She swung her naked legs past him and set her feet on the floor, taking the white towel with her into the bathroom. “I’ll wash everything up,” she announced. When she came out she was wearing a dotted wool nightie and he was still naked, kneeling at the bedside, pressing his face into the pocket of leftover heat where she had become his woman, deflowered. She made him feel foolish, theatrical, trying to make something religious of this moment. Under her nightie she was wearing, he discovered, underpants, with a pad at the crotch.

  In her brother’s room, in the year past, Owen would move away from one of their tussles on the edge of intercourse and look out the dormer window, to the dizzy jut and recession of Cambridge rooftops and the narrow back yards with their rusty barbecue grills on little brick patios or added-on decks, and feel its communal force, its collective pride. He was privileged to have this elevated access to its wooden cityscape—so many barny mansions built on an industry of thoughts and scholarship. Via one of its maidens he had secured himself a place here, a seat at the Goodhues’ mahogany dining table with its diet of dry gossip and liberal indignation, in these days of evil Joe McCarthy and lackadaisical Ike. Yet Owen felt less than fully part of it—he was practical, Phyllis had sensed from the start, and, compared with her father, coarse. There was an ethos expressed by these dormered rooftops, these innumerable golden windows admitting views of stuffed bookshelves, of faded Oriental rugs, of kitchens adorned with copper-bottomed pots and quilted potholders, of bathrooms papered in New Yorker covers, of narrow, unmade student beds: he could admire it, even marry into it, but never make it his own. Tall and wiry, he had a smile quick to expose the crooked, sensitive teeth of a boy reared far from this self-cherishing village.