Villages Read online

  One night of too much to drink at the Morrisseys’ house, perhaps New Year’s Eve, in that messy tail end after midnight, they had accidentally met in the upstairs hall—she was checking on a feverish child and he on his way to urinate, the only downstairs bathroom being attached to Ian’s off-limits studio. Ian was quite humorlessly strict about his studio being off limits to company. Veering toward each other like planets out of orbit, Owen and Alissa kissed. She pushed up so hard their teeth touched; he was startled, as he had been years ago by Alice Stottlemeyer. But this was no longer spin-the-bottle. Unhinged by celebratory champagne, roused by her party outfit of see-through blouse and cerise harem pants, he slid his right hand down her side and tucked it a moment into her crotch. She jumped back as if scalded. “Oh no you don’t,” she said, in the tough voice of a dance-hall hostess, as played by Barbara Stanwyck or Ann Sheridan in a black-and-white movie at the long-lost Scheherazade. There were layers to Alissa; there were layers to all women, he was discovering; the trick was to find the layer where you were welcome.

  The Morrisseys entertained a lot, a sure sign of marital distress: they needed others to help them bear each other’s company. Ian Morrissey, a decade older than Alissa, was a magazine illustrator. As the world of middle-class magazines needing illustrations shrank, he had grown glum and sarcastic. The years had given him more gray hair than a man not much over forty should have, and trembling fingers stained by ink and nicotine, and a hollow-chested slump. He had acquired the idea that, while his own professional world, of dashingly glamorized women illustrating romantic short stories that always ended well, was yielding to sensational nonfiction and photographs airbrushed to within a few hairs of pornography, Owen and Ed were riding a technological wave steadily upward. He spoke of them derisively as “nerds.” Owen tried to explain to him how volatile and chancy the rapidly changing computer world was, and how he and Ed were facing ever younger and more innovative competition, but it had settled into Ian’s ego that he embodied a dying fine-arts tradition which was being crassly smothered under an onslaught of rock music, industrial robots, and psychopathic violence. He had grown a stubby goatee that made him look unshaven and sunk in the déshabille of failure.

  “What you nerds don’t get, utterly don’t get,” he told Owen one night, “is those hideous machines of yours aren’t superhuman, they’re subhuman. Everything that made us human is going by the boards.”

  “It’s just a device,” Owen said, determined to be amiable, feeling Alissa’s eyes insistently on him. “Like a hundred others—the steam engine, the automobile, the movie camera.”

  “Yes, and they’ve all changed our tempo—speeded it up to the point that we don’t live at all.”

  “What is it we do, then, Ian?” Phyllis asked. It was just the two of them to an informal dinner, there in the Morrisseys’ 1730 house in the older part of town. Unlike the Mackenzies, who at first had been their neighbors, the Morrisseys had remained loyal to the town center, near the Common. While Owen had been tinkering with the original DigitEyes, Ian had been up on his roof pointing the brick chimney; vigorous and optimistic, he had scraped and scorched the old lead housepaint from the clapboards, which then he had stained. Staining was supposedly the more authentic treatment, but it looked dark and ugly, temporary and cheap, to go with the low ceilings, the cracked plaster walls, and the shopworn folk-art oddments—duck decoys, jointed wooden dolls, a tin weathervane of a top-hatted man and bonneted woman—picked up at Connecticut roadside shops back when the couple, having left Manhattan, was freshly, acquisitively countrified. The whole house, even Ian’s neatly kept, fluorescent-lit studio, felt dusty; heart had gone out of their house, which made their invitations harder to refuse. The Mackenzie children did not like to come here to play, though the two Morrissey children were close in age to Gregory and Iris.

  Phyllis’s careless soft voice drew attention to her. A third glass of wine, or a touch of intellectual stimulation, put an unaccustomed flush on her cheeks. Her distant beauty—that pallid head held high above the throngs in life’s mazy corridors—diminished the nervous, rounded attractions of Alissa, though Owen felt them curved around her discontent like the feathers of a plump bird nesting. Other people’s unhappiness, it occurred to him, had been his element since childhood; sensing it focused and invigorated him.

  “We react,” Ian answered quickly. “We react to the damn machines, and go dead when they’re shut off.” The two couples had grown expert at these evenings together—the children upstairs with the mumble of television, the venerable neighborhood quieting down beyond the windows, which leapt into light when a passing car swung through the curve of Common Lane. Phyllis didn’t mind Ian; like her father, he had spent his life hunched over a two-dimensional task, and his darkly prophetic mood reminded her, perhaps, of dire adult palaver in Cambridge faculty circles. Sensing this, Ian played to her. “Are you aware,” he said, widening his appeal to include Owen and Alissa, “that as recently as our grandparents’ generation it was a common ability of people of any means to play a musical instrument, to carry a harmony part in group singing, and to be able to draw—to sketch out of doors and do at least watercolors? All those Victorian travellers could draw, and all the writers, not just Thackeray. Now not even the professional artists can draw. They slap up these huge abstractions that are an insult, a joke. The common man has a Brownie camera. Not even Brownies—that dates me. Brownies would take too much skill, they aren’t automatic enough.”

  In agitation at hearing so much of her husband’s voice, Alissa crossed and recrossed her legs on the old velvet sofa, which had been recovered with sailcloth and decorated with several tattered crocheted shawls. “I remember my father,” she volunteered, her washed-out eyes moving from face to face uncertainly, “pacing off the distance with his old Kodak. That was how he photographed me and my brothers. The pictures came out surprisingly sharp. The little triangular viewfinder had broken off, too. He did it by guess. The snapshots fascinated me—there weren’t too many of them, the way there are now. He kept them in old candy boxes; when you took off the lids there was still the faint smell of chocolate.”

  “See,” Ian said, “your old man, limited as he was, had mastered his tools. Nobody can use tools any more. They have to have everything done for them, by so-called experts, at twenty-five bucks an hour. And even so it’s all done badly. One of the few good things about this so-called revolution under way is that middle-class children are taking up the trades, carpentry and so on, in rebellion against their ham-handed white-collar parents.”

  This tired tirade, Owen was aware, related to Ian’s own increasing difficulty getting commissions for his flashy illustrations, full of induced verve and unfinished margins; many framed samples, once reproduced in the Post and Collier’s and Redbook, surrounded them on the cracked plaster walls. Owen was enough of an art-lover to take Ian’s art lightly, but did not want to reveal, in defending his own field of endeavor, this disregard. “A computer is a tool,” he said. “Its moving parts are electronic impulses, but the same identical actions could be worked out mechanically—in fact, that’s what Babbage and Pascal before him did do, but the machines got too complex to be machined. Ian, why do you need to imagine some whole new demonic order? Do you feel the same about the pop-up toaster, as opposed to frying bread in a skillet?”

  “O., dear, let Ian talk,” Phyllis said. “I want to hear more about how we’re all becoming subhuman.”

  “Speaking of more, does anybody want another drink?” Alissa asked. She sounded hopeful of the offer being declined.

  Ian sardonically promised, “One more Scotch-on-the-rocks, my dear, will greatly clarify my insight into the pitch-dark future.”

  “A very weak bourbon-and-water, Alissa,” Phyllis conceded. “Can I help?”

  “Just water for me,” said Owen, to reprimand Phyllis and to please Alissa, who was worried about her husband’s deterioration. Her glance at Owen suggested that it was they, sober, against the others.
Her plump bare legs, as she uncurled and pushed herself up from the sailcloth-covered sofa, excited him to thinking graphically; her convex thighs curved steeply inward where they met and transformed, without violating her fundamental homeomorphism, into a concavity delimiting another sort of space, beyond the sensitive V that he had, in one electric trespass, touched. It was late; cigarette smoke had pasted itself in eddying strips against the low ceiling, subdivided by boxed beams painted that custardy Williamsburg color.

  “Capitalism,” Ian asserted, “asks only one thing of us: that we consume. The stupider we are, the better consumers we are, not just of that sliced pap called bread and of dishwasher detergents that kill fish in the river, but of canned entertainment. The less friction it makes going in our ears and eyes, the more we can take in and pay for. There is no more art in the old sense of something made, by hand, by an artist responsible only to his eye and his sense of beauty. Huddled over his drawing pad trying to get the exact shading for the, let’s say, the stones of Venice or a patch of wildflowers, he was processing the external into something human; he was understanding it, and we could understand it with him, empathizing with his process of discovery, step by step. Music lays this right out in the dimension of time: we travel with the composer as he solves the problems, the key-changes, the resolution. You don’t need to understand anything to watch television; they want you so stupid you keep staring at the commercials.”

  Phyllis said, “I wonder if that’s why the young are so rebellious, because we’ve become so stupid. If that’s why they want to go back to Nature and blow up banks. They’re trying to break the shell of everybody’s stupidity.”

  “Thanks, Alissa,” Owen said, as their hostess placed a pleasantly tall, heavy-bottomed glass of ice water, its exterior slick with the rivuleted sweat of the heat differential. Was it an accident that Alissa, bending over to place a coaster beneath his glass, showed him, in the catenary curve of the loose neck of her peasant blouse, her breasts? Their tops were brown but there was white skin, too, deeper in shadow, and a dark cavity between them where he could thrust a finger, or a tongue, or even socket his erect penis. At Heron Pond, Phyllis and Alissa both in two-piece bathing suits, Phyllis’s made an effect on her upright body of two bands of white, whereas Alissa’s two bikini pieces were all adhesive arcs, little tucked triangles secured with bows of tinted string.

  Ian didn’t bother to respond to Phyllis, which offended Owen. Sitting in his tattered plaid wing chair, stained on its arms and where his head—greasily long-haired in artistic fashion—habitually leaned back, Ian clutched his fresh drink with his yellow fingers and spoke to Owen without deigning to turn his head; the two women on the sofa might as well not have been there. His goateed profile, stony-pale, snarled as if in a trance. “You nerds. You’re squeezing the juice out of life. To you we’re all just statistical constructs to be manipulated. I don’t blame Ed, he can’t help it, poor slob, being a nerd; if he wasn’t a nerd he wouldn’t be anything, a short-order cook at an all-night diner perhaps. But you, O. old boy, you know better. You have a soul, or had one once. Let me put it this way—you know something’s missing, and still you’ve signed up, a good soldier for Moloch. Whatever you call it. Industry. The defense establishment. Defense, death, pollution, and mass-produced crap for the crappy masses.”

  “Actually,” Owen said, enjoying the other man’s meltdown into hostility, calculating that he had less and less reason to avoid fucking his wife, “a lot of our present work involves putting insurance records on tapes or, the newer thing, disks, and devising systems for hospitals, cutting down on paperwork. Or are hospitals and insurance companies part of Moloch’s armies? Ian, what’s missing began to go missing a long time ago, with Copernicus and Martin Luther, and you can’t blame technology for not bringing it back. Technology works with what, as Wittgenstein said, is the case. Some would say, incidentally, that the women’s magazines you do your illustrations for are good soldiers for Moloch, selling cosmetics and tampons and dishwashers and sexy underwear and whatever else women can be persuaded they want. It’s the Devil’s bargain, Ian—medicine and electricity and rocket science in exchange for an empty Heaven. We’ve all signed on to the bargain, and a bunch of kids going up into Vermont and doing without flush toilets isn’t going to cancel the deal.” He wondered why he had become so heated; he didn’t want to believe this. He wanted to have technology and illusions, too: both were the ameliorative fruits of human imagination.

  Phyllis loyally said, “Owen isn’t anti-art, he’s always going to museums. DigitEyes was all about that, sublimated.”

  Owen flinched at the “was.” She was right: the program was becoming obsolete, and he was stuck in updating it, groping for the next thing. Tonight’s conversation, dragged out toward midnight by Ian’s pompous venting and Phyllis’s winsome egging him on, no longer interested him; he had satisfied himself that neither he nor Alissa owed Ian a thing. She, curled up on the sofa as if to melt into its cushions, was fighting sleep behind her flesh-colored glasses. Her lids looked pink and chafed, her thin smile patiently vengeful. In the car going home, Phyllis said, apropos of nothing, “She loathes him.”

  Was she reading his mind, as it moved like a tracer point over Alissa’s remembered curves? He was startled, but believed that his wife was always right—a vault of wisdom he was in danger of totally forgetting the combination to, as he struck out on his own. “Really?” he said. “It’s just the same old Ian, rambling on. Why would she loathe him?”

  “The same reason he loathes himself. Impotence.”

  “Really?” The dark space his headlights probed seemed to deepen. It thrilled him to have her mention such things as potency and disaffection, coarse matters she usually disdained to touch.

  “Well, figuratively, for sure. He’s beating a dead horse and knows it. Nothing is the same, suddenly. The middle-class magazines he fed off of are gone or dying. People watch television, and if they read it’s the tabloid at the supermarket checkout. Even The New Yorker has changed. It’s become strident, about Vietnam.”

  “Everybody’s becoming strident,” he said, adding, in his sudden fitful fondness, “except you.”

  “I’m strident inside,” Phyllis said, in a level, resigned tone, as their house, behind its semi-concealing curved driveway off Partridgeberry Road, took their headlights full on its white clapboards, behind which their four children slept.

  Alissa, too, was a frustrated artist—at least, she made love to Owen as if each time had to be a masterpiece. In his little locked room at the factory, or the motel or hotel room they once in a while managed to find the time for, or her own bedroom with its sagging low pre-1750 ceiling on the few occasions when Ian was safely away in the city peddling his wares and the children were safely in school, she gave herself to fucking as if to save her soul. And sucking—his prick in her mouth, she would go into a trance, repetitively nodding like one of those drinking birds you fitted to the edge of a water glass. She was oral: sitting impaled on his lap while his tongue played with her nipples, she would put two fingers into her mouth and, eyes shut, begin an inner ascent. Coming was not easy for Alissa; she was an artist in that conditions had to be just right and her concentration undiluted, his parts—tongue, prick, fingers—distributed just as she wanted them. Owen felt like a translator who had to be present so that Alissa could communicate with herself. But, unlike smiling, light-loined Faye, she came unambiguously, with an increasingly rapid succession of high-pitched gasps capped, at a summit both lovers had almost despaired of reaching, by a sharply lower-pitched whimper, as if she had been struck, while the hand of hers not half in her mouth beat on Owen’s back like a panicked wing. He was proud that, after a few early misfires bred of guilt and fear, he could go the route with her, holding up his side of it. Her body as he grew to know it had a curious way of emanating heat where she wanted to be touched, so that his hands and mouth went there of their own. He had slowly, timidly realized that, while sitting on his prick having
her nipples teased, she wanted his finger in her anus, deep in it at her climax. He became an enabler, an abettor, joined with Alissa in sweet trespasses, crossing a line drawn by their Protestant ancestors, who never wholly shed their Bible-black clothes and made their love in lightless log cabins.