Villages

by John Updike

  Their first Cambridge apartment, where they lived for the six months before he was drafted, was not on any top story but in the basement of a brick apartment building on Concord Avenue, with an eye-level view of a shady patch of pachysandra and myrtle, barberry and cotoneaster. The overplanted patch, hidden from the street, was a trysting place for cats, a feline bedroom and bathroom both. That summer and into the lingering warmth of fall the young Mackenzies had to leave, in lieu of air-conditioning, their screenless windows open; more than once Owen awoke with a jowly yellow tom, whom they had nicknamed Uncle Ugly Cat, sitting purring on his chest, his blue lips so close to Owen’s face the smell of rancid fish oil was nauseating. Phyllis, indecisive and fretful for the first time since he had known her, drifted through her course in probability (combinational analysis, random variables, laws of large numbers, recurrent events, Markov chains, prediction theory) and still groped after a Ph.D. thesis topic, unable to find, in the vast tangle of achieved mathematics, an unformulated scrap she could make her own, while Owen, an ill-paid apprentice at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, struggled, in this twilight of the ponderous Mark I, with the primitive programming system called the A–O compiler and with the complications of hard-disk data storage, an innovation that would liberate the machines from programs on cumbersome punched cards or reels of magnetic tape. Already IBM had marketed, to government and research departments, the first commercial computer, the 701. The visions that these developments opened up, of ever more intricate workings down in the tiny layered circuits, an abstract processing not only exponentially faster and smoother than human thought but single-track, a spark hurtling round and round the algorithmic loops until it arrived at the programmed decimal margin that determined practical equivalence—a clean, lightning-fast process the opposite of many-branched human thinking, that mist of incalculable factors, emotional, egotistical, and sensual.

  In their two dark and dank basement rooms, whose little windows looked out on a leafy cat motel, Owen and Phyllis were gingerly immersed in one another. They learned the noises and movements each made while asleep and how each’s bowel movements smelled, even though the bathroom door was closed tight and an overhead fan could be switched on. Their bedroom was so small one of them had to sleep against the wall, and because he was the one who had to get up and go to work five mornings a week, she gave him the outside, which meant that if she had to arise in the night—having drunk too much wine at her parents’ table, perhaps, or at a spicy Greek restaurant with another young graduate couple—she slithered carefully across him, a constellation of touches passing close overhead. He would fall back asleep, in his dreams explaining to himself that he was married, that the body was that of his wife. She was still shy, and any passerby on the sidewalk could see into their windows with a downward glance, but on the stickiest nights she slept naked. His wife’s body never failed to move him. They made love less than he had imagined when a virgin, and the blame, he felt, was as much his as hers; he studied at night, and so did she, while WCRB emitted classical music on the top of the bureau in the corner. Even half-heard, a Beethoven symphony or Schubert sonata is demanding, leaving nothing to say that cannot be expressed with a sigh and the slap of a book at last shutting. When, on the eve of his reporting to Fort Devens for induction into the Army, she announced a missed period, it was as if she had become pregnant by a process of osmosis rather than a distinct instance of intercourse.

  It was always he who initiated what contacts there were. Given his overexcited clumsiness once engaged, especially when a condom, hard-squeezing and smelling disgustingly of its rubber, had been utilized, as the alternative to her inserting a slathered diaphragm (she would emerge from the bathroom blushing), he could not blame her. He never could blame Phyllis for anything; perhaps this was a defect, a deformity, in their relationship. She was a year older, and he trusted her to be right; he never got over his first awed sightings of her in the halls of MIT’s busy maze of numbered buildings, its set of sets. How unattainable she had seemed! Just the notion of talking to her, of intruding himself into the sphere of her attention, had seemed blasphemous.

  In that honeymoon week on the Cape they had walked on the beach toward Provincetown, a beach belonging to her girlhood summers, and, though it was still too cool for bathing suits, at a quiet shallow place she had taken off her shoes and waded in, her tugged-up skirt exposing half of her thighs and all of the swell and taper of her long white calves. Some young male walkers coming south from Provincetown had stopped to stare. They were burly and boisterous, and it did not occur to Owen that they might be homosexual. He was convinced they wanted his wife; they wanted to seize and rape her on the empty beach. With the force of a blow from behind, he awoke to his inability to protect her—his sheltered treasure, his innocent exhibitionist, his ex-virgin by the sea. He was a pathetic groom. The hazed sky was high and merciless. Beyond her sand-colored head of hair, guilelessly bowed in study of the shells and crabholes revealed in the suds of the surf’s retreat, there was only icy ocean and Portugal.

  vii. On the Way to Middle Falls

  His last dream before awaking is of a party, a party back in Middle Falls, though it seems to be in a skyscraper and has the gloss and high color of a party in a movie, a ’fifties movie, or a present-day film’s retro ’fifties, where the women are too dressed up, in powdery colors and wide-skirted, sharply cinched taffeta and rigidly waved hair. In the dream he slowly notices how the two female guests he is talking to, one of them seated beside him and the other standing, are both dressed in painted china, rigid carapaces with shiny sculptural edges, as if they are eighteenth-century figurines. In looking at the paintings of Copley or Gainsborough or Ingres, Owen can lose himself in the folds of silk, the semi-stiff fall and buckle of fabric, the highlights and the crevasses so passionately pursued by the painter’s brush at a remove from the rouged, indolent faces; these party clothes are like that, frozen ceramic, though the women’s arms appear soft and alive, gesturing playfully, and their voices and expressions animated and gracious, acknowledging no discomfort or impediment to their motions. Envious, Owen, feeling by comparison ill-dressed, finds himself in front of their host’s (whoever he is) closet, with its ranks of polished shoes and tweed jackets, looking for a porcelain suit he can put on. He is distracted from his search by noise from the party: an elderly guest has passed out, a halo of sleeping dogs around his head, and there seems to be a fox loose in the house. Eve, Owen’s younger daughter, is tearfully protecting the animal. This, then, is his house, the big clapboarded one on Partridgeberry Road in Middle Falls, Connecticut. So he is the mysterious host, humiliatingly ill-clad without a porcelain suit. He wakes up.

  Julia is not in the bed, and the warm depression she leaves behind is cooling. He feels, more heavily each day, the unnaturalness of getting out of bed, of rising for the same drab bran-cereal breakfast with its fistful of vitamins to slug down, the newspaper to face with its fatal car accidents, its tenement fires in the Boston inner suburbs, its never-ending revelations of priestly sexual abuse of now middle-aged and litigious and not very winning child victims, its further revelations of intricate chicanery in the exalted offices of corporations and mutual funds, its obituaries of the deserving obscure, its impending war to face. His left hand frequently possesses the tingling palm that indicates spinal deterioration or a gathering heart attack, with arthritic aches at the base of one fingernail and, less ignorably, in the joints of the thumb, buried deep in his hand’s anatomy. These pains relate, he believes, to the golf season; the aching finger is the third one, with which he has gripped the club most tightly, too tightly, all these years, and the same grip mechanics have somehow misused his thumb—put too much weight on it at the top of the back-swing. For decades he has been trying to get golf pros to show him what he is doing wrong, but all they have said was, with hardly a glance, that his grip looked fine, before they proceeded to complain about his feet, his shoulders, his excessive hip-turn, his wretched outside-in te
ndency, his stiff-legged and excessively upright stance with its companion fault, the dreaded “reverse C.” But in his heart he knows that your thumb isn’t supposed to hurt at the end of every round. Now he has worn the bones down, beyond repair; the damage and its ache will accompany him to the grave. A surge of love for Julia moves through him, in the wake of the warm sensation that had been she, on the sheet, beneath the blanket. She has stayed with him, will stay with him even as he becomes a pathetic, noisome, malfunctioning cripple.

  Not even bothering to urinate or brush his teeth, Owen goes in search of her. She is not in the upstairs TV room or at her desk in the spare bedroom. Panic begins to flutter and flip in his stomach. Nor is she in the kitchen, which he approaches by the back stairs, silently, barefoot, the new carpeting pressing snugly, springily back against his soles. The television set, where the Weather Channel, her favorite, was wont to sparkle, is blank, a deadly green-gray. The cry “Julia!” is rising in his throat when a rustle of paper reveals her presence downstairs in the library. She perches on the red sofa, eating yogurt from its plastic cup and reading the New York Times. Her blue flip-flops rest on the edge of the coffee table, and the undersides of her thighs are exposed by her shortie nightie and open bathrobe. He sits down heavily in the wing chair opposite her, with the relief of a traveller who has found his way across a desert. The panic tickling his stomach eases. Her toes in the flip-flops look from his angle like two chains of pink circles. The muscles in her treadmill-toughened legs chase one another like smoothly sporting dolphins. He marvels at how keenly her beauty still strikes him, as she glances up from beneath her arched black brows with those wide-set aquamarine eyes, her lips slightly gleaming from the yogurt. Her lips never look numb or frozen, but always decisive, trim, sharp at the edges even without lipstick.

  “Take off that absurd hat,” she says.

  It has become his habit, as his hair has thinned, to wear a wool watch cap to bed, well into the spring. His mother in her last dotage did the same. Even on a hot summer night he misses its embrace of his skull, and resorts to it if he has trouble sleeping.

  Obediently he removes the offensive item, tucking it under the armpit of his sleep-rumpled pajamas, and, thinking fondly of his wife’s feet, reaches toward them with his naked own, resting them on a Chippendale chair this side of the coffee table. A Wethersfield ancestor of Julia’s once did the badly faded crewelwork on the cushioned seat.

  “And take your dirty feet off my antique chair,” she says, with what seems genuine indignation; the same indignation propels her up, off the sofa with her empty yogurt cup, down the hall into the kitchen.

  He trails after her, protesting feebly, “They’re clean. They’re bare.”

  “And why,” she asks in a pent-up voice, without turning around, “have you never learned to comb your hair? It was one thing when you had a lot of it and it was brown and fluffy, it passed for cute, but now it’s just this ugly little white washrag on the top of your head.”

  “I just got up,” he protests, “and came to look for you. I didn’t want to take the time to comb my hair.”

  In Willow, when he was a child, his hair was combed only before Sunday school or after a haircut, and no one complained. Or did his mother complain? Trying to remember, he has a faint, scratchy memory of a comb raking his scalp, perhaps his mother crossly tending to his hair before sending him off to school with that pack of Second Street girls. Even now, he fears anger in his mother’s touch, though she is more than ten years dead.

  In the kitchen, Julia turns on the television set, where a weatherman, young, bushily mustached, and excessively lanky—the tall don’t do well on television—keeps lunging a bit too far with his white electronic magic pointer, which slides and scribbles over Ohio as he describes a zone of high pressure moving toward New England through New York State.

  “Why do you keep watching this junk?” he asks, in cautious counterattack. “The weather will come no matter what you know.”

  “Quiet!” she says, in the fierce tone with which his mother had once commanded, Don’t touch it! “Now you made me miss about the front!”

  “The front will show up however it wants to, don’t worry so about it. Not even you can control fronts. What’s in the Times?”

  “Read it for yourself.”

  “I read the Globe.”

  “How very stupid of you, Owen. There’s nothing in it but rapes in Medford and murders in Dorchester.”

  “Well, unlike the sanctimonious fucking Times, the Globe doesn’t claim to know what news is fit to print.” In his nervousness, he goes to the breadbox in its deep drawer and extricates a bag of Newman’s Own Traditional Thin Pretzels, which smell more baked than less moral brands, and bites one. The first bite is the best. Paul Newman is white-haired too, posing with his daughter Nell on the cellophane bag. Owen can remember him in Hud, as youthful and dangerous and semi-sleepy as the late James Dean.

  Julia cries in something close to agony, “Eat over the sink! The floor gets filthy and the cleaning ladies were just here!”

  These are a pair of freshly immigrant Brazilians, not sisters but identically shaped, with broad, bustling behinds. Sometimes they form a trio, the third being slimmer, with butternut skin and huge chocolate eyes and no English.

  “Oh, you’re such a slob!” his wife exclaims. “Your mother didn’t teach you anything!”

  Owen might argue this, if Julia were in a better temper. His mother taught him a great deal, though it is hard, now toward the end of his life, to say what. Her wisdom, mostly wordless, was fitted to life in Willow—how to survive there, who to obey and who to avoid, how to generate a confidence, a sense of being precious, that would arm him for a future elsewhere. She imparted little about hair-combing, and manners in general; Owen accordingly takes such niceties lightly. He is a slob, yet squeamish. He does not like eating over the sink; it makes him feel like a dog at his bowl. He wants to eat as he did when a child, wandering through his grandfather’s house with a stalk of celery or a bar of peanut brittle in blissful ignorance of any falling crumbs. Mealtimes there tended to be stressful: Grammy, as her Parkinson’s worsened, had a way of choking at the table, and his mother could be having a red-faced temper sulk, or his father, his mournful accountant’s face looking drained of blood, could be adding up in his head how much these many mouths to feed were costing him. Owen found that food eaten in solitude, on the run, in odd corners, tasted best. He happily remembers faithfully consuming a six-cent Tastycake while walking back to school after lunch and, when he was older, walking around downtown Alton cracking peanuts from a paper bag still warm from the roasting.

  He does not blame his wife for scolding him, for bursting forth. She needs him to be perfect, or else she has made a lifelong mistake. Each has bought the other dearly, in coin not all theirs. Her repugnance, when she expresses it, he accepts as evidence of her wanting him to measure up to the highest standards. She needs him to be a perfect husband, to justify herself. She does not want to hear about his dream-party back in Middle Falls, with the mischievous women dressed up in colorful porcelain carapaces.

  His marriage with Phyllis took a wound, perhaps, in the two years when he was in the post–Korean War Army, enjoying the company of the rapidly obsolescing giant computers devoted, with their skimpy memories and miles of telephone-circuitry wiring, to the calculation of missile trajectories and, linked up with radar, the primitive beginnings of air-traffic control. She gave birth without him, in Mt. Auburn Hospital, to eight-pound Gregory while Owen was stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia. Seven-pound Iris came after Phyllis had joined him in Germany, in military housing outside Frankfurt. Unfortunately, that week, toward the end of his tour, Owen was troubleshooting at a secret missile site in Turkey, and again missed her birth travail.

  By then the Russians had long-range aircraft capable of bringing a nuclear bomb across the North Pole, and coördinated air defense had achieved high priority and top-secret status. Whirlwind had been brough
t up to real-time speed with the installation of magnetic-core memory, and its prototype, the basic hardware of his education at MIT, had become the manufactured IBM AN/FSQ-7, installed at Direction Centers across the nation as part of SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. Holding forty-nine thousand vacuum tubes and weighing two hundred fifty tons and housed in four-story concrete eyesores, these electronic dinosaurs were fed data from a global network of sources maintained by the U.S. Armed Forces; Owen, on loan to the Air Force, became one of hundreds of technologically trained servicemen stationed at blinking cathode-ray tubes, deciphering blips. Mistaken blips and misfiring input could be catastrophic in the delicately poised surveillance game; but he was struck, touched even, by the basic reliability of the machines, unwieldy though they retrospectively seemed after chip miniaturization had reduced their bulk, and program languages had made them easier conversational partners. There were still many switches to throw, and blinking lights on the consoles. Owen began to take a hand in the refinement and invention of programs—tedious lines of assembly code, which in the event of error had to be examined character by character, in printed memory dumps that strained the eyes and addled the mind. He showed competence enough to be invited to extend his hitch, with officer rank, and thereby to help hold at bay the dogged Soviets, who were lagging far behind in computer science.