by John Updike
But Phyllis hated military life, both the unpacificist idea of it and the khaki-drab daily reality. “The lowest common denominator rules,” she said. “And the wives—so vulgar, so obsessed with their little nests, with sex, which is all they have to offer.” Owen didn’t think this was such a meagre thing to offer, but said nothing. He respected his wife’s opinions. When he talked of reupping, it was to tease a reaction out of her; her pale cheeks flushed pink as her arguments became earnest. Without ever seeming to study him, she could dip into his psyche. “Don’t think like your father and stick to the safe thing,” she pleaded. “He thought a safe thing was the knitting mills, and look what happened to them. There is no safe thing. America’s the bastion of capitalism, that’s what all this is about, isn’t it? If computers are half the wonders you think they are, they’re going to make fortunes, and you’re in on the ground floor.”
He knew she was, as usual, right, but was offended, slightly, to realize that she was not above considering her material position. She wanted him to earn money, if not for herself, then for her children. She wanted to get out of military housing and into an apartment, a place all their own. Childbearing had thickened Phyllis; her face, no less delicate a silverpoint than before, sat atop a broader pillar, her nightgown falling from her milk-stuffed breasts in straight Doric folds.
She was right: what he had learned with SAGE led nicely, in his job at the IBM complex on Madison Avenue in New York City, into work on what came to be called SABRE, the nationwide computerized reservation system being developed with American Airlines. The largest civilian computerization task ever undertaken, it involved a million lines of program code, two hundred technicians, ten thousand miles of leased telecommunication lines, and a thousand agents using desktop terminals connected to two IBM 7090 mainframes north of the city, in Briarcliff Manor. One computer was live and the other was duplexed, waiting in case of breakdown. A tiny fraction of those million lines of code were Owen’s creation; because of him the AND and OR gates and the IF … THEN forks shuttled flight numbers, abbreviated terminal names, prices, and individual seats into the right electronic slots half a continent away. His inborn Scots thrift became a passion for electronic economy—for reformulations that would bypass an elaborate subroutine or redundant loop and save a sliver of time he could clearly sense as the monitor screen, like a wearying boxer, responded to the tapped keys.
Phyllis, for the free hour of evening when the two babies were at last asleep and the dinner dishes sang in the dishwasher, could follow his explanations, though this was not her kind of math, these electrons flying around and around the algorithmic circuit like horses plodding around a millstone, and she could sometimes suggest, in a weightless leap of insight, a fresh way around some linear difficulty; Owen would be quite dazzled, and fall in love with her anew.
When he had spotted her floating through the crowds at MIT he had not foreseen the growing weight she would bring with her—the soggy diapers, the luggage of cribs and carriages, bibs and jars of Gerber’s puree, the clamor of unsleeping need, the cycles of fretful illness as germs ricocheted within the family, the multiplied responsibilities cantilevered far into the future into college and beyond. Bourgeois comfort took on girth in Eisenhower’s second term: big-finned cars, tall pastel refrigerators, roaring, dripping air-conditioners greedy for electricity. Phyllis’s spirited intelligence had nowhere to go within the sluggish, clogged dailiness of life in their succession of two-bedroom apartments. They moved from noisy East 55th Street between Lex and Third to 63rd, farther east; still they did not escape the metropolitan racket that kept her awake and left her to sleepwalk through her days with the two toddlers. In the intricate realm beneath the mid-town streets, into which helmeted men descended and from which puffs of steam escaped, there was endless revision; all-night jackhammers went on fixing the same thing week after week.
Somehow she was pregnant again. Owen couldn’t imagine how it had happened, he was keeping such brutally long hours at the airline project. SABRE was named in 1960, after a kind of Buick, but posing as an acronym: Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment. Before the system was operational, other airlines—Delta, Pan American—signed up with IBM, and the country’s banks and accounting offices were waking up to the computerized future. There arose a hungry market in even smaller companies for programs speeding their payrolls, inventories, invoices. In 1960 there were perhaps five thousand computers in the country, most of them in universities and scientific labs, and the programmers worked with paper-tape readers and punches and stayed up all night for computer time. The word “software” had arrived, and “bugs” and “debugging.” FORTRAN had been developed at IBM, for mostly scientific work; COBOL 60—Common Business Oriented Language 1960—opened the computer to business applications. The world of affordable PCs was two decades away, but a fellow IBM minion in the Madison Avenue hive, Ed Mervine, began to woo Owen, over lunches in the company cafeteria, with its eggshell walls each decorated by a deadpan sign bearing President Watson’s famous imperative. Ed, from the Bronx, had an offhand, stabbing way of speaking that was more efficient than it seemed. He confided above their trays, “You know, O., there’s a world out there of medium-sized companies that have paid a couple hundred thousand for hardware they don’t know how to operate. As the price comes down, there’s bound to be more of them. Manufacturers, distributors, these new franchises, lesser airlines, banks, architectural firms. IBM and Sperry Rand can’t be bothered with them; they farm them out, to assholes.”
Ed was the first adult to take enough interest in Owen to give him a nickname, “O.” He reminded Owen of Buddy Rourke—same stiff hair shooting forward so his brow looked low, same big teeth, corrected in Ed’s case by boyhood braces that left him with teeth that looked a little false, not quite what his face had in mind. He was the same inch or two taller than Owen, though unlike Buddy he was younger, just enough younger to be more at home with the idea of machines that help people think, thousands of tiny thoughts, or bit transactions, a second. To Owen it was a marvel; to Ed it was a fact of life.
“So what are you suggesting? We become better assholes?”
“You got it. Smart boy. Contract programming and advisory services. IBM is sucking our blood, and it’s going to go down one of these years. The company’s too fucking big. Smaller is better, more agile. The hardware is shrinking exponentially. Low overhead is the only way to keep up, to see the next thing possible. Set up the operation where there’s low overhead and see what develops.”
“Where’s this low overhead?”
“Beyond the commuter belt. Beyond Stamford. Beyond New Haven, even. The Connecticut sticks.”
“Ed, who would do this? You and me?”
Ed was unmarried. He gave off that sexless aura of the true computer devotee: stale air, Chinese takeout in paper cartons, Twinkies and Cokes at 2 a.m. His skin was clammy, he was twenty pounds overweight, his button-down shirt collar bunched around the knot of his necktie, which was askew and greasy. His teeth were false-looking choppers he kept cleaning with his finger, tongue, and a retracted upper lip like a chimpanzee’s. He said, “Why not? Your wife has another in the oven. You were telling me yesterday how you can’t find an apartment that Phyllis likes you can afford.”
He was, Owen realized, being proposed to. He had somehow become more desirable since the afternoon when Buddy Rourke had sneered at his loving Monopoly arrangement. “Ed, I’m not a city boy like you. I’m from the sticks, I don’t want to go back to them. Bugs, dirt; Jesus. You get mindless.” He was stalling. He thought of Elsie, the night in her father’s woods, her silky yielding body animated by a sexual will, the scrabbling things that hooted and rustled around them. The sticks had their excitements. “Phyllis and I,” Owen admitted, “are beginning to think about the ’burbs. Either Westchester or New Jersey north of Paterson.”
“Christ, you don’t want that. They’re just this same crap without the yellow cabs and the jazz in the Village—the same
big-city grapple plus a doggy little yard out back and an hour on the train twice a day. Just as expensive, when you add it all up. More expensive, if you count the spiritual cost: they suck you into maintaining false pretenses, into being nice neighbors, for Chrissake. Feed the cookie cutter—spare me. Spare us all. Listen, I don’t know Phyl all that well, but my impression is she doesn’t give a fuck for the standard rat race. She’s a free spirit, my judgment is. She needs to hold her head high; she needs to get out of those roachy apartments with those kids. And as to you, ask yourself this: how much do you want to be flow-charting airline reservations for Tommy Watson Junior for the rest of your life?”
“IBM is good to us, Ed. Last year I made three times what my father did in his best year, and that was during the war, with moonlighting.”
“O., I guess you are from the sticks. You think small.”
“You sound like Phyllis.” Owen had to laugh, being pressed this hard, this ardently. “But she loves the city. We both do.”
Ed smiled, baring his big teeth, sensing the new mood. It was a downhill, tickle-me-harder mood. “Yeah? What do you like about it?”
“The museums. The concerts. The restaurants.”
“How often do you get to them?”
“Almost never. Babysitters are a problem. And we’re always bushed.”
“Well, then. There’s millions out there, O. Big bucks for the picking, for those who show a little initiative. A little imagination. Think, isn’t that what they keep telling us? Think outside the lines.”
“Ed, please. We don’t have the millions yet. It costs money to set up a company. How do we program if we can’t afford a computer?”
This question pleased Ed; he had given it thought. “You don’t need one, you can use the client’s machine or rent time from a service bureau. All you really need is a coding pad and a pencil: that’s according to a guy I know, who used to be with scientific programming right here at IBM. Now he’s with CUC, that’s Computer Usage Company, downtown. They began in a guy’s apartment with pure zilch five years ago and just went public, for a net of a hundred eighty-six grand. They bought their own computer. Electronic data management, that’s the name of the game. Who needs sex when you can have software?”
“Ed, you are too much.” In his nervous excitement at this vista opening up, Owen had eaten too much, taking for dessert a pecan pie he didn’t want. He was twenty-seven years old and what he ate showed up, as a little pot belly. “I’ll mention what you said to Phyllis. You’re right about one thing, we have to do something, this new kid will give me three under four. But what’s the attraction for you? You’re a bachelor, the city is made for you. You’re a native.”
“Not really. There’s a lot more nature in the Bronx than people know. The Botanical Garden, Pelham Bay Park. I like to fish, to take hikes. Manhattan eats you up. It’s too fucking full of nervous, ambitious women. My mother wasn’t like that. She was just like I imagine yours was, contented, always shelling peas into a yellow bowl, with a blue stripe around it.”
This wasn’t quite how Owen, looking back, saw his mother; Grammy had done most of the kitchen work until she was bedridden. And, unlike Ed, he had already chosen his wife, who was as different from his mother as she could be, except that both women gave off a little scent of dissatisfaction. He was comfortable with this scent, it confirmed his first thought about life, that he was lucky to have been born a boy. MIT and IBM had done nothing to contradict this insight.
When he described this conversation to Phyllis, she appeared not uninterested. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy, and moved around the apartment, back and forth between the two rooms, with trips to the kitchenette and bathroom, at a stately backward tilt, her lovely long neck holding her head high, as Ed had noticed. When had Ed noticed? They had had him to dinner once or twice, and in return he came up with three tickets for Camelot, with Julie Andrews. “He could be right,” she said. “You should give your creativity a chance.”
“What creativity?”
He had always felt mathematically inferior to her, earth-bound, relatively muddy in his thinking, though he had done creditably at MIT and received faithful raises from IBM, even as costs mounted in its huge New Product Line gamble. He was both sorry and in some pocket of his heart relieved that she had relegated her Ph.D. thesis to the dustbin of old Symphony programs and Browne & Nichols report cards; nobody wants a wife smarter than he. “You’re artistic,” she told him, blushing in the unaccustomed exercise of appraising her husband. “You love wandering through the Met upstairs, and over at the Modern.”
Her thin-skinned face, its flesh a delicate mask for her bones, reddened more than usual in the bodily turmoil of pregnancy. Though these chronic bulges of hers cemented him into the role of provider, he loved the look of her distended body—the belly he rubbed with oil to soften the stretch marks, the way her accustomed air of abstraction was absorbed into a hormonal reverie, and the broadening of her, which included her face and breasts and her buttocks. She let him fuck her in the spoon position, as his body on top became too much a weight on her. They drew closer, the two of them, around this hidden third presence, and Gregory and Iris drew closer as well, patting gingerly with their little square hands the glassy bulge of their mother’s belly, its everted navel and brown center line. This was reality—biology at work, a beating, burbling process the ear could eavesdrop on. The unknown animal inside her kicked against his palm. It was a few thin layers of Phyllis away. What a pity, Owen felt dimly at the time and more keenly later, that young couples, preoccupied and self-absorbed, let themselves be distracted from this miracle of theirs. These years of their own procreating came before shared birthing classes and elaborate prenatal concern for the fetus; Phyllis smoked an evening cigarette with her hand cocked on the jut of the belly, and balanced a glass of wine on the same convenient resting place. Owen was proud that his wife made such natural and easy work of child-bearing; as long as her pregnancies continued, the thought of infidelity was monstrous. Something primitive in him worshipped her in her fertility, though it indentured them both to the next generation. “Ed says,” she told him, “you have a genius for visualization, for spatial relations. You see the programs like drawings in your head.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
She became pensive, sucking in her cheeks to contract her dry lips. “I think for many people math takes them beyond what they can picture. You’re very tied to your senses, Owen.”
He hated to hear this, since having children had reawakened in him his childhood premonitions of dying, and one clear thing about the event was the unlikelihood of taking your senses with you. MIT had shown him the universe swept clean not only of Heavenly furniture but of endless energy—of endlessness in any measurable form. Every form of order, even the proton, ended: he preferred in practical life to forget this fatal thermodynamic pinch. Phyllis’s words, though, were the seeds that, in Middle Falls, while he and Ed labored to sustain their infant data-processing start-up, eventually bore fruit as DigitEyes, a breakthrough in its brief moment.
“Would you be game, then,” he asked her, while Manhattan traffic bleated and roared below them on East 63rd Street, “to leave the city and let me and Ed try this? If it fails, we can pocket our losses and get salaried jobs again.”
“Why would you fail?” Phyllis asked, in one of those casual verbal gestures that set the vectors of his life. “I think it sounds like fun. Ed’s a slob,” she added, “but he’s solid. And he knows how the world works.”
Meaning that Owen didn’t? “You’re great,” he told his wife. “How would you feel about Connecticut? There’s a town Ed knows of, in the middle of nowhere an hour from Hartford, where there’s cheap factory space and good public schools. An aunt of his came from there; she used to work in the local light-bulb factory, when it still made light bulbs. Small-town innocence, honey. Whitespired Congregational church. Cannonballs and a statue on the village green. Playmates for Gregory and Iris.”
<
br /> “But—how much factory space do you need?”
“We don’t know yet, but we have to have an address to put on the letterhead. Ed even has a name for us, using our initials. E-O Data Management.”
“It sounds,” Phyllis said, feigning or truly feeling enthusiasm, “very impressive.”
DigitEyes, it should be explained, was a method of drawing with a light pen on a computer screen. Owen had been impressed by the way that the cathode-ray tubes on Whirlwind could display T, for target, and F, for fighter, and track them; the process had been elaborated to include radar sightings in the SAGE project, on which he had worked in his military interval. His instinct was that the CRT, the speckly basis of television, was the natural real-time interface for the computer operator, bypassing switches, punched tapes, and code-language command lines. In the early ’sixties, there was already enough complexity in the transistorized circuits for the computer games undergraduates were inventing, and for vector graphics to be plotted, enlarged, worked on, and stored. The images, all in straight lines, could be zoomed, to be worked on in detail, and then returned to standard scale, marvellously refined. They could not yet be turned in a virtual third dimension, but Owen could conceive of this coming, as computer power doubled and redoubled. Engineering and architectural firms were the first customers for the program, but mainframe computers were still out of most firms’ financial reach, and the huge future that Owen could glimpse for graphics interaction waited for more powerful chips. When he showed Phyllis the first primitive light-pen plotting, she said, giving it a glance, “Some day every pixel could have an address, and serve as a communication point.” Even for Owen it was hard to picture such an abyss of calculation, of electronic information—as if every atom in the universe were an individual, with its own private story.