Villages

by John Updike

  At the start of his convalescence he focused with invalid closeness on the workings of his family—the four children nosing ahead like earthworms in the world’s substance, encountering pebbles like bad school reports and the deaths of pets, but pushing on, growing, speaking in ever more complete and complex sentences. Gregory turned nine and suddenly was full of sports statistics. Iris at seven and a half was given to undressing her Barbie dolls and then finding she could not put the tight little clothes back on the unyielding plastic bodies. Owen more than Phyllis had the patience to tug the bits of cloth within reach of the fasteners; some of the outfits reminded him of ones Faye used to wear, playfully.

  He was a good father, the mothers of their circle told Phyllis, she in turn told him; but he knew he was not. An only child, helplessly self-centered, he could not bring to these four little souls—strangers to the towering cosmos, each a different mix of his and Phyllis’s genes and each varyingly susceptible to the surrounding culture—the same morbidly hopeful concentration his parents and mother’s parents, stripped of hope for themselves, had brought to him. He had been outnumbered, four adults to one child, and now four children outnumbered him. He felt less their progenitor than their brother, and this fraternal lightness, a love leavened by distraction and pinches of sadism, for good and bad characterized his fatherhood. On the one hand he did not sit heavy on his children; on the other, he did not strive to shape their lives, to inculcate patterns of behavior. There was little in the children’s lives like the tiring, tedious, but impressive Sunday walks he took with his own parents. Instead, all was tumble—squawks and shouts and squalling appeals for justice. Television and other children, first from the packed Common Lane neighborhood and then, ferried to and from the Partridgeberry Road place, the children of their friends, filled the little time left over after sibling interaction and school. Phyllis’s schooling had been all private, and his all public; they agreed to begin with the latter, which was handiest and most democratic, reserving transition to paid private schools as the child’s needs seemed to indicate. He was proud of being able to support these dependents, from above as it were, but in most respects he dwelt among them, sharing in both the entertainments—Captain Kangaroo, The Sound of Music—and the moral bafflement of the era, as a rising political fury shadowed a holiday giddiness. Still, after Faye he was noticeably more of a paternal presence, all summer taking his lunch hour at Heron Pond once or twice a week, there among the dragonflies and peanut-butter sandwiches and gossipping near-naked mothers.

  At work, too, he tried to rededicate himself, patiently stringing together those long but finite binary chains, those rickety scaffolds of contingency, that, once debugged, gave companies in an electronic twinkling the information that used to be pieced together from typed or handwritten files. It was like knitting: a single mis-stitch necessitated tearing up dozens of rows of code, yet whole patches of previously perfected subroutines could be crocheted into a fresh customized design. Except for strokes of ingenuity, of logical lumping and short-cutting, which only another programmer could appreciate, his work felt trivial; the kind of data-processing he was making possible on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar mainframe could have been carried forward, in most company systems, on punched cards, more clumsily and slowly yet with no qualitative difference. Number-crunching, it was called, with an affection that yet dramatized its basic drudgery.

  “Ed,” Owen asked his partner one day at lunch, “doesn’t there have to be a next thing?” Once a week they tried to share lunch, just the two of them, since the success of the company, its multiplication of projects and employees, came more and more between them, as if the hyphen in E-O was implacably lengthening. The restaurant was the least crummy of the three eateries left along River Street. The downtown had been struggling for years. Empty stores were rented, newly tricked out as boutiques or arty stationers or educational-toy stores and, after a spurt of customer curiosity, slowly failed, and were empty again, with butcher paper taped across their windows. The Ugly Duckling had a swan on its signboard. Only the two back windows overlooked the river, but the mock-tavern decor—dark-stained oak beams, rough-hewn maple tables, waitresses with frilled aprons over their blue jeans—was cozy and acoustically merciful. The meat-and-potatoes menu was being infiltrated by pasta salads and macrobiotic soups; nevertheless, Ed ordered a Reuben thick with cheese and fatty pastrami, and fries and a Heineken. He had added twenty pounds since his days at IBM. Entrepreneurial success and pricier clothes gave his bulk authority. The front man with their corporate clients, he had taken to wearing suits, with a shirt and tie; Owen remained loyal to the ’fifties student garb of khakis and soft flannel shirt, augmented in winter with a down vest. He had lost five pounds in the affair with Faye and its painful aftermath, and had worked to keep it off, vain of his newly wiry figure. He felt nimbler now, more dangerous. He had taken to black turtlenecks, and joined an indoor tennis club in Upper Falls. As longer hair became permissible for men, his own showed a bounce and a tendency to curl.

  “You’re talking what?” Ed asked. “Private life? You did the next thing already.”

  Owen blushed; he wanted to believe that his adventure with Faye, if not secret, was conversationally off-bounds with Ed, who had known him and Phyllis so long he seemed part of the marriage. “Computerwise,” he primly clarified. “This OS/360 of IBM’s is turning into a fucking disaster. It’s costing them tens of millions, and still they can’t take it to market for all the bugs. They got a thousand programming people on it out there in Poughkeepsie and it’s more and more a mess, I hear.”

  Ed asked, through his chewing, “What are they gonna do? They gotta work it through if they’re going to get any of their investment back out. They tried to use multiprogramming and that made problems. The larger the program, the greater the tendency to crash. One bug is all it takes.”

  “It’s more than problems, Ed, it’s a basic imbalance. The capacity keeps doubling; programming can’t keep up. Hardware development is industrial; it’s knitting mills. Software is still sitting in the cottage working on an old hand loom. It’s piecework.”

  “It’ll catch up. Electrical engineering is everybody’s major; it’s everybody’s toy these days. Remember when metallurgy was the sexy thing? Not to mention nuclear physics. Why sweat it, if what we do is piecework? We’re getting paid.”

  “Yeah, but look who can afford us: banks, insurance companies, airlines, the Pentagon. The world’s dreariest mentalities.”

  Ed stopped chewing, and said across the table with mock solemnity, “It grieves me to hear you talk like this, O. Tell me, what do you want out of life you’re not getting?”

  Owen pictured Phyllis, because he knew Ed was picturing her too. What more could a man want out of life than Phyllis? That was what Ed’s owlish stare, through glasses so thick a tint of skin was refracted into the bevelled edges, was asking. Owen didn’t know the answer but knew Ed’s estimation of Phyllis was unrealistic. “What I want is a little shelter from the trivial,” he answered. “My desk sits right in the thick of traffic; everybody keeps asking me things, to double-check this or that approach, to look over their schematics. We could keep the desk where it is, and I’ll be at it most of the time, but couldn’t I have another, at the other end of the floor, that would be private? I need to really think about the DigitEyes redo, to make it cutting-edge again.”

  Ed resumed eating and was having trouble with the Reuben. The greasy pastrami had soaked through the thin rye bread, making it slippery to hold. He was lowering his big head to get his mouth under it, the drooping strings of cheese, and the odd angle emphasized how much his hair had receded from his forehead; it had once looked like Buddy Rourke’s, boyishly thrusting forward. When he had taken his bite and swallowed and the Reuben was under control again, down on the plate beside the French fries and the paper cup of coleslaw, Ed said, “So that’s your new thing? To cut yourself off from the company mainstream? These kids we hire don’t know how to write economica
l programs. Everything is GO TO, GO TO. They think there’s no end to capacity now.”

  “They’re almost right. They may be right.”

  “Enough big baggy GO TOs hanging out there, logical contradictions begin to show up.”

  “They’ll learn, Ed. We’re all learning; it’s still a young trade. All I’m asking is a little privacy, and one of the new DEC minis. I’d like a PDP-8 and a graphics CRT screen, as well as the telex assembler reader. Give me six months and cut my crunching to half-time. There’s something I’m missing, some fresh approach.”

  “So that’s your new thing. You’re pulling out on us.”

  “Ed, it’s how I’ll be most valuable to the company—a little detached. I’m just the head ribbon-clerk as it is now. All that socializing up front produces nothing; it’s driving me crazy. The brain ages. Time runs out. Look at the breakthroughs—most of them by guys younger than we are. Einstein at twenty-five. Turing the same. Phyllis says she couldn’t possibly do her math thesis now, she’s gotten too stupid.”

  “That’s sad, that Phyl thinks that,” Ed said, touching his loosely knotted necktie with greasy fingers in synchrony with a semi-suppressed burp. He did that chimp thing with his upper lip, bulging it out over his upper teeth, trying to work some bit of pastrami loose. “Hey. You want to know what my new thing is?”

  “Sure. Didn’t know you had one,” Owen said, hurrying into his salad of chickpeas and bow-tie pasta, to catch up after talking too much. The little room he had in mind, an old watchmen’s locker room with one little metal-framed window too high to look out of and a row of battered green lockers, locks long gone, was at the head of steel-and-cement stairs that descended down to a door that opened onto a disused sidewalk leading toward the permanently locked pedestrian bridge across the river. In the days of the old arms factory, a workforce on foot crossed the river from the region of row houses. The door, sheathed in metal painted red to match the bricks, was never used but was kept unlocked in daytime, as an emergency fire exit. Owen would use it, unseen. The door, the stairs, the private room appeared in his mind in luminous vectorized form, the whole projection turning as if he were passing through it, the geometric shapes transforming as the underlying mathematics determined.

  “I’m getting married,” Ed announced.

  A mass of pulped chickpeas found resistance in Owen’s throat. He chased it down with a sip of water and brought out, “That’s great. High time. Who to? Do I know her?”

  “I hope you don’t, you lech,” said Ed, for the second time offending Owen’s strict sense of sexual propriety. “She’s eight years younger than me, nine years than you—just a kid, O. An innocent kid. Have a heart.”

  Owen felt a pang. Phyllis was a year older. Maybe that was their trouble, simple biology: the man should dominate. He never had. Ed had a lovely patience, to wait till he could marry so much younger. “We met at a conference,” he was explaining, “that thing in Seattle, remember I went last year? On integrated circuits. Stacey’s a rep for Texas Instruments.”

  “Integrated circuits,” Owen said, to show he was following. He had never thought of Ed as marriageable, which was silly. Almost everybody is, the way Nature has set it up, with its usual tremendous margin for error.

  “Yeah, and what to do with such tiny ICs. Last year TI brought out a hearing aid. Next year they’re marketing a desk calculator that weighs less than a chicken. She tells me this as if everybody knows what a chicken weighs.”

  “Is she a Texan?” Why do I feel so betrayed? Owen asked himself. What do I care if Ed is married?

  He had counted on Ed to remain loyal to the business, so his own attention could wander to higher or lower things. He needed to know about life. “Not so’s you’d notice,” Ed answered. “Her folks are really from the West Coast; her dad worked for Grumman. She says ‘my daddy.’ They moved to Dallas when Stacey was nine. She picked up the accent, but, more important, the attitude.”

  “The Texas attitude.”

  “Yeah—it’s great. She thinks the American dream is still on. I get so fucking tired of wise-ass sourpuss Easterners, who think everything worth doing was done before 1750, always taking cheap shots at America and LBJ.”

  “Another Texan.”

  “Damn right. Johnson’s done more for blacks in two years than Saint Franklin Roosevelt did in twelve, and still all these knee-jerk liberals keep knocking him, calling him a redneck.”

  It occurred to Owen that Ed considered himself a redneck, Bronx-style. A girl from Texas would see him as the suited-up electronic empire-builder he was. “When do we all meet her?” Owen asked.

  “Soon, O. I’d like you to be my best man.”

  Owen blushed. “With pleasure, Ed. I’m tickled pink, as they used to say.” It smelled a bit as if he was being restored to society’s good graces, after his Faye episode. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be restored. “When is the, the happy event?”

  “We thought soon, May, maybe. Later than that it gets stinking hot down there. Then we come up here and have the Eastern summer before the long winter. She’s never experienced a Northern winter. The only snow she’s seen has been on mountaintops, on the San Gabriels.” Already Ed was sounding pompous, a consumer of geographies and climates.

  The waitress came and offered dessert or coffee. Ed thought he’d try the prune-fig brownie, with whipped cream, and a cappuccino. Owen settled for mint tea. He asked Ed, “How did you do all this courting? I never knew about it.”

  “You haven’t been paying much attention,” Ed said, for the third time jabbing in the direction of Owen’s private life. Owen was still not, the Middle Falls consensus was, “over” Faye. “I’ve been down there, she’s been up here a couple times. Phyllis has met her.”

  “She has?” Mint tea, hot water barely tinted green, was put down before him; Ed’s brownie looked as heavy and rich as chocolate cake, wearing a toppling squirt of whipped cream. Saliva sprang from Owen’s inner cheeks. Was this to be the rest of his life, self-denial? He said, “She never said anything to me.”

  “I asked her not to. She liked Stacey a lot,” Ed told Owen, squinting as if daring him to object.

  Ed had sought Phyllis’s approval, and she had given it, all without her husband’s knowledge. We all have inner lives, Owen thought: secrets to protect. The recognition seemed to click into a segment of his own liberation.

  Stacey was a charmer, it turned out. She was skinny but soft-boned, floppy even, in the way she moved and talked. She had a wide soft mouth that seemed to slow her words, like a child’s endearing impediment. She was enough younger than they to lack some of their inhibitions. She liked to swim naked in the heated pool that came with the somewhat pretentious house Ed bought for them in the new hillside development on Wilson Drive. “Woodrow, Charlie, or Don?” Owen had asked, but Ed was too besotted with the married state to hear any sarcasm. By the second summer, Owen and Ed had gotten used to her nudity and some nights Phyllis joined her in it. It was no worse, after all, than a hot tub, which is supposed to be good for you. The older woman’s figure, breasts and stomach taut now that her spell of child-bearing was forever over, had nothing to lose in the comparison with Stacey’s, which was, younger though she was, droopier. Ed and Owen kept their bathing suits on.

  “Aren’t they sweetly shy,” Phyllis said to Stacey. The pool as well as being heated had underwater lights that revealed wobbly truncations of the two women’s hips and water-treading legs. Their heads looked small, with their hair licked flat against their skulls.

  “Oh, aren’t men just!” Stacey said back, in her twang. “They’re afraid of having their little jimmies chopped off.”

  “Or laughed at,” Phyllis suggested, to make the image less horrific.

  “Pretty much the same thang,” Stacey said.

  The men being teased sat in the shadows, on aluminum chairs, with cans of beer, while the mermaids wobbled in and out of the pool lights. When Stacey decided to emerge from the water, she would thrash to the lad
der and stand on the pool edge and, tipping her head way over, wring out her long dark hair towel-style. If light was behind her, Owen would see her pubic triangle dripping from a point like a wet goatee between her skinny thighs. Languidly, her long feet leaving prints on the flagstones that rimmed the pool, she would seek out a beach towel to wrap herself in. With the hand not clasping the towel at her chest she would fiddle a cigarette from the pack on the little white poolside table and, her head still tilted as when she was wringing her hair, manage with wet fingers to get it lit in her mouth. It was in this pose, Owen thought, that she looked most glamorous, squinting and exhaling, and her drying hair backlit like a burning haystack. Stacey brought whiffs of the counterculture into Middle Falls. Somehow she produced pot in little cellophane envelopes, and Zigzag paper, and the four of them would partake, usually on Sunday nights, in the Mervines’ living room. Fridays and Saturdays there were dinner parties to give or go to, dances for this or that good cause, and the Mackenzies’ house was too inhibiting, with all those children upstairs listening. Ed and Stacey did not intend to have children, at least not immediately. This was somehow shocking to Owen; Phyllis offended him by seeming to agree. “I think it’s better not to hurry,” she said, making her little frosty moue of thoughtfulness. “The kids now have the right idea—have the sex but don’t get trapped.”