by John Updike
It was in 1974, at the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, belonging to the Xerox Corporation, a sponsorship that tipped the research toward mass-marketable products rather than military or corporate problem-solving, when Owen saw his first true graphical user interface, on the PARC Alto. His heart sank; the interface, with its mouse-manipulated icons and its schematic imitation of an ordinary desktop, relegated all technical instructions to the hidden program. The operator simply moved an on-screen indicator with his mouse and dropped and dragged icons or blocks of highlighted text. The day of the command-line interface was over. The geometrical increase of chip capacity enabled each pixel on the line-scan monitor to have an address—coördinates that a simple manual motion hurled in silent storms of computation to the next location, along with all the other pixels in its icon or text block. The inventor, a PARC scientist with the suitably elemental name of Alan Kay, had gotten the idea from watching schoolchildren write and run their own small programs using Seymour Papert’s programming language, Logo, whose commands were all expressed as objects and movements—“turtle graphics.” Children led the way. It would always be the young who had the intuitive connection with this gorgeous toy, this brain in a box, a brain not mired in a messy, bloody animal. Owen was no longer young. He saw, out there on this other coast with its sea cliffs and palm trees and sun-battered, earthquake-resistant, low, glassy research centers and dust-free microelectronic manufacturing units, an alien future, a world of computers as mass-marketable as typewriters, all their elegant mathematics, once the remote province of electrical engineers and Boolean logicians, now buried beneath a cartoon surface as vulgar as a comic book. At MIT and the monitors of the Turkish missile site and in New York at IBM and in the garage behind the clapboarded semi-detached on Common Lane that he and Phyllis had rented their first year in Middle Falls, Owen had felt on the forward edge of a revolution, a new technology’s breaking wave; now, though E-O Data could keep exploiting the expanding number of CEOs who knew nothing about computers except that a modern business had to have them, and had to have programs that would make them work, doing work for which people would be no longer needed, Owen and Ed were like farmers hurriedly working their fields before the rising waters of a newly dammed lake inundated them. Soon every company office boy could program a stripped-down mainframe, and the minimalist, add-on approach of Unix, salvaged by Bell Labs from the GE Multics debacle and licensed to universities at nominal cost, further democratized what had been an arcane craft. Owen must henceforth think in terms of niches, special projects, European clients, and passing flings.
There were more women in the computer world than ten years ago. A few were programmers and engineers; more were installers, support staff, and sales reps for the wallowing giants of the industry—Sperry Rand, IBM, GE, Honeywell. These young women, many of them math majors like Phyllis but some of them reborn out of English and psychology departments, showed up at conferences, and from time to time Owen and one of them explored the opportunities of a night far from home. Jacqueline, Antoinette, Mirabella—they tended to have fancy names, trim bodies, short skirts, long hair, and liberated morals. Until Vietnam ended and Nixon resigned, the ’seventies were an extension of the ’sixties, of the rebellious fever inflicted by irritation from above. But the new decade was more shopworn and hard-eyed. Female bodies were hardening, as exercise and diet became a mode of feminist assertion. Drugs and promiscuity had catered to spiritual health; now physical condition’s turn had come. Owen could not help admiring, as he kneeled on the San Jose hotel’s shag carpet to pull down Jacqueline’s pantyhose, the flat tendony knit behind her knee, the calf-bulge modulating upward into the biceps femoris and the gluteus maximus, so firm to his touch; he had to pause to kiss the dear adductor longus on the inside of her thigh, and she, halfway out of her pantyhose, had to clutch the hair on his head to steady herself. She was, fully undressed, a little solemn-bodied, less flexible than her muscular development promised. Her skin and hair had a sour tinge from day-old jet lag and twelve hours on her feet singing the praises of a DEC PDP-11 with its timesharing software and magnetic-tape units, taller than she even with her impressively “big” hair. Once inside her, he was too tired himself to hold back, and she didn’t accept his apologies. Lack of sleep came with these hasty conquests, and lingered as a faint grogginess, for a week, while the sensation of conquest faded, overnight, to nothing.
Antoinette was a severely thin, tough-talking debugger met at a Saint Louis computer fair—acres of pale metal and convex black-green screens, within a walk of the great arch through which Lewis and Clark opened the West. The fair occupied a vast shed recently erected where a black ghetto had been torn down, its residents fleeing to East Saint Louis, and the fair’s sponsors seemed not to know at whom its glamour was aimed, big business or the private hobbyist who had the patience and hundreds of hours needed to assemble an Altair 8800. In that dusk before Apple dawned, and the hobby computer became a consumer product, even a Tandy TRS-80, out of Radio Shack, cost more than a new Buick, and the cheapest DEC, the PDP-8, went for “only” eighteen thousand dollars. Owen stood guard at the E-O stall, hawking without much heart a packaged games application Ed had insisted on developing. Trying to cash in on Atari’s Pong coup, he had bypassed Owen with a design team of younger employees. But Pong itself was still a matter of a two-hundred-pound box that people in an arcade or a luncheonette put a quarter in to play, like a pinball machine. A home that had a computer in it was one in a hundred thousand. It was hard to believe that video games, requiring sound and color and joysticks, were the future of a device born of a great war and presently hauling numbers for the financial, industrial, and scientific armies of the world. Corporate types in gray and putty suits circulated among the booths with ponytailed computer-heads in old blue jeans and flannel shirts. In another generation, the second uniform would have displaced the former as the height of moneyed fashion, and lawyers and bankers would dress casual to welcome their most valued clients, the electronic superrich.
Owen spotted Antoinette working the booth for Cray Research, a new company for high-performance computers up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She had black hair that looked hurriedly cut by a child’s plastic scissors, and an electric aura of grievance that boded well. He homed in on her at the boozy reception hosted by the city’s newly created Association of Electronic Industries. Very quickly, it seemed to him, she was confiding to him a tirade against a fellow employee, slightly her superior, an “asshole” whose “shit” she was tired of putting up with. The words made squeamish Owen wince, but there was a promise of intimacy in them. He curbed his repugnance, telling himself that this was a passionate woman, who lived like him in a small-town Falls, and that they were thrown together in the heart of this great, free country. They went on from the reception to a celebrated steakhouse a cab ride away. Her tale continued: “This absolute, stuck-on-himself shit, Eric by name—and can’t you just bet that anybody called Eric is going to be stuck on himself?—kept dumping on me in these subtle ways that nobody could fault him for but that I could certainly sense, saying these bogus-polite things like ‘I’ll let you’ and ‘Would you be an angel’ and yatata-yatata, when what was involved was literally all night going over the machine code, matching it number by number against a master, twenty-plus pages of dot-matrix with hardly any ink on the ribbon, it’s a wonder I didn’t go blind. And in the morning, you know what the peckerhead did?”
“No, what?” said Owen, nursing his second beer, which he hoped might dilute two stiff bourbons at the reception, in case he would have eventually to perform. He was learning to pace himself in these matters, on the principle of deferred gratification.
“He said, ‘Thanks—thanks, Antoinette’—that was all the scumbag said, taking the printout I’d marked up, number by number, circling the possible bugs, it killed my eyes, I need to get a new prescription and I bet that’s the reason. ‘Thanks,’ he had the nerve to simply say to me, ‘you’re a dear,’ and put it o
n the other papers on his desk as if it was the merest little five-minute favor in the world, knowing fucking damn well I’d been up all night.”
“That does seem rude,” Owen said, his brain beginning to feel puffy, lifting him up out of guilt and the worry that Phyllis was telephoning his hotel.
“At the same time he’s constantly pulling these chauvinist tricks, he’s talking a great game of what a terrific IQ I must have, so much quicker to spot redundancy and garbage than he is, I actually should have his job—can you imagine, he had the crust to admit it, I ought to have his job?—if there was any kind of a level playing field. He’s one of these guys who thinks being a great women’s libber is an easy way into your pants. What a prick, truly. What a conceited, smarmy, phony prick.”
“My wife is brainy,” Owen shyly told her. “Or used to be.”
Antoinette didn’t hear him. She told him more about Eric, how he dressed for work oh-so-casual and boyish and yet pulled out his comb twice every hour, he had this wavy reddish hair he was really vain of, and wore these broad belts and cowboy buckles to show what a flat stomach he had—he ran five miles a day and only drank soda water and white wine to keep his figure, just like a woman. She suspected he was gay, in fact. “When he walks, he seems conscious of his ass, the way a woman is—this skinny little ass of his, and his long lanky legs. Why would any guy but a queer wear such tight jeans, he must use a shoehorn to get them on? And not blue jeans, either, they would be too common, he wears black jeans, with the white stitching on the hip pockets. God, what a pompous turd.”
Even in Owen’s hotel room, Antoinette out of her clothes and slithering through the shadows like an agitated white snake—her skin cold against his, the very chill of her hostility exciting, something to overlook and overcome—she continued to express her venom toward her colleague, who thought he was too hot a shit to come to this miserable so-called fair and sent her instead, expecting her to be grateful for this nonexistent favor. Even as she was being fucked, her tongue ran on about how some people just get under her skin, she knows she shouldn’t let them, it’s exactly what they want, mega-pricks like that, her girlfriends tell her to rise above it and not give the creepy bastard the time of day, and even as Owen came in her—she was one of these circus-performer types, bringing her legs way back like she is being shot from a cannon, he didn’t see how her clitoris was getting any contact but then she should know—it occurred to him that she was in love with this hateful Eric and felt spurned by him, and was using Owen to make him jealous. She thought that Eric could see her, that he was with her every moment. She was obsessed with him and was angry because, drunk as she was, she could feel Eric not caring; hanging up there like a bat in the corner of the ceiling, he didn’t care who she was acting like a circus performer with.
She awoke, finally, as they lay beside each other overheated and disappointed, to the dim reality of him, Owen, as opposed to that of the man tormenting her self-esteem back in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She announced, in a different, sobered voice, “Hey, whatever your name is. You’re not so bad. Thanks for listening. My girlfriends think I’m crazy on the subject.”
“Well,” Owen said, mild and acquiescent as he tended to be, “we are crazy. People in general. Eric sounds like an interesting guy.”
“He’s not. He’s a prick, and I should have his job,” Antoinette said, as if he hadn’t been listening at all. Yet they lay there another hour, side by side, their drying sweat chilling them so they pulled up the flimsy hotel blankets, then tossed them aside for trips to the bathroom. Her hard white buttocks gleamed in the strips of shadow and light that fell through the venetian blinds, at the window overlooking the silent lit courtyard, while Owen drowsily wondered if it was true, as she said, that women are always conscious of their asses. Returning, she nudged up against him, even stroking him where he was limp and silky-soft, as if to demonstrate to herself that he was there, a not-Eric, and that none of the grievances against Eric applied. She made an effort, as the red digits on the bedside clock radio jiggled through the minutes of the wee hours, to give him his due, a man who had stuck with her through all that tipsy tirade, processing Eric’s snubs, and who had made love to her, after all, praising her body and flexibility while keeping his reservations about her clitoral management to himself. But it was too late, the Association of Electronic Industries was striking its tent tomorrow, and they would be winging their way back to lives for which this interlude was no lasting solution.
No solution, but an event nonetheless, partaking of sublimity. When they met the next day, under the high metal roof of the exhibition shed, they took a break from their duties to share coffee in Styrofoam cups, in the back room set aside for workers, for exhibition insiders, with free crullers and disgustingly hi-cal Danish. Neither had enough to say, but as they fumbled sheepishly and sleepily for words they were acknowledging that, though they would not meet again, they had made a start, a stab at significance. There was a flavor to this, a taste, amid those of coffee and sugary fried dough, of sluggish animal ease and of mutually achieved knowledge—a swallowed mournfulness which lovers with a future avoid knowing. Two kinds of women existed in the world, Owen perceived: those with whom you have slept and those, a cruelly disproportionate but reducible number, with whom you haven’t.
One-night stands had their underside of sorrow, but had he ever been more crazily happy, more triumphantly himself, than when Mirabella was blowing him while he sped at ninety miles an hour into the flat Nevada desert, straight into the rising morning sun? There was just space, in the rented tangerine Camaro, for her head to fit between the steering wheel and his sucked-in abdomen. The honeyed sensations in his prick, hard-used the night before, were mixed up with what he imagined her sensations were in that confined space, as the westward-bound cars materialized in the morning glare and flashed past at a combined speed that made the Camaro shudder and suck toward the middle of the highway. The highway was a thin ribbon beginning to show trembling puddles of mirage as the sun settled to baking the miles of lilac-gray vegetation on either side; distant cattle lowered their heads to graze. He knew a twitch of the wheel would annihilate them both and Mirabella knew it too but kept giving him exceedingly welcome sensations, including, with a twist of her head of bleached and teased hair, warm kisses on his naked abdomen, his button-down shirt rumpled and pulled up. Under his caressing fingers her shell of curls felt stiff and sticky, from too much spray. When he glanced down, he saw slant sunlight piercing her hair so the chalky pink of her skull showed through, the defenseless epidermis of it, skin on bone, and he had to fight losing his erection in the suppressed shock of the sight.
This conference was in Las Vegas, in one of the enormous luxury hotels—was it the Sands? or the Stardust?—that have since been pulled down to make way for yet larger ones. Her hair was dyed to a platinum pallor except for a half-inch of hometown-brown roots. Her ears had been double-pierced for two sets of little earrings, in those days an advanced self-mutilation. He took her, in her chamois-colored hotpants and green net stockings, for one of the hookers of the place, but she surprised him by knowing his name and saying, “You invented DigitEyes. My father was a structural engineer in Fresno and when I’d go to his office he used to let me play with the things on the screen. How they turned in space and still stayed together, the volumes described by these, like, wires, all with a few commands on the keys—it was magical.”
“An ingenious artifact of the past, I fear,” Owen told her. “Like the apple corer and the treadle-operated sewing machine.” He must have had a few drinks already; he had been on a panel, and when there was a reception afterwards girls from the hotel circulated among them with plastic glasses of champagne.
“The future builds on the past, and you can too,” she reassured him, Mirabella with her two-tone hair and green fishnets on her legs like a shrunken piece of costume from Sherwood Forest.
He confessed to her, “I’d like to gamble here but I don’t know how.” She led him
to the roulette wheel, but he didn’t like it, because it was pure chance and the odds were unashamedly in the house’s favor. At the blackjack tables, he won because the game was a problem in mathematics, and most people, stupidly optimistic, tried to improve their hands with one more hit: the house counted on that. He most enjoyed the machines, the impersonal slots, gaudy and solemn both, their melting colors and the silky tug of the handles, the soft leveraging within, and the gush of their occasional jackpot spitting Kennedy half-dollars into the battered trough.
In his room high above the Strip she showed him something else—a line of white powder on the glass coffee table. He knelt on the carpeted floor as he had with Jacqueline in quite another city, in another hotel room. Mirabella, her broad face shining and smiling, guided him in rolling up a twenty-dollar bill and inhaling the powder as best he could. He had never been good at blowing out candles on a birthday cake, either. He disliked the tickly sensation, like loose hair across his lips except that this was deeper into his head. The powder that eluded his nostrils she scraped up quickly, neatly, with a one-edged Treet razor blade, and inhaled herself, making afterwards an ingratiating child’s grimace. She was an angel, Mirabella, with something Slavic in the shine and breadth of her face.
Owen distrusted drugs because he needed his brain cells, but this was a slow icicle to the brain that awoke that gray organ to its potential, gave it the precision and speed immortal spirits must know. His body, too: he had never wanted to fuck so much, and been so good at it, so hard and controlled, a man of iron, desire rising in him throughout the night like hydraulic pressure and always being greeted willingly by the marvellous Mirabella, her body as thick and resilient as a peasant woman’s, her breasts thoroughly brown and a ghost of non-tan around her trimmed pubes smaller than a doily. She reminded him of Alissa except that she was firmer-bodied and younger and didn’t want a baby. Her back viewed from above as he humped her was less touching, less articulate in its muffled spine. Her back was blank. Her cunt became full of him, so soppy he felt less and less friction, and she confessed toward dawn that he was hurting her with his cock. He apologized and kissed her all over tenderly, including the vertebra just above the sallow cleft of her ass, but in fact he was not sorry, he enjoyed the idea of hurting her with just himself.