Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

snow-flecked air with fresh arrivals, and mirrors sweated as the heat of the packed bodies interfaced with the cold walls. Wedged around a Formica-topped table with three or four others of Phyllis’s set—Anne-Marie Morand from Montreal, Amy Toong from Boston, Jake Lowenthal from Flatbush, Bobby Sprock from Chicopee—Owen admired the way she listened, said so little, just fed cigarettes into those pale, numb lips and exhaled up into her dirty-blond bangs. She had the magnetism of those who make no effort to shine; she held them together, many actors playing to an audience of one. Noisy, fast-talking Jake was mocking the first digital computers: Harvard’s Mark I, ENIAC down in Philly, the Lincoln Laboratories Whirlwind housed a few blocks from where they sat. “Mountains that don’t produce a mouse,” he proclaimed. “Thousands of switches, boxes and boxes of punch cards, miles of wiring, tons of hardware all to do what a slide rule and half a brain can do in thirty seconds.”

“Jake, you don’t believe that,” Phyllis told him, so levelly and quietly Owen felt a jealous pang: a well-established connection was being used.

“Why don’t I? Hey, Phyl, why don’t I? By the time ENIAC was built, the war was over and the Army couldn’t use it. It was a thirty-ton dog. It takes two hundred kilowatts to run it, it gobbles up electricity even when it isn’t running, it costs a fortune just to keep the tubes cool—there are eighteen thousand of them. Eighteen thousand tubes. Not to mention ten thousand condensers and six thousand switches.”

“Yes, and it does math it would take thousands of people to do by hand,” Amy Toong said, glancing quickly sideways to check that Phyllis, to whom Jake had spoken, was not replying.

“You’re talking obsolete,” Bobby Sprock told Jake. “Vacuum tubes are on the way out. Already, Whirlwind’s storage unit uses magnetic cores instead of tubes. Punch cards are being replaced by magnetic tapes. Bell Labs has come up with something called a transistor that does the switching with semi-conducting strips of silicon and doped germanium. Circuitry is going to be all thin-film layering soon. Pretty soon we’ll have a computer no bigger than a refrigerator.”

“Yeah, and we’re going to fly to the moon on gossamer wings,” Jake scoffed. Owen wondered if their ganging up on Jake amounted to anti-Semitism; but his persistent aggression seemed to invite it, to relish it. He said, “There are molecular limits in thin-film they’ve reached already. Face it, guys and gals, computers are basically clunky energy-hogs so expensive they’ll only ever have one customer, and that’s Uncle Sam. Look at UNIVAC. Remington Rand finally got the kinks out, mostly, and now they can’t sell them. They run so hot they’ve got to put dry ice in the ductwork.”

“Well,” Owen pointed out, as mildly as possible in imitation of Phyllis, “UNIVAC picked Eisenhower over Stevenson right enough. And did it so early nobody believed it; the network had the results and didn’t broadcast them!”

“Predicting elections is a stunt,” Jake said.

“The first airplanes were stunts. The first horseless carriages,” said Bobby Sprock, with the agonized expression and near-stutter of those who feel all the justice of an argument heaped on their side. “The first t-telephone, right here in Boston!”

“Analog computers, I can see,” Jake conceded, with a tongue emboldened by his opponent’s sputtering. “Amplifiers, differentiators—that’s what I call electrical engineering. This digital, binary stuff is a toy—it’s one step up from tic-tac-toe.”

“Jacob, aren’t you funny?” Phyllis said, not smiling. Owen heard the soft familiar tone with which she addressed him, and felt—the jolt that went straight across his chest—certainty that these two were connected as more than friends. She was the passive, negative pole of a number of highly charged connections: this inference, there in the circuit of close-pressed bodies and tousled wool wraps jammed around a small table littered with the soy-scented ruins of a Chinese meal, did not unplug his insulated belief that the course of his life must flow through this particular girl, this woman.

That she had not been born the moment he first set eyes on her, that he found her in the midst of attachments old and new would have dismayed him had he not been numbed into becoming a mere implement in the hand of a designing Nature. Their bodies knew they would make good babies. In the midst of this student seethe and chatter, they were kindred exotics, sheltered children groping after reality, singular in a pride they couldn’t express, gifted but defective, set apart. They promised to each other a fresh genetic start, a beginning of real life. He had no cause for jealousy. As computers know, the past is mere storage, to be called upon only as the present calculation requires. When they were indeed alone together, he asked for no more information than she volunteered, and she was vague. “Oh, I went out a few times with this section man from Projective Geometry, but that was last spring, and I have no idea where he’s got the idea that I owe him something. I can’t believe it was anything I said.”

“How do you know he thinks you owe him something?”

“He keeps sending me unpleasant letters. He’s very angry I won’t go out with him any more. Now he’s angry about you.”

“Me?” Flattered, scared: Owen’s tender stomach registered these incompatibles. “But why me especially? I’m just one of your crowd—why would I stick out?”

“Well,” Phyllis said, “to him you do.” If she was in his arms, she wriggled a little deeper, as if wanting to shrink away from the entanglements her unassuming beauty had brought upon her and, it seemed, on him, too. “He’s right, of course. We’re more—serious?”

“We are?” Again, the abdominal chafing of incompatibles. He wanted life but was scared of it. It was easier to roll over and dream on. In her light-handed, abstracted way Phyllis was tenacious. “O.K.,” Owen said. “What shall we do about—? What’s his name?”

“Ralph.”

“Ralph. How can you be worried about somebody called Ralph?