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

“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