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

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.”

“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