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

“If she did, she was wrong. The new version of DigitEyes is selling very slowly. Sketchpad, out of the Lincoln Lab, has taken away market share. Also Ed is worried about this new minicomputer DEC is putting out for only eighteen thousand, the PDP-8. Everybody can own one and the market for standardized programs will take off. Contract programming like we do will become obsolete.” With their marriage revealed as an abyss beneath them, he was happy to shift their ground to technology. She was, too, for a few moments.

“Really? That’s not what Ed tells me. He says the more people own computers the better for the software business all around. And anyway Faye didn’t know any of that. She wanted you for a husband, darling, like one of her cute new costumes. It’s the tragedy of women, isn’t it? The only thing we can trade on is fucking, and with the Pill now the price has gone way down.”

“Please, stop talking so tough. It isn’t you.”

“I thought you liked women tough. Or at least crass. It is me, Owen. It’s what you’ve made me, with this sleazy town of exurban misfits and this grotesque infatuation with Faye. First I had to put up with your deceit, and now with all your adolescent post-facto mooning. My mother was right: you weren’t for me. You were too much of a boy. My father was the one who liked you, though I never heard the two of you exchange more than six words. After scuttling Hank, I suppose he felt he owed me one.”

Color had risen to her cheeks, through her throat; her level eyes, silvery in some lights, flared in rare indignation. He suppressed an admiring snicker: Phyllis had a lonely talent for seeing through things, to their bleak bones. Poor Faye, yes, she had told him to be practical, and had given him what lessons she could, but now her practical value to him was as a conquest, a badge he could wear in their little local society, where sex was less and less a household secret. True, he ached in her absence, but having her day after day would have brought with it daily life and its tedium, and sickly children with half of Jock’s genes, and a wife who thought half like Jock. “How could I marry her?” Owen asked his wife, plaintively, anxious to discuss this with somebody impartial. “I have four children, the youngest a year old!”

Phyllis told him, “That wouldn’t have stopped some men. She saw you as reckless, Owen, because you’re creative, but in fact you’re very self-protective, very Pennsylvania-Dutch one-step-at-a-time. She rushed you, and you hate being rushed.”

He took these observations for compliments, or at least for knowledgeable attention, and said with pleased sulkiness, “Ed says the trouble with programming is it’s been too creative. The need now, with the basics in place and all these new chips piling up hardware capability, is to make it less of an art and more of an engineering discipline.”

“Does that scare you?” Phyllis asked him, ever a wife. In spite of the domestic horrors of the spring—scandal, possible breakup—she had found time to sunbathe in their big back yard, down by the lily pond with its rebuilt bridge, and the tip of her nose was pink.

“No,” he said, relaxed again into being a husband, “E-O has younger people for the nitty-gritty, the coding and debugging, it comes like second nature to them; they don’t know there was ever a time before FORTRAN and COBOL. My task is more to dream, to dream big. I have my theories. I think graphics is the way into a huge market. If you can find a way around all these line commands that have to be memorized, and use simple intuitive images as the interface, everybody can use them. You can have games.”

“Do people really need,” Phyllis asked, looking over her shoulder as she left the room, “even more ways to waste their time?”

The Dunhams had a family lawyer, and Jock for a while talked about suing Owen for alienation of affections, or making the Mackenzies move out of town, but they produced a lawyer of their own, and in the end the most desirable thing seemed to be for the Dunhams to sell that rambling place with its veranda and move closer to the city, to Norwalk or Wilton, where the schools would be better for the children, and Jock would be closer to where the Dunham money was managed over three-martini lunches, and Faye was fifty minutes away from Manhattan’s stores and shows and display cases. Owen thought of her striding through the city he had left five years ago, sinking happily into its glitter, and felt a jealous relief. He would always love her, she was his one fling into the dreamland of sexual happiness, but it had not been practical, and it gave him a metallic taste in his mouth, a touch of dread, to know that he had intervened in the lives of others, dislocating them, causing something as serious as a change of address and a change of schools for the two bewildered, delicate Dunham children. Marrying Phyllis had occurred under the supervision of adults; engendering his own children—a blunt intervention in the world’s statistics—had occurred under her supervision. But fucking Faye had been his idea, or an idea of hers that he had readily adopted, alone with her beneath the square sky that day, with the crows, and the bed of soft grass behind the holy rock.

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