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

and then finding she could not put the tight little clothes back on the unyielding plastic bodies. Owen more than Phyllis had the patience to tug the bits of cloth within reach of the fasteners; some of the outfits reminded him of ones Faye used to wear, playfully.

He was a good father, the mothers of their circle told Phyllis, she in turn told him; but he knew he was not. An only child, helplessly self-centered, he could not bring to these four little souls—strangers to the towering cosmos, each a different mix of his and Phyllis’s genes and each varyingly susceptible to the surrounding culture—the same morbidly hopeful concentration his parents and mother’s parents, stripped of hope for themselves, had brought to him. He had been outnumbered, four adults to one child, and now four children outnumbered him. He felt less their progenitor than their brother, and this fraternal lightness, a love leavened by distraction and pinches of sadism, for good and bad characterized his fatherhood. On the one hand he did not sit heavy on his children; on the other, he did not strive to shape their lives, to inculcate patterns of behavior. There was little in the children’s lives like the tiring, tedious, but impressive Sunday walks he took with his own parents. Instead, all was tumble—squawks and shouts and squalling appeals for justice. Television and other children, first from the packed Common Lane neighborhood and then, ferried to and from the Partridgeberry Road place, the children of their friends, filled the little time left over after sibling interaction and school. Phyllis’s schooling had been all private, and his all public; they agreed to begin with the latter, which was handiest and most democratic, reserving transition to paid private schools as the child’s needs seemed to indicate. He was proud of being able to support these dependents, from above as it were, but in most respects he dwelt among them, sharing in both the entertainments—Captain Kangaroo, The Sound of Music—and the moral bafflement of the era, as a rising political fury shadowed a holiday giddiness. Still, after Faye he was noticeably more of a paternal presence, all summer taking his lunch hour at Heron Pond once or twice a week, there among the dragonflies and peanut-butter sandwiches and gossipping near-naked mothers.

At work, too, he tried to rededicate himself, patiently stringing together those long but finite binary chains, those rickety scaffolds of contingency, that, once debugged, gave companies in an electronic twinkling the information that used to be pieced together from typed or handwritten files. It was like knitting: a single mis-stitch necessitated tearing up dozens of rows of code, yet whole patches of previously perfected subroutines could be crocheted into a fresh customized design. Except for strokes of ingenuity, of logical lumping and short-cutting, which only another programmer could appreciate, his work felt trivial; the kind of data-processing he was making possible on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar mainframe could have been carried forward, in most company systems, on punched cards, more clumsily and slowly yet with no qualitative difference. Number-crunching, it was called, with an affection that yet dramatized its basic drudgery.

“Ed,” Owen asked his partner one day at lunch, “doesn’t there have to be a next thing?” Once a week they tried to share lunch, just the two of them, since the success of the company, its multiplication of projects and employees, came more and more between them, as if the hyphen in E-O was implacably lengthening. The restaurant was the least crummy of the three eateries left along River Street. The downtown had been struggling for years. Empty stores were rented, newly tricked out as boutiques or arty stationers or educational-toy stores and, after a spurt of customer curiosity, slowly failed, and were empty again, with butcher paper taped across their windows. The Ugly Duckling had a swan on its signboard. Only the two back windows overlooked the river, but the mock-tavern decor—dark-stained oak beams, rough-hewn maple tables, waitresses with frilled aprons over their blue jeans—was cozy and acoustically merciful. The meat-and-potatoes menu was being infiltrated by pasta salads and macrobiotic soups; nevertheless, Ed ordered a Reuben thick with cheese and fatty pastrami, and fries and a Heineken. He had added twenty pounds since his days at IBM. Entrepreneurial success and pricier clothes gave his bulk authority. The front man with their corporate clients, he had taken to wearing suits, with a shirt and tie; Owen remained loyal to the ’fifties student garb of khakis and soft flannel shirt, augmented in winter with a down vest. He had lost five pounds in the affair with Faye and its painful aftermath, and had worked to keep it off, vain of his newly wiry figure. He felt nimbler now, more dangerous. He had taken to black turtlenecks, and joined an indoor tennis club in Upper Falls. As longer hair became permissible for men, his own showed a bounce and a tendency to curl.

“You’re talking what?” Ed asked. “Private life? You did the next thing already.”

Owen blushed; he wanted to believe that his adventure with Faye, if not secret, was conversationally off-bounds with Ed, who had known him and Phyllis so long he seemed part of the marriage. “Computerwise,” he primly clarified. “This OS/360 of IBM’s is turning into a fucking disaster. It’s costing them tens of millions, and still they can’t take it to market for all the bugs. They got a thousand programming people on it out there in Poughkeepsie and it’s more and more a mess, I hear.”

Ed asked, through his chewing, “What are they gonna do? They gotta work it through if they’re going to get any of their investment back out. They tried to use multiprogramming and that made problems. The larger the program, the greater the tendency to crash. One bug is all it takes.”

“It’s more than problems, Ed, it’s a basic imbalance. The capacity keeps doubling; programming can’t keep up. Hardware development is industrial; it’s knitting mills. Software is still sitting in the cottage