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

“It’ll catch up. Electrical engineering is everybody’s major; it’s everybody’s toy these days. Remember when metallurgy was the sexy thing? Not to mention nuclear physics. Why sweat it, if what we do is piecework? We’re getting paid.”

“Yeah, but look who can afford us: banks, insurance companies, airlines, the Pentagon. The world’s dreariest mentalities.”

Ed stopped chewing, and said across the table with mock solemnity, “It grieves me to hear you talk like this, O. Tell me, what do you want out of life you’re not getting?”

Owen pictured Phyllis, because he knew Ed was picturing her too. What more could a man want out of life than Phyllis? That was what Ed’s owlish stare, through glasses so thick a tint of skin was refracted into the bevelled edges, was asking. Owen didn’t know the answer but knew Ed’s estimation of Phyllis was unrealistic. “What I want is a little shelter from the trivial,” he answered. “My desk sits right in the thick of traffic; everybody keeps asking me things, to double-check this or that approach, to look over their schematics. We could keep the desk where it is, and I’ll be at it most of the time, but couldn’t I have another, at the other end of the floor, that would be private? I need to really think about the DigitEyes redo, to make it cutting-edge again.”

Ed resumed eating and was having trouble with the Reuben. The greasy pastrami had soaked through the thin rye bread, making it slippery to hold. He was lowering his big head to get his mouth under it, the drooping strings of cheese, and the odd angle emphasized how much his hair had receded from his forehead; it had once looked like Buddy Rourke’s, boyishly thrusting forward. When he had taken his bite and swallowed and the Reuben was under control again, down on the plate beside the French fries and the paper cup of coleslaw, Ed said, “So that’s your new thing? To cut yourself off from the company mainstream? These kids we hire don’t know how to write economical programs. Everything is GO TO, GO TO. They think there’s no end to capacity now.”

“They’re almost right. They may be right.”

“Enough big baggy GO TOs hanging out there, logical contradictions begin to show up.”

“They’ll learn, Ed. We’re all learning; it’s still a young trade. All I’m asking is a little privacy, and one of the new DEC minis. I’d like a PDP-8 and a graphics CRT screen, as well as the telex assembler reader. Give me six months and cut my crunching to half-time. There’s something I’m missing, some fresh approach.”

“So that’s your new thing. You’re pulling out on us.”

“Ed, it’s how I’ll be most valuable to the company—a little detached. I’m just the head ribbon-clerk as it is now. All that socializing up front produces nothing; it’s driving me crazy. The brain ages. Time runs out. Look at the breakthroughs—most of them by guys younger than we are. Einstein at twenty-five. Turing the same. Phyllis says she couldn’t possibly do her math thesis now, she’s gotten too stupid.”

“That’s sad, that Phyl thinks that,” Ed said, touching his loosely knotted necktie with greasy fingers in synchrony with a semi-suppressed burp. He did that chimp thing with his upper lip, bulging it out over his upper teeth, trying to work some bit of pastrami loose. “Hey. You want to know what my new thing is?”

“Sure. Didn’t know you had one,” Owen said, hurrying into his salad of chickpeas and bow-tie pasta, to catch up after talking too much. The little room he had in mind, an old watchmen’s locker room with one little metal-framed window too high to look out of and a row of battered green lockers, locks long gone, was at the head of steel-and-cement stairs that descended down to a door that opened onto a disused sidewalk leading toward the permanently locked pedestrian bridge across the river. In the days of the old arms factory, a workforce on foot crossed the river from the region of row houses. The door, sheathed in metal painted red to match the bricks, was never used but was kept unlocked in daytime, as an emergency fire exit. Owen would use it, unseen. The door, the stairs, the private room appeared in his mind in luminous vectorized form, the whole projection turning as if he were passing through it, the geometric shapes transforming as the underlying mathematics determined.

“I’m getting married,” Ed announced.

A mass of pulped chickpeas found resistance in Owen’s throat. He chased it down with a sip of water and brought out, “That’s great. High time. Who to? Do I know her?”

“I hope you don’t, you lech,” said Ed, for the second time offending Owen’s strict sense of sexual propriety. “She’s eight years younger than me, nine years than you—just a kid, O. An innocent kid. Have a heart.”

Owen felt a pang. Phyllis was a year older. Maybe that was their trouble, simple biology: the man should dominate. He never had. Ed had a lovely patience, to wait till he could marry so much younger. “We met at a conference,” he was explaining, “that thing in Seattle, remember I went last year? On integrated circuits. Stacey’s a rep for Texas Instruments.”

“Integrated circuits,” Owen said, to show he was following. He had never thought of Ed as marriageable, which was silly. Almost everybody is, the way Nature has set it up, with its usual tremendous margin for error.

“Yeah, and what to do with such tiny ICs. Last year TI brought out a hearing aid. Next year they’re marketing a desk calculator that weighs less than a chicken. She tells me this as if everybody knows what a chicken weighs.”

“Is she a Texan?” Why do I feel so betrayed? Owen asked himself. What do I care if Ed is married?

He had counted on Ed to remain loyal to the business, so his own attention could wander to higher or lower things. He needed