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

on the wheel while pressed against Gregory. No doubt the controlled substance that had enhanced their spooning session at Heron Pond had been still in their systems. Owen, thinking of how not many years before he had sped through the Nevada desert with Mirabella’s bleached curls bobbing in his lap, and years before that had hastily backed out of a perilous wood while Elsie hurried into her clothes beside him, could not find it in himself to be indignant. He deserved these assaults on his hardware.

He was more angered, at his distance, by the difficulties Iris was having in Massachusetts with the little cream-colored AMC Pacer coupe he had bought for her to take to Smith: repeated fender-benders while jockeying in the college parking lots, and weekly traffic tickets from the Northhampton police. It began to feel like a taunting, which hurt the more because Iris, the only one of his children with his mother’s auburn hair, had been the child whom he felt most himself with, the least unconvincingly paternal. Iris had effortlessly, it seemed, entrusted him with the wry, teasing respect that is a father’s due from a daughter.

During this accident-prone interregnum, Ed began to talk to him, at their weekly lunch, about E-O Data designing a PC for a company in New Hampshire to manufacture and market. “PCs are not just the future, they’re here,” Ed urged him. “There’ll be one in every home in ten years. It’s television sets all over again. There’s billions to be made. Think Apple.”

“Ed, we do software, not hardware.”

“What’s the big diff? You’re talking eggs and chickens. If you can cook one you can cook the other. What the hell was your MIT degree in? Electrical engineering. Well, Christ, let’s start engineering. We got a whole empty floor up there, for the prototypes and logic analyzers, once we get past the design stage. Look at Apple. The 141 had to be connected to a television set; a year later the 169 had color and sound and could do games. Thousands of these rigs are out there now, soaking up other people’s software.”

“Ed, I’m too fucking old for these new tricks you want. Let the smart kids you’ve hired out of Rensselaer or wherever do it. They’re hardwired for it all, it’s second nature to them. To me it was adventure, to them it’s just appliances.”

“You’re not fucking old, you’re too fucking distracted, is what you are. You can’t figure out if you have two wives or no wives. Shape up, O.; your brain will turn to mush.”

“It has turned, actually. Sorry about that, Ed. I know you had great hopes for me. I guess I got sidetracked.”

Bad conscience, bad memory. But Owen would never forget—he remembered it every day—the sparkling late-October morning when, to deliver an update of his income figures for Phyllis to take to an appointment with her lawyer in Hartford at ten a.m., he drove straight from his Covenant Street pad to his former home on Partridgeberry Road. Halloween was impending; stoops and porchlets sported pumpkins, and some front lawns held straw-stuffed dummies, headless horsemen and sheeted ghosts, arranged in studied tableaux. In Owen’s childhood there hadn’t been such an elaborate pagan fuss at Halloween, just a little frowned-upon mischief. The holiday, as the major religious holidays lost credibility, had gone from being an excuse for childish mischief and blackmail to being an inoffensive pseudo-Christmas.

There had been rain overnight, giving the roads a shine and the world a washed look. Leaves were coming down, making a wet pulp here and there beneath the wheels. The Stingray had been totalled and the Ford Mustang he had bought with the insurance money never felt right; it didn’t like to start on damp days and didn’t hug the road like the Corvette had. The seats were covered with some black matte vinyl stamped with a hokey pattern of cattle brands; looking at it made him feel cheesily middle-aged.

Floyd and Eve were off at school. Daisy the yellow Labrador greeted him at the kitchen door with a thumping tail. The two cats rubbed around his ankles purring. Phyllis was up and dressed in a navy-blue suit and a plain white blouse and medium-height heels; she looked uneasy, like a modern nun not used to being out of the bulky old habit. Her color was high. She regarded her fast-talking lawyer as a kind of tutor in the legal facts of life; her face wore a student blush of anticipation, as if before a test. Phyllis was still slender, still erect in posture. She had not attempted to dye the gray that had come into her temples, blending into the sand color like traces of snow at the beach. Except for the animals, and the non-migratory birds chirping outside, they were alone with the house, with its jointly bought furniture, most of it old and showing signs of the economies they had once practiced, a medley of antique and modern now crowded, he could see from the kitchen, by her inheritance from her parents’ two homes, the late-Victorian Cambridge one and the lighter-hearted, rickety summer place on the Cape.

“It’s horrible,” she said, following his eye. “My brother says he doesn’t have any space in Ithaca for his share. We know what that means—Francine doesn’t want it. You scrimp and save to buy furniture,” she generalized, “and then, when you’ve got your house full, your parents die and dump all their stuff on you. Except,” she added quickly, as if she had been tactless, “for your mother. She’s still alive.”

“Overweight, high blood pressure, and all,” he comically admitted. “That tough old farming stock.” He would lose, he saw, a wife who knew his problematical mother—over twenty years of difficult acquaintance, for better or worse. Julia had of course not yet been to Pennsylvania to meet the prickly old woman. “Most of that stuff she has,” he went on, “nobody would want anyway. When we moved from Willow, for some reason, our porch furniture came