Villages by John Updike (best summer reads of all time .TXT) 📗

technology has, by geometric leaps and bounds, left him behind; his dashing algorithms and circuitry-saving forked commands, his IF … THEN … ELSEs and WHILE-loops, have become as homely as patchwork quilts. The chip-power of a thousand-dollar desktop IBM clone dizzies and disgusts him. All those bells and whistles: realistically three-dimensional computer games animated in real time; hard-wired programs for storing and cropping and shading digital photos, for editing digital home videos, for printing in a hundred type fonts; programs for playing music broken into ten thousand digitized tones, for drawing upon the Internet’s endlessly enlarging Library of Babel; programs for fending off viruses and worms and spam and unwanted e-mail correspondence. The dot-com bust has made the whole industry seem disreputable, including those who, like him, got out near the top. Correctly judging the Clinton bubble to be unsustainable, Owen reversed the course of his grandfather’s investments, bought during the ’twenties bubble and wiped out by the Crash of 1929. He has avenged the old man, whom he loved most purely of those he early loved.

Unlike his mother, Grandpa Rausch had not been too present, nor had he been, like Owen’s father, too absent. He had been just right, sitting quiet in the center of the caneback sofa while Owen played on the living-room carpet with his Tinker Toys and lead warplanes, or made the Lionel train go around and around, backwards and forwards, the little black transformer box overheating to emit a slight, cozy stink of burning, like his mother when she ironed. She also emitted this smell when, sitting at her dresser, she used the long-nosed curling iron on her auburn hair. His mother was hot, hot like the top of the coal-burning kitchen stove, dangerous to touch, though she warmed the kitchen, and the whole house for that matter. She had a redhead’s temper, what his father called “a short fuse”; her hand would flash out and slap Owen’s face quicker than he could duck. All his life Owen wanted women to be cool and calm except when he (more and more rarely) desired them otherwise.

“Talk about the news, the economy,” Julia advises him. “Whether or not we should go to war with Iraq again.”

“Another thing that happens at seventy—thank God, darling, you’re too young to have it happen to you—is you cease to care about the news. It isn’t new. Didn’t we do Iraq a Bush or so ago?”

“Talk about golf. You love golf.”

“But not golfers necessarily. It’s pathetic, it’s all we can talk about, you can see the wives start to fidget and move away. The wives didn’t use to get so bored in Middle Falls, I wonder what we talked about.”

“You talked about how you wanted to fuck them, without exactly saying so.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“I was there.”

“Bless you for that. Right there, playing the game with the best of them.” She doesn’t like to be reminded of that. To mollify his stab, he asks, in a child’s whine, “What am I going to do between now and the Achesons?” Owen used to work in every spare minute; he developed his first marketable program, DigitEyes, using a clumsy mix of machine code and the early version of FORTRAN he had learned at IBM, in a garage behind the clapboarded semi-detached he and Phyllis had rented on Common Lane for their first year and a half in Middle Falls. In Haskells Crossing, his garage, much larger than that historic one, is taken up with three cars and with lawn equipment he never touches, as well as cartons and cartons of prep-school and college texts abandoned by their combined children by previous marriages.

“Go to the club and play golf,” Julia suggests. “Or help me weed the hosta and cut back the ivy. It all looks like shit.” She has a genteel manner but a salty tongue.

Owen misses the old Willow playground, its plateau long bulldozed out of existence. Time hung heavy there, but the weight was delicious, as he moved the marbles of Chinese checkers from one triangle to another, and braided rickrack lanyards for whistles though only Miss Mull had any need to wear one, and retrieved the roof ball from the cornfields when it went over the pavilion’s tarpaper roof, and watched Ginger dangle from the monkey bars or kick high, higher on the creaking swing. He realizes that to the children of Haskells Crossing the country club is their playground, with its pool and snack bar and tetherball and clay tennis courts, and probably with dirty drawings scratched somewhere where grown-ups never think to look, but for Owen this recreational space wears a stupefying glaze of propriety, of that hopeless boringness special to the rich. The poor know boredom but always hope that things will change for the better, whereas the rich simply want things to go on just as they are, which is even less likely to happen. Their problems—the constant crisis state of their golf games, the huge new house some nouveau riche from out of state was putting up right in their ocean view, the impossibility of finding dependable help in the house and garden (even the Brazilians and Albanians are overcharging and learning how to loaf), the unshakable slump in the stock market, the rising real-estate taxes, the adult children who are getting divorces and having disappointing, quixotic careers in the arts or bleeding-heart social work—strike Owen as trivial, compared with the do-or-die problems that afflicted his childhood household and from which he had been sheltered.

As the slate roof of the house on Mifflin Avenue withstood rain and the hurricane of ’38, so his guardians had shielded him from a pelting hail of worries: poverty with no federal safety net, ill health with no post-war medical miracles, loss of social face with no forgiveness in the social system. The child gathered ominous bits of conversation from other rooms in the house: his father’s job was none too secure, the local hosiery industry was a lost cause, his mother’s health was uncertain. She had