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

mind the Viking spacecraft landing on Mars, which after a century of talk about canals looked drier than Arizona.

“Evil Knievel not making his jump,” Trish replied with surprising promptness, as though she had given his mental processes some thought. Her hostile edge was hopeful; he was beginning to work within her. He saw from a foot away how her face would look in bed, on a pillow; the realization made him a little tired, with the effort of living on several levels. Her face would be petulant, eager to extract from him payment for her daring, for the risk she had taken.

“Why would I like that?”

“You like flub-ups. Misery loves company,” Trish pronounced, tapping him unexpectedly on the chest and drifting off the porch, with its November chill, into the bright, warm, chatter-filled living room.

His private monk’s cell at E-O, with its dirty high window and its carefully scheduled visitors from beyond, had been lately invaded from within the factory. A low-level programmer, Karen Jazinski, hired a year or so ago, had delivered a number of papers from Ed’s end of the operation—printouts of machine code with problems, contracts Owen had to initial, yellow-highlighted items from Computing Tomorrow. Karen had to traverse an unutilized section of upper factory floor (its vacancy a reminder of the company’s recent stagnation, of DigitEyes 2.2’s relative failure on the increasingly graphics-crowded market) and knock on the gray-painted metal door Owen kept locked from within. Admitted for the first time, Karen was startled by the near-domestic coziness he had created within the small space: the Oriental rug, the corkboard where memos and snapshots of his family had been thumbtacked, bracket-supported shelves of catalogues and computer manuals, the fluorescent overheads seconded by bridge lamps and bulbs enclosed in ribbed rice-paper balls, the molded-plastic, much-adjustable office furniture augmented by a corduroy-covered easy chair and the Naugahyde sofa softened by a striped blanket and several fat pillows, the CRT monitors on separate desks but coupled by a colorful festoon of multi-strand insulated wire. The young woman’s eyes took on a glisten; she saw the room for what it was, a chamber for fucking, for binary fantasy. Indeed, she must have sensed it, even without the clues of those instances when he refused to answer her knock, and breaths were held on both sides of the quilted steel door.

She stood there like a spectre; she had been admitted to his dream life. She handed him Ed’s sheaf and fled, back across the empty factory floor. But there came a day, as both sensed it might, when, once the thick door had closed with a punky click behind her, she handed him along with the business papers an additional message: a wadded warm handful of nylon underpants. Karen stood there with swarming eyes and lifted up her skirt, showing that her pants were in his hand and not on her. “We don’t have much time,” she said in a voice doubly fearful—that her absence from her workstation would be noticed and that he would spurn her.

She was small and sharp-featured, with abundant wiry hair and a worried, malnourished look. She was one of the thousands of young people feeding day after day on the sickly light of a cathode-ray tube. She plucked at Owen’s heart. “Then let’s not waste it,” he said gamely.

She took off her gray flannel skirt and little penny loafers but kept on the white peds and pearl-pink silk blouse. If he kissed her, it was afterwards. When she carefully removed her glasses, she squinted, and above her pointed chin her lips thinned with habitual concentration. She said, “Hey, look at you,” when she saw how ready he had become for her, his jeans quickly off, but then she was surprisingly slick, without foreplay. She must have carried a rising sexual excitement with her as she hurried across the blackened old floor, with its pattern of bolt scars and gleaming worn nailheads, her underpants in her hand. Or had she slipped them off right at his door, on an impulse? What a brave generation hers was, that in a mere decade or so had freed itself from centuries of hangups.

“Why do you want this?” he asked her in a breathy moment stolen from one of their times together.

Pressed beneath him on the sofa, her thighs spread to embrace his hips, she was not afraid of seeming tactless. “With guys of your own generation,” she explained, “there’s all this negotiation. There’s all this baby stuff and heavy crap about commitment. You feel trapped by your future and what you do with it. With you, there’s no future. There’s just this. Bim, bam, not even a thank-you-ma’am.”

“How wonderful you are,” he began.

“None of that, Mr. Mackenzie. I’m not wonderful. I’m functional, and I’m not downright ugly, but that’s all. Face it: to you I’m a piece of ass.”

“And me, what am I to you?”

Karen was silent. Owen felt time ticking. Phyllis might call. Or Ed. He had promised Ed to plot a revise of an insurance program that needed to combine actuarial probabilities with the sliding interest rate of their annuities, plugged into the Fed’s interest rates, with algorithms that included double log functions.

“You, you’re a beautiful old guy. I can see you as a kid. I love DigitEyes, what you did back then with those few kilobytes available. I love playing with it, when I start missing you and wishing we had more.”

“Then you do miss me. You do want more.”

“Of course; that’s just biology. Biology is stupid. It wants babies. I don’t want babies. Not yet. I just want your cock inside me now and then.”

They could talk this way to each other only in the small sealed space, as sealed in by thick old walls as his brain was by his skull; they occupied it like the murmur of thoughts incessant in our heads.

“How often?” he asked. “When are you going to come again? I ought to know, so I’m sure to be here.” Vanessa and