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Show Tl Mono, not stereo, but he was inordinately proud of having put a few components together and getting sound from them, as amazed at his feat as if he had brought fire to mankind. LP records had been on the market for a few years then and Bill and Joan bought Bach and Beethoven and Bartok. Also jazz, and the first of their recorded folksongs. They listened to the radio too, to FM; they began to watch TV, selectively; they still went to movies but increasingly to foreign ones; and they began to shop for a sports car. The modern world was on its way in all right. Sputnik hadn't orbited yet but men everywhere were looking at the moon with other than romantic feelings, the smog was thickening, the noise climbing decibel by decibel, the traffic jams piling higher. But Bill and Joan felt comfortably immune, sealed in their happy marriage: she spent over three months reading War and Peace, and he spent week after week reading up on suspension systems, cubic liters of bore, compression ratios, and like that. She began to think of having a baby, he narrowed the sports cars down to two; she stored her diaphragm, he bought a Triumph. They were very happy. But then, the hi-fi built and the sports car bought, his natural talents surfaced again, his jokes sparkling and marveously unclean, his eyes glowing lustily and his flirting never more charming, and Joan began to hover over him. She tried harder to have a baby, he drank more. He had an affair with one of the girls at the office, not much to recommend her except that Joan was fooled, but when it ended, he began to suffer guilt and drank and flirted even more. A divorced friend of Joan's got married again and moved back to town, and Bill found her much too attractive. But dien an acquaintance sneered at his hi-fi, called it low-fi, and Bill found his way not to be ordinary, found his destiny. Not that he decided all at once to build the perfect hi-fi; instead he decided to build a really good one, but to do that he had to know more than he knew and so he began to read. The more he read, the more he had to read, and soon he was spending Friday nights at the library, Saturday nights with his books, the perfect scholar. Joan, feeling safe once more, feeling that man's sneer as providential, took up knitting, went to Friday night movies with a girl friend, and when Bill wasn't studying or off talking to experts, tried very hard to have a baby. 168 |