“Did she romanticize me?” He had felt, merely, that she had assigned him his true value. Their whole affair, from the first event in the woods by Whitefield’s Rock, had taken place under the sign of truth—fresh truth, fresh seeing. A smeared window had been ammoniated and wiped clean. As he plodded through one of E-O’s contracted applications programs for an insurance company’s records and logarithmized risk margins or a Danbury hat factory’s cost accounting, payroll, and stock control, he was aware of a lessened ability to link and combine logic chains, a fuzziness in his neurons brought on, perhaps, by their saturation in memories and anticipations of sex with Faye. But he was confident that eventually a new mental strength would result from this dip into sexual adventure. His marriage to Phyllis, when new—just lying beside her sleeping body, in unconscious partnership with her breathing and her dreams—had brought on brainstorms of which DigitEyes was the final, precocious product. After a few years, however, many rival such programs entered the market, while his vision of a graphic computer-user interface remained frustrated by the limits of the hardware, and the hardware’s high cost.

High cost—what it came down to, perhaps, was that Faye had seemed too expensive for him; he could time-share her but not own her.

“Of course, it’s what people do,” Phyllis told him, wearily, even tenderly, out of that ambient Cantabrigian wisdom she had absorbed as a girl. “Romanticize. Otherwise it all seems gross. Fucking,” she clarified. There had been a time when she wouldn’t have used the word, but the counterculture had changed that. Phyllis liked the faux-pauvre costumes of the young, their lack of makeup, their attachment to radical causes, their theoretical bent and belief in contentious discourse; it felt like home to her, something she had been part of before E-O Data had brought her to middlebrow Middle Falls. “Not that you needed much romanticizing; you’re an attractive man, Owen.”

“Now you tell me.”

“I told you from the start, the best I could. I can’t gush the way Faye does. Attractive, and she took you for rich, too.”

“If she did, she was wrong. The new version of DigitEyes is selling very slowly. Sketchpad, out of the Lincoln Lab, has taken away market share. Also Ed is worried about this new minicomputer DEC is putting out for only eighteen thousand, the PDP-8. Everybody can own one and the market for standardized programs will take off. Contract programming like we do will become obsolete.” With their marriage revealed as an abyss beneath them, he was happy to shift their ground to technology. She was, too, for a few moments.