“Really? That’s not what Ed tells me. He says the more people own computers the better for the software business all around. And anyway Faye didn’t know any of that. She wanted you for a husband, darling, like one of her cute new costumes. It’s the tragedy of women, isn’t it? The only thing we can trade on is fucking, and with the Pill now the price has gone way down.”

“Please, stop talking so tough. It isn’t you.”

“I thought you liked women tough. Or at least crass. It is me, Owen. It’s what you’ve made me, with this sleazy town of exurban misfits and this grotesque infatuation with Faye. First I had to put up with your deceit, and now with all your adolescent post-facto mooning. My mother was right: you weren’t for me. You were too much of a boy. My father was the one who liked you, though I never heard the two of you exchange more than six words. After scuttling Hank, I suppose he felt he owed me one.”

Color had risen to her cheeks, through her throat; her level eyes, silvery in some lights, flared in rare indignation. He suppressed an admiring snicker: Phyllis had a lonely talent for seeing through things, to their bleak bones. Poor Faye, yes, she had told him to be practical, and had given him what lessons she could, but now her practical value to him was as a conquest, a badge he could wear in their little local society, where sex was less and less a household secret. True, he ached in her absence, but having her day after day would have brought with it daily life and its tedium, and sickly children with half of Jock’s genes, and a wife who thought half like Jock. “How could I marry her?” Owen asked his wife, plaintively, anxious to discuss this with somebody impartial. “I have four children, the youngest a year old!”

Phyllis told him, “That wouldn’t have stopped some men. She saw you as reckless, Owen, because you’re creative, but in fact you’re very self-protective, very Pennsylvania-Dutch one-step-at-a-time. She rushed you, and you hate being rushed.”

He took these observations for compliments, or at least for knowledgeable attention, and said with pleased sulkiness, “Ed says the trouble with programming is it’s been too creative. The need now, with the basics in place and all these new chips piling up hardware capability, is to make it less of an art and more of an engineering discipline.”

“Does that scare you?” Phyllis asked him, ever a wife. In spite of the domestic horrors of the spring—scandal, possible breakup—she had found time to sunbathe in their big back yard, down by the lily pond with its rebuilt bridge, and the tip of her nose was pink.