“No,” he said, relaxed again into being a husband, “E-O has younger people for the nitty-gritty, the coding and debugging, it comes like second nature to them; they don’t know there was ever a time before FORTRAN and COBOL. My task is more to dream, to dream big. I have my theories. I think graphics is the way into a huge market. If you can find a way around all these line commands that have to be memorized, and use simple intuitive images as the interface, everybody can use them. You can have games.”

“Do people really need,” Phyllis asked, looking over her shoulder as she left the room, “even more ways to waste their time?”

The Dunhams had a family lawyer, and Jock for a while talked about suing Owen for alienation of affections, or making the Mackenzies move out of town, but they produced a lawyer of their own, and in the end the most desirable thing seemed to be for the Dunhams to sell that rambling place with its veranda and move closer to the city, to Norwalk or Wilton, where the schools would be better for the children, and Jock would be closer to where the Dunham money was managed over three-martini lunches, and Faye was fifty minutes away from Manhattan’s stores and shows and display cases. Owen thought of her striding through the city he had left five years ago, sinking happily into its glitter, and felt a jealous relief. He would always love her, she was his one fling into the dreamland of sexual happiness, but it had not been practical, and it gave him a metallic taste in his mouth, a touch of dread, to know that he had intervened in the lives of others, dislocating them, causing something as serious as a change of address and a change of schools for the two bewildered, delicate Dunham children. Marrying Phyllis had occurred under the supervision of adults; engendering his own children—a blunt intervention in the world’s statistics—had occurred under her supervision. But fucking Faye had been his idea, or an idea of hers that he had readily adopted, alone with her beneath the square sky that day, with the crows, and the bed of soft grass behind the holy rock.