At work, too, he tried to rededicate himself, patiently stringing together those long but finite binary chains, those rickety scaffolds of contingency, that, once debugged, gave companies in an electronic twinkling the information that used to be pieced together from typed or handwritten files. It was like knitting: a single mis-stitch necessitated tearing up dozens of rows of code, yet whole patches of previously perfected subroutines could be crocheted into a fresh customized design. Except for strokes of ingenuity, of logical lumping and short-cutting, which only another programmer could appreciate, his work felt trivial; the kind of data-processing he was making possible on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar mainframe could have been carried forward, in most company systems, on punched cards, more clumsily and slowly yet with no qualitative difference. Number-crunching, it was called, with an affection that yet dramatized its basic drudgery.

“Ed,” Owen asked his partner one day at lunch, “doesn’t there have to be a next thing?” Once a week they tried to share lunch, just the two of them, since the success of the company, its multiplication of projects and employees, came more and more between them, as if the hyphen in E-O was implacably lengthening. The restaurant was the least crummy of the three eateries left along River Street. The downtown had been struggling for years. Empty stores were rented, newly tricked out as boutiques or arty stationers or educational-toy stores and, after a spurt of customer curiosity, slowly failed, and were empty again, with butcher paper taped across their windows. The Ugly Duckling had a swan on its signboard. Only the two back windows overlooked the river, but the mock-tavern decor—dark-stained oak beams, rough-hewn maple tables, waitresses with frilled aprons over their blue jeans—was cozy and acoustically merciful. The meat-and-potatoes menu was being infiltrated by pasta salads and macrobiotic soups; nevertheless, Ed ordered a Reuben thick with cheese and fatty pastrami, and fries and a Heineken. He had added twenty pounds since his days at IBM. Entrepreneurial success and pricier clothes gave his bulk authority. The front man with their corporate clients, he had taken to wearing suits, with a shirt and tie; Owen remained loyal to the ’fifties student garb of khakis and soft flannel shirt, augmented in winter with a down vest. He had lost five pounds in the affair with Faye and its painful aftermath, and had worked to keep it off, vain of his newly wiry figure. He felt nimbler now, more dangerous. He had taken to black turtlenecks, and joined an indoor tennis club in Upper Falls. As longer hair became permissible for men, his own showed a bounce and a tendency to curl.

“You’re talking what?” Ed asked. “Private life? You did the next thing already.”