“Sure. Didn’t know you had one,” Owen said, hurrying into his salad of chickpeas and bow-tie pasta, to catch up after talking too much. The little room he had in mind, an old watchmen’s locker room with one little metal-framed window too high to look out of and a row of battered green lockers, locks long gone, was at the head of steel-and-cement stairs that descended down to a door that opened onto a disused sidewalk leading toward the permanently locked pedestrian bridge across the river. In the days of the old arms factory, a workforce on foot crossed the river from the region of row houses. The door, sheathed in metal painted red to match the bricks, was never used but was kept unlocked in daytime, as an emergency fire exit. Owen would use it, unseen. The door, the stairs, the private room appeared in his mind in luminous vectorized form, the whole projection turning as if he were passing through it, the geometric shapes transforming as the underlying mathematics determined.

“I’m getting married,” Ed announced.

A mass of pulped chickpeas found resistance in Owen’s throat. He chased it down with a sip of water and brought out, “That’s great. High time. Who to? Do I know her?”

“I hope you don’t, you lech,” said Ed, for the second time offending Owen’s strict sense of sexual propriety. “She’s eight years younger than me, nine years than you—just a kid, O. An innocent kid. Have a heart.”

Owen felt a pang. Phyllis was a year older. Maybe that was their trouble, simple biology: the man should dominate. He never had. Ed had a lovely patience, to wait till he could marry so much younger. “We met at a conference,” he was explaining, “that thing in Seattle, remember I went last year? On integrated circuits. Stacey’s a rep for Texas Instruments.”

“Integrated circuits,” Owen said, to show he was following. He had never thought of Ed as marriageable, which was silly. Almost everybody is, the way Nature has set it up, with its usual tremendous margin for error.

“Yeah, and what to do with such tiny ICs. Last year TI brought out a hearing aid. Next year they’re marketing a desk calculator that weighs less than a chicken. She tells me this as if everybody knows what a chicken weighs.”

“Is she a Texan?” Why do I feel so betrayed? Owen asked himself. What do I care if Ed is married?

He had counted on Ed to remain loyal to the business, so his own attention could wander to higher or lower things. He needed to know about life. “Not so’s you’d notice,” Ed answered. “Her folks are really from the West Coast; her dad worked for Grumman. She says ‘my daddy.’ They moved to Dallas when Stacey was nine. She picked up the accent, but, more important, the attitude.”

“The Texas attitude.”