Owen spotted Antoinette working the booth for Cray Research, a new company for high-performance computers up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She had black hair that looked hurriedly cut by a child’s plastic scissors, and an electric aura of grievance that boded well. He homed in on her at the boozy reception hosted by the city’s newly created Association of Electronic Industries. Very quickly, it seemed to him, she was confiding to him a tirade against a fellow employee, slightly her superior, an “asshole” whose “shit” she was tired of putting up with. The words made squeamish Owen wince, but there was a promise of intimacy in them. He curbed his repugnance, telling himself that this was a passionate woman, who lived like him in a small-town Falls, and that they were thrown together in the heart of this great, free country. They went on from the reception to a celebrated steakhouse a cab ride away. Her tale continued: “This absolute, stuck-on-himself shit, Eric by name—and can’t you just bet that anybody called Eric is going to be stuck on himself?—kept dumping on me in these subtle ways that nobody could fault him for but that I could certainly sense, saying these bogus-polite things like ‘I’ll let you’ and ‘Would you be an angel’ and yatata-yatata, when what was involved was literally all night going over the machine code, matching it number by number against a master, twenty-plus pages of dot-matrix with hardly any ink on the ribbon, it’s a wonder I didn’t go blind. And in the morning, you know what the peckerhead did?”

“No, what?” said Owen, nursing his second beer, which he hoped might dilute two stiff bourbons at the reception, in case he would have eventually to perform. He was learning to pace himself in these matters, on the principle of deferred gratification.

“He said, ‘Thanks—thanks, Antoinette’—that was all the scumbag said, taking the printout I’d marked up, number by number, circling the possible bugs, it killed my eyes, I need to get a new prescription and I bet that’s the reason. ‘Thanks,’ he had the nerve to simply say to me, ‘you’re a dear,’ and put it on the other papers on his desk as if it was the merest little five-minute favor in the world, knowing fucking damn well I’d been up all night.”

“That does seem rude,” Owen said, his brain beginning to feel puffy, lifting him up out of guilt and the worry that Phyllis was telephoning his hotel.