“Where is she now?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Emily.
“Where are you now?”
“In bed with my computer. I have to get up.”
“No, don’t,” he said. “Stay there.”
“It’s getting late.”
“I left Oskar’s meeting,” he blurted out.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” He had nothing to confess except a brief opportunistic impulse, and he was not about to upset her by admitting that. The uneasiness he felt required reassurance, not expiation. Perhaps his logic was circular. He followed the circuit nonetheless: He needed Emily to believe in him so that he could believe in himself. Because of this, he did not always tell the whole story about himself, or even about ISIS. That night, when she had pressed him to explain what was wrong with Lockbox, he had lied to her, glossing over the structural problems Orion had discovered, insisting Orion broke the system by willfully abusing code. He lied now, as well. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“You’re not happy.”
“I am happy,” he contradicted. “We’ve got Yahoo!”
“I know, but—”
He interrupted, “I miss your voice.”
“Just my voice?”
“Not just your voice.”
“You have my voice,” she pointed out.
He pulled down the shades. “Keep talking. I’ll imagine the rest.”
“I’m in your arms,” she whispered. “I’m kissing you and I can taste the coffee on your tongue.”
“And then what?”
“Then what! You tell me.”
“I’m kissing your neck,” he said. “My hands are around your waist. I’m lifting up your nightgown.” He closed his eyes, imagining her slender neck, her skin, her breasts. “Take off your nightgown.”
She was quiet.
“Are you?” he whispered after a moment.
She hesitated, and then said, “Yes.”
And he was with her, and he began to forget the meeting. “Please,” he urged her.
“Will you?”
“Yes,” he breathed, and he was not upset anymore. His company was going public within the week. He’d celebrate with her; he could hear her even now. He felt almost, on the verge, soon to be intensely happy. He was no longer lying. What were lies, anyway? Only futures waiting to come true.
14
Harvard Square glowed with artificial candlelight. Damp air misted the glass doors of Brattle Street Florist with its potted azaleas and glossy-leaved gardenias. Cardullo’s stocked Dutch licorice and Belgian chocolate, Bendicks mints, Walkers shortbread, Turkish delight. Every shop tempted with earrings and antiquities, evergreens and crimson KitchenAids. But the millennium’s end was not altogether jolly. The hungry still hungered, addicts scratched and stole. The season had its somber rites, exams and funerals. Hushed students filed into Houghton Library to view the manuscript of “Ode to Autumn” and puzzle at its wailful choir of loss and consolation.
The market dipped and rose, and rose again, and some speculated that the new economy had limits. It was popular to say, even without believing, that this time might never come again, that it was late in the day. Some said the markets had already peaked, and Wall Street wizards agreed that timing was everything. Therefore, ISIS celebrated its December IPO with equal parts relief and trepidation.
Orion noticed that where there had been banter about boats and cars, bikes and ultralights, now the talk was strictly options and derivatives, wills and trusts. Dave instituted wealth seminars. Lawyers arrived from Hale and Dorr, and consultants visited to discuss charitable giving.
Programmers ridiculed the seminars, but they attended anyway in small groups, gathering in the glass- walled conference room to hear account managers from Goldman Sachs hold forth in suits of navy so dark the color could not exist in nature, except possibly in the deepest ocean, where giant squid inked out their predators. These reps from Goldman were all named Josh and Ethan, and they arrived bright-eyed, cuff-linked, trussed in ties of burgundy, and they were thrilled to answer every question, psyched to help out in any way possible, and honestly happy to talk whenever, because most of all they were about having fun and learning and teamwork and making dreams happen—not just short term, but long term, which was very much what they perceived ISIS to be about. They loved innovation, said Ethan. They lived for flexibility, said Josh. When the lockup ended, they couldn’t wait to innovate with everybody in the company. They worked with your lawyer and your accountant and your bank, but when it came to strategy, they said, Picture, if you will, myself and my colleagues as the quarterbacks of your team. This above all: They loved to communicate. Communication was the key, as in life, because at the end of the day, it was relationships that mattered. It was all about trust—just knowing that your team was there. Bottom line, that’s who they were in private-wealth management—your team, when you were worth ten million or more.
In one of these seminars, especially for the Lockbox group, Orion glanced at Sorel and saw that she was scribbling studiously, or maybe sketching. He leaned past Clarence to look, and she saw him and smiled.
Gradually, without discussions or apologies, the awkwardness between them had subsided. Their night together, or rather their all-nighter, seemed less embarrassing in retrospect, and slowly, over weeks and months, Orion had begun to cultivate Sorel’s friendship. At first he tried the smallest gestures, a glance, a word. The briefest exchanges.
“Nice snowstorm.”
“Lovely, if you like that kind of thing.”
He sent her lines of particularly bad code from the new Lockbox system:
Did you see? Orion typed.
Worst ever, Sorel replied.
Trying to solve from back to front.
Might not be possible.
Fundamental flaws?
Yeah.
Cracks in foundation?
Worse than that.
Shaky ground?
ORIGINAL SIN.
A rationing of interactions until they spoke easily again. That was Orion’s major goal these days at ISIS. He had refused an executive position, and he had no project to administer.
“Can I see?” he asked her after Josh and Ethan had distributed their heavy white business cards, and taken their leave.
“It’s nothing.” She showed him the sketch.
“They look like gangsters.” He drew his swivel chair a little closer.
“You think?” She’d turned her notebook so that the faint green lines on the page ran vertical, like pinstripes, and then she’d drawn the pair of financial advisors as suits with dollar signs for eyes.
“You could add guns.”
She looked skeptically at her drawing. “Could do. But I like to keep my sketches subtle. Either dollar signs
“Cancel the guns,” Orion said.
