doorway. Can you find me if I go to a table?”
“Sure.”
That gave her a chance to pick a dark corner of the room and claim it while she waited. She sat down at a table and blew out the candle.
The arrangement she had made held its own dangers for her. She knew nothing about this man, but she had grown up in a world that included date-rape drugs like GHB and Rohypnol, so watching her drink was a reflex. She saw the bartender ice a martini glass, pour vodka and vermouth in the silver shaker, fill the glass. She kept her eye on both of her new man’s hands as he held the two drinks level and made his way through the crowd to her.
When he sat down at the small table she had chosen, she gave him another expert smile before she accepted her drink and took a sip. She felt the bright, icy liquid travel down her throat, and then a sudden glow as it reached her stomach. She had always imagined that reaction as small magic, a sudden warmth that exploded under her heart and spread outward to her toes and fingertips.
She looked over the rim of the glass at the crowd around her. This was the first time she had dared come out to a nightspot since she had been in Portland. There was always a chance that somebody in a bar would have seen a picture of her on television and be able to spot her even with her new light hair and different makeup. But this was a very dark bar, she was in the darkest corner, and the rest of the people here were fully engaged in trying to pick each other up. “Thank you very much,” she said.
“You’re welcome. I’m Greg. And what’s your name?”
“Judy,” she said. “This is a really good martini.”
It was enough to trigger his prepared sequence of small talk. He said, “I haven’t seen you here. Have you been here before? Were you brought up in Portland? I was. What do you do? I design software. Where did you go to college? Are you dating anybody?” with such relentless rapidity that it was like a series of combination punches he had practiced so there would never be a moment of awkward silence.
Judith Nathan needed to help him avoid the silences, so she answered each question, some of them as though she were blocking or diverting his blows, but others more carefully. She said, “I’m not working right now. I’m going to be an entrepreneur, but I haven’t figured out the best business to be in right now. It’s a tricky economy.”
“What have you done before?” he asked.
“I’ve tried a couple of things, but I haven’t hit the right one yet. I tried starting a magazine, and I wanted to do a gift-buying service for men but couldn’t get funding. If you’ve got any surefire ideas you’d like to share, I’d be delighted to hear them.”
She also answered the one about college. She said, “I went to school in the East, at Boston University. I was only there for about three years, and then I left.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Fatal pragmatism.”
“What’s fatal pragmatism?”
“I was out alone like this. And I met a man.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I was being nosy.”
“Don’t be sorry. There’s nothing mysterious. He was older. He had some money. I just compared what I was doing—being snubbed by snotty girls in the dorm and writing term papers—with what he was doing. His life was better, so I decided to do what he was doing.”
“What happened? Did you get married?”
“No. We broke up and I moved on.”
She had him within the first two minutes. Because he was shy, she was saying enough to make it clear that having a relationship with a man she met like this had a precedent. But in order to build on her progress she had to help him win himself over. He had to feel that when he was with her he could be smart and attractive.
She said, “What is it like to be a software designer?”
“I like it a lot, but it’s probably boring to other people.”
“That’s perfect job security,” she said. “If it looked like fun, everybody would be doing it.”
“I guess that’s true,” he said. She could see he was beginning to trust her enough to forget his fear of seeming dull and foolish. He said, “It’s actually a lot more exciting than it looks. The code we write is moving to the edge, and changing a lot of things fast.”
“You mean things in people’s lives?”
“Sometimes. Okay. You’ve got all these machines already, with incredible capacity. Every two years the next chip doubles the speed of the machine, and the minute you have a new machine you can make a hundred million of them. The competition, the hard part, is that somebody has to think up the killer application and then write code to make a computer do it. It’s like—” He paused. “I don’t know, because the second I say it, somebody’s already doing it. Say you want to control your house with your cell phone.”
“Control my house? Why?”
“Just say you do. Set the temperature, lock and unlock doors, turn lights and appliances on and off, take a look to see what the dog is doing, set the alarm. There’s not a bit of new technology involved. It’s all a lot of simple operations using pieces of equipment we already have. But somebody has to design a new chip for the cell phone and program it both to send intelligible signals to a phone receiver in the house with a chip that would serve as a switcher, and to receive messages to tell it the status of each of the appliances. You can’t change the thermostat if you don’t know what the temperature is.”
“That’s what you do?”
“It’s a dumb example, but that’s the general idea. What we do is a lot more complicated than that. Most of it has to do with defense.”
“But that’s really exciting. That kind of thinking extends the range of things a person can do. It makes us stronger and smarter. Is that what you meant by being on the edge?”
“What I think of as the edge is the next step—moving into code that’s computer generated.”
“That’s the next step?”
“For me it is. That’s what I work on. The idea is that the computer gets designed and programmed to recognize the points in the world around it where there could be an application. It will say, ‘You’re doing this task this way. Why not do it a different way and save a step?’ Or ‘Can you combine this task and that task?’ See? It’s computers suggesting their own applications.”
“What a great idea.” She had him. He was absolutely hers now, a possession like a pair of shoes or a car.
He said, “Then once you have this machine analyzing your operations for things to do, you give it the capacity to write code. Computers do most operations faster than we can, and they have digital memories that are theoretically unlimited. We could have the computer see and analyze a task, go into its memory or online to find existing programming that can accomplish the task, customize it in a second or two, and do the task.”
“That would put you out of business, wouldn’t it?” she said.
Greg was delighted, intoxicated with the unfamiliar pleasure of having an attractive woman listen to what he was saying. “It will put us out of one part of the business—the dull part, where you’re just writing derivative code, testing, finding bugs, and making patches—and into a hundred others.”
“Wow,” said Judith Nathan. “I envy you so much. You’re working on such exciting things. You must jump out of bed in the morning and run to work.”
He said, “I do run to work.” He had finished his scotch, but he didn’t notice it until he picked the glass up, put it to his mouth, and had the ice clink against his teeth. “I think we need another drink, don’t you?”
She looked at her martini judiciously. “I don’t usually have more than one of these, but I don’t usually have anybody interesting to talk to. Okay.”
She watched him bring two more drinks to the table. He drank his while they talked, but Judith Nathan simply brought hers up to wet her lips now and then.
She manufactured a special evening for Greg. What he said was brilliant, because she was impressed by it. When he tried to say something mildly witty, it was hilarious, because she laughed at it. He became physically attractive, because she focused her attention on the parts of himself he was proud of. When she laughed, she touched his biceps or leaned on his shoulder. When he spoke she stared directly into his eyes, never letting him remember that she must have noticed his rough, pitted skin.
