by Ellen Ullman
The elevator opened to a small vestibule with a single door. I knocked. Mr. Charles himself opened the door.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.
“Come in, come in,” he fussed, “but I don’t know how much use I’ll be.”
The entrance opened into a large living room, maybe forty feet long and twenty wide. The floor was old parquet. The furniture, like the building, was of another era. Crystal sconces, smoked mirrors, paneled walls and ceiling—all the fancy stuff of the twenties, that great time for the wealthy before big income taxes. I could see an adjoining dining room, entirely paneled in polished oak. Off the living room was a glassed-in porch, a protected balcony from which Mr. and Mrs. Charles could overlook the world. The city rolled away beneath us. The bay curved from northwest to southeast. Beyond were the hills of Marin. And there were the bridges: to the east the Bay Bridge; to the north the orange span of the Golden Gate.
“What a wonderful view!” I said, as Mr. Charles settled us in the porch, with its old rattan and wicker furniture. “Is the building from the twenties?”
“Exactly,” said John Charles. “This apartment was originally built by a Frenchman. All the brass on the doors”—he indicated the sun-porch doors and the entrances to other rooms—“was cast in Paris and shipped to San Francisco for assembly.”
John Charles was the whitest man I had ever met. Then in his late sixties or early seventies, he was trim and white-haired, his hair combed back from a still-handsome face. His shirt was unbuttoned two buttons, showing an able chest for a man his age. He looked like David Niven with a few years on him. I could easily imagine Mr. Charles on safari in Africa, posing by a kill with pith helmet and rifle. But there was no sign of big game, only the wicker furniture, which—weathered and worn in the way only very expensive things can be—might have been carried off from some place called “Raffles.”
I asked about his life, about which he was circumspect, and finally got to the questions that had brought me there.
“These men you advise—what do you think drives them? It has to be more than money; they already have a lot of money. What is it—what is it inside them?”
Mr. Charles seemed confused. “Do you want me to examine their psychologies?”
“Yes. If you can. The best you can. What motivates them?”
He thought a minute. “Well, I suppose it’s that they want to see their companies grow.”
“But why keep growing?” I asked. “Can’t someone simply enjoy a good living, a nice life?”
Mr. Charles looked away, moving his mouth in a gesture that could only have been distaste. “It’s boring,” he said finally. “It’s simply not interesting to do the same thing with your company year after year. I won’t work with someone who doesn’t want to grow.”
“But many people find pleasure in other parts of life, don’t they? What do you think it is about these CEOs you work with? What kind of person looks for all his satisfactions in growing a company? Any why—why do that instead of, I don’t know, getting a Ph.D. or learning French?”
Again Mr. Charles looked away.
“It can’t just be the money,” I pressed.
“Well, it might be that they have what they think is a good idea … .” He trailed off then sat looking at his hands, which were fine-boned and pale.
But there are many ways to express a good idea, I thought. One could talk to people, give a speech, write an article, perhaps a book. But it was clear these were not the sort of good ideas he had in mind. No, his were the sorts of ideas whose goodness could be expressed only through the amount of revenue they generated, the size of the company that was grown, the grandeur of the CEO’s house, the price of the stock.
“So it is the money,” I said finally.
The whitest man I ever met looked into his lap then gazed out the window. On the other side of the French doors edged in bronze from Paris, the sky was the bright, deep blue of early autumn in San Francisco. The two bridges stood against a sparkling bay. The searchlight of Alcatraz blinked rhythmically against the water. Toward the northwest, a tanker was slowly sliding out the Gate, about to pass under the bridge on its long ride west to Japan.
The networking-software company lingered on for a while. After a hiatus of two weeks, I was called back to work. The idea was that, if we finished the product, the company might be easier to sell. Maybe some other venture capitalists would be willing to invest in it for a while.
The sales and finance people—the current office occupants—had a dejected and distracted air about them. They didn’t have much to do except sit around and worry. Not so for the programmers. The engineers continued working their endless days and long weeks. The lead engineer went on sitting in his charged way in his cubicle, his knees opening and closing, opening and closing.
A merry kind of hysteria took over the programmers. The situation was impossible, the deadline was ridiculous, they should have been completely demoralized. But, somehow, the absurdity of it all simply released them from the reality that was so depressing the rest of the company. They played silly jokes on one another. They stayed up late to see who could finish their code first. The very impossibility of success seemed to make the process of building software only that much sweeter.
The lead engineer wanted me to come in every day to see their progress. “Look,” he said, “you just select the device and drag it over to the location tree—”
“—and boom!” said another programmer, “It updates. Just like in your specs.”
“And the database is updated?” I asked.
“Done!” said the lead.
“And the multiple add,” said a third programmer, a young Chinese woman who looked exhausted but who was clearly having the time of her life, “look at this.” She typed in a few parameters and the screen filled with information as the program cranked away.
“Does it crash?” I asked.
“Only a little,” she said.
“Twice yesterday,” said the second programmer.
“No,” said the lead, “once. Only once!”
They arranged a demonstration of their work for the entire company. They put out cake, ice cream, champagne. The worried sales and finance people did their best to be impressed.
In the middle of the demo, I realized how fortunate we were to be engineers. How lucky for us to be people who built things and took our satisfactions from humming machines and running programs. We certainly wouldn’t mind if the company went public and we all got fabulously rich. But the important thing was right in front of us. We had started with some scratchings on a whiteboard and built this: this operational program, this functional thing.
“And look,” said the lead, demonstrating his handiwork, “You just click here, drag here, and click here—”
“And it works,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, exhaling the word in a long breath of contentment, then standing back, exultant. “Yeah, it works.”
[8] THE PASSIONATE ENGINEER
I SAW BRIAN AGAIN.
It was my doing—I sought him out—though there wasn’t any good reason for me to do it. We hadn’t tried to contact each other. And I knew, through various intermediaries, that there was indeed a woman in his life. He and this woman had an odd, open relationship that had gone on for years, which I told myself was fine: I didn’t want that sort of thing with Brian.
I sent him e-mail. Talks on the phone with Brian tended to be short and awkward, so e-mail was my preferred way of reaching him. But there was a network problem. My mail kept bouncing back at me, undelivered.
I was reduced to calling him. It was strange, but the words that had seemed properly cool in e-mail seemed too forward, made me feel too exposed, once Brian was breathing on the other end of the line. So I stupidly read him the e-mail message, verbatim, envelope included. “To: [email protected], From: [email protected], Subject: Saturday? Data: I thought it might be nice to see each other sometime when we didn’t have to get up and go to work.
How about Saturday? Quit.”
Moment of dead air. Then: “Saturday? What’s today? Monday? Tuesday?”
“Monday.”
“I’m sure I’ll have some time in the week. But I don’t know about Saturday. I’ll call you.”
“Well, let me know by—”
“Yeah. I’ll call you.”
And we hung up.
But he didn’t call. Not Tuesday or Wednesday or the next day. Not until noon on Saturday.
“I made other plans,” I told him.
“I figured you would,” he said.
It was impossible to know exactly what this statement meant. Was he more impressed with me for not having waited around? I think he saw me as fearlessly independent, not much caring whether I saw him or not. He probably would have been hugely disappointed if I had not gone off and made my own plans. This idea of me he had—of this free spirit, this mature woman who took what she wanted and dropped what she didn’t—was wrong, but it wasn’t his fault. He had seen me coming and going at the conference with my several elsewheres. I’d invited him out exactly this once. Otherwise, I hadn’t exactly chased him. So it shouldn’t have surprised me if he had a mistaken image of me: it was, after all, the exact image I’d wanted him to have.
“You know, Brian, we don’t have to do this.”
“No, no. Let’s go out.”
“When?”
Pause. “Saturday. Next Saturday.”
“If you’re—”
“Yeah. I won’t blow it this time.”
We went to a movie. He held my hand all through the show. Afterwards he waited for me outside the ladies’ room. When I walked back out into the lobby, there was Brian leaning against a wall, with all the other boyfriends. I felt strangely pleased at the sight of him, at his high-schoolish, date-night good manners. It wasn’t nostalgia—I had been a sullen, rebellious girl who drove off any boy who tried to get within a foot of me. No, it wasn’t memory but the brief idea of some other life entirely. As he put his arm around me to make our way out, I had time to regret the morose young woman I’d been; to wish I had let a few more boys into my life to hold my hand at the movies and wait for me outside the ladies’.
What happened next was a mistake. Instead of just taking him home, I suggested a wine bar, one of my haunts. The place was sleek, the clientele dressy, the wine expensive. And there sat Brian, cowboy hat in lap. “Do they have peppermint tea?” he asked.
Maybe it was the stark reality of how mismatched we were. Maybe it was the political argument we stumbled into, where Brian showed off his cold, “moral-less” side. Maybe I had a subliminal understanding that if Brian and I reached each other again through whatever that physical thing was between us, I would only want more and more again, and that would be impossible. But when we finally did get back to my loft, and we were at last to get to the one thing that connected us, I drew back. Or my body did. One moment I was there with Brian, I was present in the all-there way that had drawn me back to him, and the next, I felt my body slide out from under me and disappear, like a fish swimming away into dark water.
“I think you’re becoming real,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“Not just someone to sleep with.”
I heard him sigh in the uh-oh sort of way men do. “Well, there are complications in my life I need to tell you about,” he said. “But I’m too tired right now. I’ll tell you all about it in the morning.”
Whereupon he fell asleep.
I did not fall asleep. I knew instantly he’d misunderstood me. He probably thought the next thing I’d say would be a declaration of love, the desire for commitment, and so forth—all the messy business of relationship that usually brings on the uh-oh response. But I had explained myself badly. “Real” at that moment did not mean his realness so much as my own: I was suddenly tired of playing the sexual buccaneer.
I had a long night to consider why this was true. The steeply pitched ceiling sent the reflections of headlights circling overhead, and I watched the lights fly around as I roamed through my past. I could no longer count the number of lovers I’d had. I could only remember the time when, with great surprise, I’d realized that the number of men and women had become about equal. After that, I’d let go of the ordinals, the list of names, in sequence, and what remained was a flickering serial memory of making love, and the constant amazement at how different it was with every single person.
It seemed to me I had taken lovers rather freely, without a lot of assurances or negotiations. I’d had three long-term relationships, marriages in essence. But I didn’t need to marry everyone; not everyone had to fit into the whole of my life. I remembered one lover in particular, a man I would go off to visit whenever it occurred to me to see him. I never called first. I’d just show up and knock on his door. He could be there or not; he could be busy or not. If he was there and available, I’d stay. We would make love, go the movies, make love some more then sleep a little. In the morning, he’d make me strong coffee and rich scrambled eggs. We’d talk for a couple of hours. Then I’d leave. Between times, I never wondered what else he was doing. When we wanted to talk about our love interests, we did; when we didn’t want to mention it, we didn’t. This went on for years.
The deep friendliness of that old relationship—and its unnegotiated intimacy, most especially—became something of an icon for me. I wondered if I would ever find anything like it again. So here was my chance, yes? Why not with Brian? The traffic noise seemed too loud for that hour of the morning. I watched the reflections of headlights run up the walls, circle the ceiling, collide. Why not with Brian?
I conjured up the face of my old lover. I saw his body, his bed, the look of his kitchen, the way he brewed coffee by boiling the grounds. I remembered coming back from the movies then making popcorn and lazily watching another movie on the television while we talked. There it was: we talked to each other for hours. Our time together had a leisurely spaciousness in which he came to know me, and I him. All that knowing each other was what made possible our “open” relationship. Besides, we never called it that. We didn’t intend anything; it was simply the unexpected place we came to with each other.
But Brian, I knew, started out with an idea: this will go only so far and no farther. We started out on a road that already had its dead end. What could be the point of such a relationship? It would be too much like a virtual reality, where things only seemed unpredictable and possible. Why bother with all the difficulty of another person if it could not go somewhere unexpected?
It seemed to me that my life was already too full of unconnected bits. Contracts that came and went. Companies founded and dissolved. Programs downloaded from the Internet, tried out, discarded. Intense moments with colleagues who then disappeared. Calls to names at 800 numbers who were usually gone if you asked for them again. I had stopped expecting much, I saw. It was too easy to live in these discrete, free-roaming capsules, a life like particles from an atom smasher, exploding into spectacular existence—for an instant—then gone.
I looked over at the sleeping Brian. And I felt sorry for both of us. We weren’t very brave. Surely we were missing something essential if our idea of other people was a program downloaded from the Internet.
Before I finally fell asleep, I remembered a conversation I’d had with an old friend, the one who recruited me into the communist party. We had both been pretty wild in our youth. I used to kid her that she’d slept with everybody—and she practically had. “How did we do it?” I asked her. “How did have so many lovers? And how did we go so blithely from one to the next?”
“You have it wrong,” she said. “We weren’t blithe. We suffered. We fell in love with all of them.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I remember now.”
In the morning, while we were still in bed, Brian told me about the woman he called his “main girlfriend.” It all seemed reasonable enough. They had been together for four years. They didn’t live together. They took othe
r lovers. “I need a lot of psychic distance from her,” he said.
I’d known about the girlfriend. But where did I fit in?
“And the others?” I asked. “Where are they?”
He looked at his feet. “They’re more … casual,” he said.
Casual. He might have said almost anything else—they’re all different, they’re important in particular ways, who knows what someone will be. But casual … . I felt myself float off and away from him. Whatever hold his sweet and unsweet sides had on me dissolved in that instant. It was like a sleeping foot coming back to life: first some pin sticks, then a little pain, then normal feeling again.
“You know, Brian, this isn’t exactly my scene. I think we should stop sleeping with each other.”
He seemed to be expecting this. “Okay. But I’d still like to see you.”
How would we reach each other if we didn’t have sex? But saying yes seemed to be the thing to do. “Sure. If it will be all right with you that we don’t sleep together.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said with little laugh, “I have years of experience being celibate. I learned to control myself.”
Months later, I learned just how many years Brian had spent controlling himself. How little experience he’d had with women, casual or not. How all his “polyamory” stuff was underway but still more notion than history. It was just as I’d suspected the first night I spent with him: he’d been with himself too long. Even his working life was mostly fantasy. His company never did set up an offshore porn server. It did not control the secret paths of a Web click. There was no bank in the Caribbean. I have no doubt that one day some of Brian’s schemes will become awfully real. But, just then, they were still the amoral dreamings of a young man who was too smart and too isolated for his own good.