Chapter 12

"Oh-h no," said Wendy. "You’re not going to squeeze me into some dress for your profit margin, you drug-dealing little hobbit."

We had all just flown into San Francisco for the MultiMediaWorld trade show, and everybody was jet lagged and pissy.

Sascha frowned. "I do not deal. I distribute to my loved ones. Anyway, don’t weasel out of this, Wendy. I’m serious. Just buy one dress, or a skirt, or something. Anything you want, just as long as it doesn’t have Indian prints on it. I’ll pay for your outfit. Seriously. Go to Macy’s, pick something out that you like, and be back in an hour. Here’s my credit card."

"Excuse me? Did I just hear you trying to buy me off for the nth time in our acquaintance? My husband’s credit is just as good as yours, thank you. Do you want to pay for a babysitter while I’m gone? Or maybe a wetnurse?" Wendy ostentatiously lifted her T-shirt so that all of us could see her breasts before she brought a whining Starchild to them.

(I knew this was actually an act; she had just told me on the plane ride over that Starchild had too many damn teeth and she was sick of being someone else’s Thermos. The kid, she said, would be weaned by the end of the week, starting now.)

"Wendy, look, Sascha has a point," said Jonathan, patiently. "It’s not a big deal. I know it’s sexist and gross, but you don’t have to wear makeup or anything. Sara’s doing it..."

"Sara is a corporate drone in recovery," sneered Wendy. "She’s so brainwashed she’d probably bind her feet if her boss asked her to. Except that her boss is her husband, and he might have weirder requests than that, tee hee."

Sascha was begging Wendy and me to be Deus Ex Machina’s booth bimbos---the women who lure male prospects into a booth or demo at a trade show. Traditionally, I heard, these women looked like stewardesses, in that sort of suited, potentially whorish way, and they were a proven gimmick for getting lonely nerds into the buying action. These days, though, with more women, and many more ordinary, short-haired men in suits, attending trade shows, the bimbo schtick wasn’t as sure-fire effective as it had been in the glory days. But two wholesome women who were computer-savvy (although one of them was still faking madly, exam-cramming as the plane bounced over the Rockies) and approachable, according to Sascha, would bring everyone in: the hackers, the women, and the wonks.

I started looking around for an escape route. "I wonder if there’s a swimming pool in the hotel," I said nervously.

"Fuck yer swimming pool," said Wendy. "Do you want to come to Macy’s with me, or do you want to stay with the kid? I think she needs a diaper change."

*

This was my first trip to San Francisco, and I was sick with love for it already in the way that most people reserve for human beings. My heart tripped over the frosty, elegant buildings; the young Pacific Rim businessmen in four-figure suits and painfully chic women of all ethnicities with severe short haircuts and chunky black boots; the soft, damp skies in the morning; the raunch, sophistication, and worldly outdoorsiness that coexisted everywhere. We had driven out briefly to Berkeley and to Marin, and I envisioned early Grateful Dead songs and acid and tie-dye and flowers before they all got corrupted. I saw glimpses of the true Aquarianism: people here could talk about crystals and polyamory and CPUs all in one sentence, and it didn’t sound as contrived as it did at home. It was, as they say, beautiful, if a little intolerably so.

But most of the time I was stuck in trade-show technohell. In brief, a trade show is made up of row upon row of tiny, noisy booths in a giant enclosed space. In detail, it is an assault on the senses, a gigantic fluorescent-lit motorized give-it-away-and-suck-em-in, devoid of windows, nature, or more than three feet of space between you and the next vendor. Moscone Convention Center was the cement, industrial carpet, and large-scale computer monitor equivalent of a hucksterish county fair.

This particular huckster’s silver lining was my new black cashmere sweater set, which I was wearing along with my SF-fashionably black miniskirt, tights, and boots. I had never owned any cashmere before, but Sascha was a big fan of it and felt that his bride should not have to go cashmereless if she didn’t want to. But as far as bimbosity went, I was at a loss; sometimes I felt that the first thing people noticed about me was my colossal diamond and platinum solitaire. I wouldn’t have picked it out for myself, personally. Sascha, on the other hand, felt so terrible about our not having a proper engagement that he thought he could make up for our hurried courtship in sheer diamond size. Every time I shook hands with someone, I felt like I was saying, "Hello, I’m married to a rich, ostentatious swell; and you?"

Instead, what I actually said was: "Hi, thanks for stopping by Deus Ex Machina, we’re having a demo at three, would you like an information kit?", grinning between juicy Chanel lips. I reminded myself of the makeup women at department stores with their masklike, obsequious faces, spraying nasty perfume at you every time you walk by.

Wendy was too busy hiking up her pantyhose to be obsequious. "Fucking women’s clothes," she growled. "Fucking misogynist designers."

Actually, it was pretty funny to see everybody in what they considered to be trade-show-appropriate outfits. Sascha, of course, never cared about what he was wearing, unless it was for a party or something. He owned 20 different heavyweight button-down shirts from The Gap and Structure, plus seven or eight different pairs of khakis ("I can mix and match anywhere I go! I never have to think about what I’m wearing!", even though an eye as critical as mine would notice that this was not always the case). Underneath his purple chamois he was wearing a Deus Ex Machina T-Shirt. I guessed this was in case somebody questioned his identity and he had to rip open his shirtfront like Superman.

Catfood, who was happy to be on the West Coast among other Asians who were not just, as he put it, "Eastern Establishment token mongers," had his hair slicked back and his Armani suit pressed. Jonathan had suffered to wear a tie; his dark hair was restrained in a luxurious braid; he had an anarchist fist in his earlobe and eighteen-hole Doc Martens on his feet. Will wore a regular suit, but he was just boring and it was hard to have him around like somebody’s father on a trip like this. Drexler had brought his girlfriend---Ms. "Dark Side of the Moon." She certainly had no pretensions towards dressing up, but she was a hacker at a small consulting firm and probably didn’t own a whole lot of dresses anyway. Drex himself, his weird bleachy hair and dark beard cut dramatically, was wearing a big general’s coat with beaded epaulettes and sinister looking medals; it hardly mattered what he had on beneath the costume. Ian hadn’t even bothered changing out of his jeans.

Most interesting, though, was Frick. Cass Frick was wearing a maroon silk interview suit with a skirt. She had on very thin pantyhose and shoes with little spiky heels. Her hair was up in a bun. Frick had nice legs.

"Look," I whispered to Sascha. "Frick has nice legs."

"Yeah, so?" he whispered back. "What’s the big deal? You’re so damn concerned with other people’s appearances. Why don’t you pay attention to qualities that really matter, like native intelligence or ambition? Beauty is wasted on idiots, anyway."

That day’s ExCommunicate 3.0 demo, under Sascha’s charge, began at 3:00. People trickled into our booth a little before the top of the hour. Wendy, Drexler, and I began giving them goodies---monogrammed black and silver pens and Koosh balls, mini demo CD’s with the Deus Ex Machina logo on them---as soon as they signed their names and companies to the attendance list. I really felt like a stewardess now. When was someone going to get me off this damn plane flight?

Fifteen attendees came to see the demo. Five of them wanted to talk to us. The first was a group of four---three men and a woman---all dressed in black. They were from a Hollywood preproduction company, they said, and had been thinking for some time about using ExCom on their Silicon Graphics workstations. The other person was a man in his late twenties. He had a press badge.

Sascha, I could tell, wanted to talk to both of them---the preproduction woman because she was stunningly attractive and he wanted to sweet-talk her either with his product or with his hackerish charm, and the journalist because Sascha was particularly good at manipulating the trade press. But he was scurrying around with cables strung over his shoulder and a terminator in his teeth, and couldn’t stop to chat. Both the woman and the journalist seemed eager to talk to me, rather than to anyone else there.

The woman’s name was Tanya, she told me. Her red hair was long and frizzy, and she wore a fetching little black hat on top of it. Her lipstick was the same color as mine. "Hey," she said to me in a low, cigaretty voice, pulling me aside. "Can we talk for a second?"

For a few months now, I had been used to being the least nerdy person I was in contact with. Tanya was much cooler than I; I was worried I had fallen out of practice in dealing with people like her.

"Who are you in the company?" she asked.

"My name’s Sara Abrams-Strathmore. I’m the president’s wife," I whispered back. "Sascha’s over there." I angled my head towards him. Sascha, at that moment, was hunched over the demo computer, typing with one hand while he shoved a fistful of chocolate-covered espresso beans into his mouth like they were M&Ms. I saw his lips moving. "Fuck you fuck you fuck you boot NOW," he was saying to the computer.

"Definitely uncool," I said to Tanya, treasonously.

"Oh, it’s nothing I haven’t seen a million film executives do," she said. "I bet Mike Ovitz is doing it right this second."

Tanya leaned towards me conspiratorially. "Listen, Sara, this is why I need to talk to you. Our people are really into your product. We just can’t stay through the whole presentation. Can you like maybe set something special up for us tonight? Or just for me. I’d be happy to take a look at it later on in the evening."

"We’re staying in the penthouse at the Fairmont Hotel..." I said doubtfully.

"Sounds great. I can even bring over some drinks---or whatever you want. You name it. You folks just tell me when."

Tanya was totally up to no good. I had already learned about wrongness of trying to ply potential vendors with toys; it was equally against ethics to let a customer ply you with them. Tanya either didn’t know this dictate, or was flagrantly disregarding it. I decided to pass the buck.

"See the guy with the black ponytail and the tie?" I murmured, just as conspiratorial. "That’s Jonathan Marshall, our VP. Why don’t you talk to him about it? He’ll help you out if Sascha’s too busy."

"Thanks a bunch, hon," she said, pressing a business card intimately into my hand. Her bright red nails were sharp. "See you tonight."

Tanya slid through the maze of metal office chairs over to Jonathan. They talked for a minute. I could only see her back, but I did see Jonathan’s face. He was into it, whatever it was, and it was definitely sexual. So much for morals. He motioned for Wendy to come over. His body language was clearly telling her that they had nabbed a quarry. Wendy stood next to Jonathan, drawn up to her full height. Together, they were kind of magnificent-looking, in a harsh, horsy sort of way. Tanya blew them a little kiss and melted back down amongst her black-clad cohorts.

Cool, I thought. She’s offering us an evening of debauch in return for a detailed demo and probably a discount. And I thought I was using sex just to pass out brochures.

Once Tanya had slid away, the reporter strode up to me, blond and preppy and wholesome. He had one of those post-Beatles haircuts I associate with WASPy prep school students around 1970. And yet, I found his funny hair and his loping walk totally seductive. Here was no geek.

"Hi," he said, shaking my hand enthusiastically. "Peter Greer, Technology Today. Are you the PR person?"

"Oh, so you’re Peter Greer. I spoke to you a couple of months ago. You were in bed. Actually, I’m the ornament," I said. "The guy in the yicky suit is our marketing person, but I pretend to do our PR. By the way, I read your article about online art fraud. Pretty good. So you’re here to interview us?"

Peter Greer looked down at my hands for a second. "Nice rock. You’re the new Mrs. Sascha Strathmore?"

"My name is Sara Abrams-Strathmore, if you please," suddenly remembering this was the adversary. "I told you that over the phone."

"Listen, Sara, I got your press release about Version 3.1 of ExCommunicate. That certainly puts a new twist on the setup for my story. After all, there are so few small Unix software companies putting out innovative products that are really doing well these days. It’s a sad fact of life at the end of the millennium, but Deus Ex Machina’s continued success has really been a beacon of hope for everybody who wants the true hacker ethic to live on. And now you guys are moving to Windows?"

Peter Greer was so impressively sycophantic that I didn’t want to waste his performance. "I’m sure Sascha would love to talk to you after the demo. I remember that you had some high---ambitions, you might say---about doing in-depth coverage on the company."

"I don’t want it to be an ordinary trade-rag tech story," he said with an ingratiating, toothy smile. "I had wanted it to be ‘The Life of Deus Ex Machina Software Inc., Where Microsoft and Downsizing Have Never Cast Their Shadows.’ I don’t know if the introduction of a product for NT will obscure that point."

I laughed sophisticatedly. "Charming idea. If you actually want to spend that much time with the company. I’d say, move in for the kill now, before the Microsoft juggernaut hits us. Look, Sascha’s about to start his demo. We might as well be quiet and listen to him."

All the futzing at the computer had forced the demo back to 3:07. I knew that Sascha, who felt that he had to do everything on time in order to be taken seriously, was mighty pissed---he’d probably complain about his seven minutes of lost time for a total of at least twenty minutes or so.

But you wouldn’t know it now. Sascha was on stage, showing off the joy of his professional life, and he would be happy for a while, especially with Ian at the computer controls to take the fall in case of some technical glitch.

But there wouldn’t be one. There seldom was with ExCom, even with a delicate and tricky product like a beta.

Sascha was all angel in front of a crowd: fluffy hair, round blue eyes, a dimple in his pink cheeks, a little voice always about to break into laughter because he loved his work so much. He also loved to stand on tables and take off his clip-on microphone, waving it in the air to demonstrate his point. This was a big, and successful, ploy to grab the anarchic, over-caffeinated set.

"Welcome, friends, to the first public demonstration of ExCommunicate 3.0," he said. "We hope you enjoy yourselves enough to buy it."

*

$8,000 will buy you one night in the penthouse suite of the Fairmont Hotel, a post-1906-Earthquake fantasy atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill. The penthouse elevator deposits you right at your elaborately carved wooden door. And once you go through that door, you reign supreme. True, the Fairmont’s management has been forced to make certain changes---no lit candles during large dinner parties, for instance---but enough kings and movie stars have stayed at the Penthouse over the last 70 years that all its tenants’ excesses are kept secret from the plebecite beneath.

The celebrities that stay at the Fairmont these days are in software. And no one has told them about manners.

Nobody at the registration desk questioned us when we wrote out the company check. If you plunk down $16,000 (minus a discount of a few K for catering your parties through the Fairmont), even the hotel’s security staff, who are dressed quaintly like little Yeomans-of-the-Guard, will leave you alone. I wondered if it occurred to the hotel management that nine adults, a baby, a ferret, some accidental overnight guests, a revved-up portable stereo system, 15 high-wattage computers, and a couple fistfuls of controlled substances were heading upstairs to tarnish their 10-room historical treasure.

Sascha would have no physical besmirchment, anyway. "I grew up in a place like this," he said proprietarily. "I’ll hack it, but I won’t leave a mark. You guys don’t, either. We have professional reputations to uphold."

But as the evening started rolling, Sascha abandoned his propriety for dandyism, and things started going downhill from there.

"Look! It’s the singer formerly known as Prince!"

Sascha emerged from our bedroom wearing black leather pants, white plunging shirt with lots of New Agey jewelry, black boots, and a psychedelic purple cape. He had painted his eyelids and cheekbones with some sort of faint purple glitter. Where the hell did he get all this stuff from? I wondered. I certainly wouldn’t have let that shit into his suitcase.

"No," he giggled, "I’m the hacker formerly known as Sascha." He laughed some more. "‘If I was your girlfriend,’" he sang in an appropriately Prince-like falsetto, "‘Of course I'd undress in front of U! And when I'm naked, what shall I do?’"

"Guy, you are wa-ay too fucked up to give anybody a demo," said Jonathan. "How about if I take care of this Tanya woman alone?"

"You wish," said somebody else’s voice, suspended in space. "Is Wendy going to help you, Jon?"

I was lying on the exquisitely tiled floor of the suite’s Turkish bath room. Some idiot several decades ago, the concierge told us, had covered the room in white plasterboard because the nurse who stayed there couldn’t stand the aesthetics. The hotel had only recently "rediscovered" it, but by that time, the giant sunken whirlpool in the center of the room had had to be decommissioned. Above me, noises bounced off the aquamarine and gold-leaf mosaics. There were golden Arabic letters all around me. I wondered what they meant.

A man dressed in what I considered to be semi-drag---flowered leggings, biker boots and jacket, pretty things tied in his dark hair---was leaning over me, telling me how beautiful I was. "You are an angel," he gushed. "Your breasts are small but magnificent. Your ankles---ah! Worthy of poetry." He knelt on all fours and kissed my bare feet.

"You know Sascha, right?" I asked suspiciously. "I mean, you’ve been invited to this party?"

"Of course I know Sascha. Not as well as you do, my dear, but it’s always been a goal of mine." He laughed theatrically. "He’s got a cute little behind."

As if from under water, I could hear Sascha shouting, "I am not tripping too hard to do a demo! I can hack as well as anybody in here! Look at this!"

I crawled across the hall---never again would I buy any weed from New York, because this stuff definitely had to be laced with something---to watch what Sascha was doing. The semi-queen followed right behind me.

The conference room had been turned into a forest of networked computers. Sascha sat at the big-screen workstation, banging at the keyboard. With his cape, he reminded me of the young Mozart in Amadeus. "There!" he said triumphantly. "Check this out!"

He hit the Return key. All the lights in the suite fizzled. He typed a few more keys. Lights turned on and off in sync. He typed the Morse code for "Deus Ex Machina" with ones and zeroes, and the lights blinked accordingly. Then they turned off abruptly, and sputtered back to full power in a dazzling crescendo.

"Ha!" he shouted. "I started working on this after I dropped! I started suite hacking in here, and found the electrical panel."

Someone had turned the music on very loud. I wondered if people in the hotel rooms below us could hear it, or whether $16,000 also paid for complete soundproofing. Catfood, Drexler, and Drexler’s girlfriend, Shanna, were dancing like the Supremes behind the mahogany library balcony, under a constellation of gold-leaf stars.

They were singing along to Peter Gabriel’s song "Big Time." "And my heaven will be a BIG heaven, and I will walk through the FRONT door!" roared Drexler, while Catfood and Shanna flailed their arms and wiggled their hips behind him.

Wendy was sitting at the buffet table, scarfing gravlax and caviar. Soon I would get the munchies, I figured. But right then the idea of all those squishy fish eggs made me feel pretty queer.

The door chimed, a series of regal bells. "I’ll get it!" yelled Wendy. She brushed the caviar from the corners of her mouth and walked majestically to the foyer. I’ll bet she’s expecting Tanya, I thought.

It was in fact Tanya, who could not help but look impressed as she walked in. She was still dressed in black, but now it was all a little tighter, and she had gotten rid of the hat. Her lipstick was lush.

"Tanya, come in!" said Wendy, bending down a little and giving Tanya a kiss on the cheek. "Let’s go into the conference room. Jonathan and Sascha and I will give you a personal tour of the penthouse. Then they’ll give you a private demo. Then---who knows? You’re welcome to stay."

I didn’t want L.A. Woman to see me huddled on the floor, so I used a brocaded chair to lift myself to my feet. "I’m supposed to be in a private meeting right now," I said to Mr. Semi-Drag, trying to kick him off my heels.

"At a party?"

"There’s not a whole lot we do just for fun here," I explained. "It’s business, business, business." I tried to make myself look a bit less cooked, walked into the conference room, and shut the big paneled door behind me.

Jonathan, Wendy, and Sascha were staring at something in Tanya’s outstretched hand.

"What is that?" Jonathan asked suspiciously.

"Coke. What do you think it is?"

"I don’t know who you take us for," said Sascha. A warped picture of somebody was spinning on the workstation screen behind him. "We don’t traffic in narcotics."

Tanya shrugged. "Whatever. I was just trying to be a good guest. What are you on right now, then?"

"Mind-expanders. Liberators. Not yuppie-aggressive powder."

"Do you mind if I do some, then?"

"Do what you want," shrugged Jonathan. "Just take it back with you. We don’t want it here."

Sascha disaffectedly handed her a $100 bill. "Here," he said coldly. "Do it like the pros do."

He saw me. "Sara, what are you doing here! I thought you had forgotten about me! You look realllly tall right now. Did you get taller than me? Look at what I did on the computer. This is you!"

I saw a photo of myself swimming around like the Satori screen saver. It scared me.

Tanya finished doing her lines on the conference room table. She rubbed the side of her nose and handed Sascha back the bill. "Sara, honey! Great to see you! Are you going to join us later?"

"Join you in what?"

She tossed back her long frizzy curls. "I don’t know. Whatever. What are you in the mood for?" She opened the glass door to the tiled patio. We were twelve stories above the highest point of one of the highest hills in San Francisco. It was too high. I sat quickly on the decorated tiles so I wouldn’t fall off.

Tanya sat down next to me on the tiles, jiggling her legs. "Interesting group," she said, more sarcastically than I liked. "How’d you get hooked up with them? CalTech people?"

"No, MIT."

"Same difference. I know I came over here promising your friends Jon and Wendy a good time, but I was going to try to get you involved. I hear that all women who do computers are dykes. You one?"

"I’m married to Sascha."

"I saw your rock. What do you think about hubby being dressed like a fairy princess? Is he queer too?"

"Sascha’s queerness is one of those unsolved mysteries---you know, like the Abominable Snowman. He acts pretty straight with me."

"Listen, queers can be married too. Come here."

I was kissing Tanya. Her red lipstick was all over my face, and she tasted like she had cigarette butts lodged all the way from her tongue to her lungs. But it was a little late for me to complain, and I didn’t care anyway. She crawled on top of me. We found ourselves wedged near the delicate wrought ironwork that separated us from oblivion, and we were rolling around, banging into it, upsetting plants and the elegant California lawn chairs.

"We’re going to fall off this thing and kill ourselves," I managed to say as Tanya let go of my mouth to expertly pull off my Levi’s.

"Bullshit. You can’t get off without the risk of falling off. By the way," Tanya added, "I’m not a dyke."

"You just fuck around with women for fun?"

"Oh, you know, it’s an L.A. thing...so many beautiful people, so little time..." she said vaguely, and we were back at it again.

"Isn’t there some place we can go?" she eventually growled in my ear, sitting on my chest with her red-tipped fingers tracing over the tops of my thighs. She was a lot more persuasive than Wendy had been. Or maybe it was just me. ("Set and setting," Sascha always says.) "I am so hot."

"If you’re hot, we might as well stay out here. It’s a lot hotter inside."

"No, stupid," she said. "I mean this kind of hot." She crawled off me and knelt near my feet, pushing my legs farther apart than they already were. "But if you don’t mind me going down on you right here..."

I don’t know what it was---the pot, the shock of it, being in San Francisco, the feel of Tanya’s sticky red lips and expert tongue in places no woman had ever been near---but it wasn’t more than a couple of minutes until I came, probably a world’s record for me. I found myself digging into Tanya’s hair and hearing my hoarse screams float off the patio into the tops of the eucalyptus trees below.

"Saa-raa!"

Where had that agonized howl come from? I looked around as best I could; Tanya had crawled back onto me and was kissing me hard with her smeared and salty mouth. Sascha stood in the doorway with an absolutely stricken expression.

"Oh God," he said. "I must be hallucinating this. Sara, how could you?" He burst into tears and staggered back indoors.

"What’s the matter with Louis Quatorze?" said Tanya.

"I don’t know. We’re just messing around... I mean, he practically sticks his tongue down the throat of every woman he knows. You know, just to be friendly. Can you let me up, though? I’d better check to see what the problem is."

Tanya grudgingly got off me. I tried unsuccessfully to rub her lipstick and my own juices off my face. I went back inside while she curled into a lawn chair, presumably to wait for my return. It was too dark for me to check if I had any spots on my jeans.

Sascha was face down on the table with his silly cape spread about him like a tie-dyed bat. Jonathan and Wendy looked bleakly at me. "You guys put on a great show...," she whispered.

Sascha propped his chin on the table. The rest of him didn’t move. "I trusted you," he said.

"Trusted me with what?" Thank God I was coming down. I was at least starting to get clear-headed; he was going to be up in the ether for a while.

"Sara, I thought it was going to be only us from now on. I didn’t know you were going to break faith with me like this, so soon." He pointed at the wood paneling. "There. There are all the women I’ve betrayed. They’re all laughing at me. Rachel Cohen and all of them."

"Let me get this straight." I climbed up on the table and sat next to him. "When we had been married for about three days you told your buddy Drexler you weren’t sure if we were going to have an open marriage or not. ‘Not sure’! Like it’s an option you’re considering. Then you take me to parties where people are swinging like Tarzan, and you smash mouth with every woman you know, and then suddenly you say that I’m supposed to remain pristine. And you’ll never even meet any guy I ever dated! So I have a little makeout session with someone while I’m shit-faced and now you think I’m going to leave you. Please explain your inconsistencies."

Sascha rolled onto his back. "So I’m inconsistent," he said. "So sue me." He snuffled again. "I worry about you leaving me. Is that OK? I worry you’re going to find someone more attractive than me, more normal than me, more like you than me. I need to feel secure."

"Do you want to make love right now? Would that make you feel better?"

"Can we?"

"Sure. We’ll kick someone out of our room if we have to. Just do me one favor---take off that cape."

Sascha unclasped the cape from his neck. It fell on the table in a quivering purple heap. "Cool," he said, looking at it. "That’s really---purple. Oh. And do me one favor. Brush your teeth. You stink of cigarettes."

I took his hand and dragged him off the table.

"Remember," he said to Jonathan, "give Ms. Coke-Head a good time. Try to get her to buy a lot of units. And make sure that she gets a deep discount. We at Deus Ex Machina Software stand true to our word."

*

"So, how was the party?" asked Peter Greer the next morning.

My headache was excruciating, and I felt kind of psychologically dirty, if still libidinous. I didn’t think Tanya would be showing up at our booth today; last night after Sascha’s and my bathetic exit, she had tentatively ordered 75 seats of ExCommunicate, all at a significant discount, for her company, and she had gotten what she wanted. I didn’t know if her original bargaining price had included me or not.

Peter Greer, blue press ribbon proudly pinned to his perky blazer, clearly had not attended any debauches last night. He looked as if he had spent the evening playing squash, then retired to his room for some steak au poivre and a tiny martini, delivered by room service.

"What party?"

"Come on," he said significantly. "I know you guys had a party up at the Fairmont last night. I know, for instance, that you ordered 12 bottles of Pinot Noir---and only drank eight of them."

"What the hell were you doing snooping around our hotel? I thought you guys from the trade press just called our PR offices for information anyway. By the way, the offices are in Cambridge, so why don’t you call them? It’s noon over there already.

"And," I added snidely, nodding at the big journalisty Nikon strapped around Peter’s neck, "what are you doing with that camera? I think our PR office would be very happy to send you some product shots also."

Peter didn’t skip a beat. "Sara---" Hmmph, I thought, he’s one of those manipulative little weasels who loves to use people’s first names to get them on his side, and yet I liked how my name sounded on his lips. "First of all, I thought you said you were the PR offices. Do you have any product shots on you?"

Touché. I snapped my mouth shut.

"Second, I’ve said the following to you several times already: This piece is going to be a little larger in scope than your average trade press article. Sascha is an interesting character---so are the rest of the people who work at Deus Ex Machina---and there are so few Unix hackers left who still have the luxury of taking their vows seriously. A few pictures won’t do anything but put a positive spotlight on Deus Ex Machina and ExCommunicate, last night’s party notwithstanding.

"Oh, and third of all, I took the liberty of doing a Web search on you last night. Glamorous photos. And nice article on "Boston College Eagles: Will They Fly in the New Stadium?" Peter Greer’s face---the bland blond face of Edwardian royalty---was pleasant and open.

Christ. He was reading my lousy kiss-ass articles for the BC magazine---and pretending that he liked them. "Have you talked to Sascha about this?" I asked. "Does he know what you have in mind?"

"Sure," he said confidently. "I talked to Sascha and Jonathan and Ian and the rest of them yesterday afternoon after the demo." He smiled knowingly. "You were getting a massage then, I think. So California, n’est-ce pas?"

I didn’t like him knowing about my guilty pleasures, either. Sascha had turned me on to Shiatsu and Swedish massages, and there was a woman in San Francisco who was one of the best masseuses he had ever gone to. But it still seemed, to my puritanical mind anyway, that massage was so New Agey and vain and sneakily sexual---so California, as Peter put it. I could bet that he, a Dartmouth grad born in Maine (I couldn’t understand how he could have lived in the Bay Area for more than a couple months without freaking out) had never experienced the "healing touch."

"Peter Greer!" shouted Sascha, waving and running over to him. He gave the reporter a big, enthusiastic handshake. "I’m so glad you could come. Great camera. I’ll show you mine some time---limited edition Leica from the 1960s."

My husband’s publicity hunger had overcome his better judgment. I was experiencing hunger of another sort, though. Did Peter Greer count as one of those influential men for whom Sascha would, as Wendy indecorously put it, "drop his pants"? Was this something that could perhaps be arranged over time? I was as turned on by the idea as I was filled with self-disgust for thinking it. All this counter-cultural sex stuff was getting through to me, after all.

All the Deus Exers were all especially well-scrubbed and enthusiastic this morning despite the massive hangovers some of them must have been hiding. In a fine team-building spirit, Jonathan had suggested that we all wear our black and silver Deus Ex Machina T-shirts. They were miniature mockups of the giant "Deus Ex Machina" Plexiglas screen in our booth. And our pens. And our Koosh balls. Cashmere sweaters would have looked nicer, but this was better advertising.

Something was not as it seemed about Peter Greer---as I had believed from my very first contact with him. Apparently, no one but me could sense it, which also had been true from the beginning. My brief acquaintance with the Deus Exers had proven them all to be poor judges of character. The only other person who seemed to be suspicious of him was Frick, but she was suspicious of everybody, so I couldn’t necessarily trust her judgment. Besides, she disliked me so much I’m not sure I could get any useful information out of her.