Nightlife: A Novel

40

As soon as her telephone service was working, Judith bought a laptop computer and printer and signed up for Internet service. She entered the online telephone directory and typed in Catherine Hobbes’s telephone number to find her address. When she had it, she began to get restless.

The night was coming again, and Judith was always restless in the early evening. It was the time when other women were putting on their most attractive clothes and makeup. She had always loved dressing to go out at night. Even when she was a little girl on the pageant circuit, she had pretended she was getting ready to go out dancing instead of just out past the flat pieces of scenery and the electrical circuit board and onto the stage. The beginning of an evening out was the best that a person ever looked, the best that she could be—the most beautiful, the most excited, and the most eager.

Judith Nathan could not dress that way tonight. She slipped on the black pants and sneakers, the blue sweater and the jacket Tyler had left her, then put on Tyler’s baseball cap and went out to walk. Night in Portland was much cooler and wetter than she liked, but she knew that she could get used to it if Catherine had. She walked toward the Adair Hill neighborhood, overlooking the west side of the river south of the downtown section, because that was where Catherine lived. It was a long walk, but she amused herself by watching the few stragglers driving home from work, while others were coming out of their houses in nice clothes, getting into their cars to go to restaurants and bars.

People didn’t really see her as she walked by, her hair under Tyler’s baseball cap and her hands in the pockets of the jacket. In the dark she was just a shape that was merely human, and even when the headlights from a turning car swept over her and she became female, she was just another young woman who walked after business hours to keep in shape.

She found the right street at around ten. She stared up the block cautiously, getting a feel for it before she dared go farther. It seemed fitting that Catherine would live up a hill, where she could look down on the city but not be touched by it, or even seen.

Judith studied the neighborhood, but saw nothing that looked threatening. It seemed to be the kind of residential area where people walked, but there was nobody out now to see her. East of the Willamette River and to the northwest of it, Portland was laid out on a north-south, east-west grid. It was only here, below West Burnside Street, that streets angled off a bit, and Catherine’s street wound and cut back to get up the hill.

Judith liked it, because the curves in the road kept headlights from settling on her for more than a second or two. Before a car came around a bend she would see the cones of the headlights shining on the trees, and then the pair of lights would appear like eyes opening for only a second, and they would go past.

Catherine probably walked along this street fairly regularly, Judith decided. Maybe she even ran. Judith had not been going for her morning runs since she had needed to leave Los Angeles, and she could feel this climb exercising her calves and thighs.

Because she was on foot, Judith could watch the house numbers closely, and she became aware of each house that she passed. The core of the neighborhood was old houses built in the 1920s and ’30s, and the details and proportions were different from the few brand-new houses. The old ones had narrow, arched doorways and steep, pointed gables that held small windows divided into many panes. The trees and shrubbery had been given whole lifetimes to grow and thicken around the walls, so some of the houses looked as though they were from the illustrations of children’s books.

As the road climbed, the trees thinned and the yards were less heavily planted and impenetrable. At the top, the land leveled to become a rounded bluff, and there was a whole row of small, nearly uniform houses that seemed to have burrowed into the cliff. Each had two stories, with a garage on the lower level. There was a set of steps on the left side of each house leading up the hill to a back door.

There it was, number 4767. It was white with a bright yellow door. The lights were off except for a couple of automatic outdoor floods that had sensors to switch them on at dusk. Judith stood across the street where the lights did not reach her, studied the house for a long time, and then moved on.

Three nights later, Judith began to wonder what was going on in Catherine Hobbes’s life. There seemed to be something going on, because every evening when Judith walked by Catherine’s house on Adair Hill the windows were dark. Judith kept taking her walks later and later, and still Catherine was out. Judith began to be afraid that Catherine Hobbes was out of town scouring some other city for signs of Tanya Starling. She didn’t want her doing that. Catherine Hobbes had to be home. She had to be in her bed up on the upper floor, in a deep, peaceful sleep.

On the fourth evening, she arrived on Catherine Hobbes’s block at one-thirty A.M., just as the garage door below Catherine’s living room opened and a small car pulled into the garage. Judith Nathan sidestepped onto the grass strip in front of the nearest house and knelt behind a fragrant, flowering bush to watch. Judith could see the car was a new Acura, teal blue. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she knew Catherine had chosen the model and color so it wouldn’t be anything like the unmarked cop cars that Catherine drove at work. She saw Catherine get out of the car in the lighted garage, then walk to the side of the garage and press a switch on the wall. As the door rolled down, Catherine’s head, then shoulders, then torso, legs, and feet disappeared.

The lights on Catherine’s main floor came on. Judith walked past, looking at the other houses in the row. Judith could see that all of the houses must have been built by one contractor from a single set of blueprints. All of them had balconies facing the river except Catherine’s; she had a set of greenhouse windows in place of the balcony.

Judith could see identical bowl-shaped light fixtures in the center of the ceilings of two of the houses, and the rest seemed to have replacement fixtures in the same spot. The garage doors were wide enough for two cars. The straight, plain staircases to the upper floor were all on the left sides of the houses. As Judith walked home, her body seemed weightless, her step was light, and it seemed to her that a day was beginning instead of ending. Things were starting to seem clear to her. That was really all that Judith asked, that she be able to discern what she should do.

In the morning she got the Tribune and the Oregonian and began to look at the ads for Acuras. The dealers were really the only choice, because she wanted hers to be in exactly the right color, and no private owner who had one seemed to be trying to get rid of it. She needed to have exactly the right one. She decided to let the question simmer in her brain for a time while she concentrated on settling into the new city. Judith kept herself busy most of the time, and she found that it gave her a kind of contentment. She had missed the sense that everything she did contributed in some way to a practical goal, and now she had it again.

Judith decided two days later, as dusk came on, that it was time for her to go out for the evening. She had a special problem, because her photograph had been on television many times, and probably most often in Portland. The color and style of her hair were different now, but she would have to be careful.

In Portland there was seldom a reason not to be dressed for rain, so Judith Nathan could wear a black raincoat with a high collar that she could use to abbreviate the profile of her face, and carry a small umbrella. She tried on the outfit and the coat and studied her appearance in the mirror. Then she put on some flat black shoes and walked to the bar she had selected. It was called Underground, and it was decorated to look like a London tube station.

Judith Nathan walked comfortably in the dark. It was her time. She had Mary Tilson’s revolver in her coat pocket and her right hand on the grips. It amused her as she walked to study the men who passed her on the street, imagining each one of them recognizing her from her picture. She would anticipate how each one would go about his offense—rushing toward her, or pointing at her and yelling—and then think through exactly how she would free the gun from her raincoat, aim, and fire. The pistol she was carrying wasn’t like Carl’s .357 magnum. She would have to fire five or six times to silence a full-grown male. She would place three in his torso to put him down, and then be sure to fire one into his head. She was sure she could do that.

She found the bar, and looked at it warily as she walked up. It was impossible to determine anything subtle from outside, but she could tell that it was crowded, and that the lighting came indirectly from some tiny spotlights behind the bar and some jars with candles in them on the tables. She could see that men wore coats and women wore dresses and business suits.

Judith Nathan slipped in the front door and used the bodies of a group of tall men to shield her from view while she verified her impressions. It was the sort of place where people went after work. Most of them bought their drinks at the bar and stood around talking rather than sitting at tables and waiting for the waitress. The one difficult part was that she had to come in, make her choice, and establish a relationship almost instantly. She glanced at the three men in front of her, and then sidestepped into one of them.

He was about six feet two and had a sculpted body that he showed off by taking off his sport coat just inside the door. His only imperfection was that he had a terrible complexion. His face was rough and pitted by acne scars. She smiled up at him and said, “I’m sorry. I was just trying to slip through to the bar. If I’ve hurt you, I’ll buy you a drink.”

He seemed to overcome years of shyness to say, “I’ve got a longer reach. I’ll buy us both one.”

She said, “Thanks so much. I’ll have a vodka martini.” Then she looked around her and said, “I’m right in the 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.

She knew that he had, at some point in his teens, begun doing exercise to compensate for the attractions he lacked. He had studied to compensate for the fact that he wasn’t clever or charming. He was a man who had learned one thing well—that patient, tireless effort would be his salvation—and he was slowly developing confidence.

When the bar began to lose some of its customers, she said, “Well, Greg, it’s getting late. I’m glad I met you. I was beginning to think that there weren’t any men left who were smart enough to talk about something that hadn’t been on TV.” She pushed her chair away from the table.

He said, “It’s been a pleasure talking to you. I—uh—wonder, would you give me your number?”

“Sure,” she said. “I thought you’d never ask.” She took a pen out of her purse, wrote it on her cocktail napkin, and handed it to him. She stood up, and he stood up with her, but she didn’t move. “I’m waiting to be sure you can read it. Can you?”

He held it up and scrutinized it in the dim light. “Yes. I can.”

“Good. Then if you don’t call me I’ll know that wasn’t it.” She quickly turned and walked to the door. Just before she went out, she glanced back at him. He was leaning close to the table, transferring her number to his Palm Pilot. She kept moving, trying to keep from being face-to-face with any of the patrons lingering near the doorway.

The night air had turned cooler now, and after she had walked a few blocks it began to rain. She found that she was in the mood for walking, so she opened her umbrella and kept going. It took her forty-five minutes to get home, and it seemed to rain harder and harder as she went. When she arrived she was wet, so she slipped inside, locked the door, and undressed in the entry. She went into the bathroom and took a long, hot bath. She was winning again. It seemed to have been a long time since she had felt that way.