No, not her.

Regardless of what had happened last night, he needed Kate. Not this girl, who, he reminded himself, like everyone else, was using him.

"Get out!" he shouted.

"But I love you!"

"No!" He turned and raised his hands to his head to subdue the pounding that was growing angrier the longer he stayed in this polluted room. "You used me. You even stole my clothes."

"I'm in love with you. Peter, please. I almost died when I heard you were coming to speak at the commencement. I had to sneak into the reception, just so I could see you. And then when I met you and you invited me here, I knew it was because you felt it too, the way we connected when we saw each other." She came from behind him and attempted to take him in her arms.

"Don't touch me," he said, shaking her off. He crossed the room and positioned himself on the other side, a chaise lounge between them.

She stayed where she was, hands at her sides and face all red and puffy. "Peter, I need you. I've changed my life because of you."

He looked in her direction, but his eyes were unseeing. "If you don't get out of here right now with everything that's yours, I'll carry you outside myself and throw you down the hill." His face was unmoving and placid, almost like the smiley face.

She took a step toward him, her hands twisting together, pleading. "But last night. Peter. What about last night?"

He closed his eyes and clamped his jaw. Nothing.

"f.u.c.k you, then," she spat. But she made no motion to leave.

Instead, she crossed her arms over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stood there. A sound that was both a laugh and a cry burst from her lips. "Don't you see? I did this for you, because I care about Joey, and you.

Why don't you want to believe that. That's why I changed my studies, because I knew this was something important." She smacked the monitor. "You know you care about it." She pointed at him accusingly. "You said so yesterday, when I showed you how far I'd come." She made a disgusted face. She fought to hold back her tears. "But you don't give a d.a.m.n. Not about anyone but yourself."

He did not respond. As she collected her things, his attention remained fixed on the computer's screen. He heard her climb the stairs and enter the guest room. There were sounds of drawers opening, the closet door sliding on its tracks. A few minutes later she came downstairs. He did not look at her.

She crossed the room and ejected a floppy diskette from the Joey, and picked up a box of floppies sitting on the table. She placed the items in her knapsack, hoisted the bag onto her shoulder, and collected her small duffel bag at the doorway. Straightening herself for a moment with her back to him, she spoke. "You're gonna regret you did this, Peter." Then she was gone.

He sat down and glared at the smiley face. It returned his gaze, pa.s.sive, obedient, waiting for input. Just like everyone else, he thought morosely, it wanted something from him.

At his side he felt the neck of a bottle protruding from between the sofa cushions. He lifted it. A nearly empty bottle of wine.

Red wine.

And then it hit him. The bottle was the special Cabernet Sauvignon Kate had given him on their first date, which they had vowed to drink together when Wallaby turned ten years old.

"No!" he cried, and hurled the empty bottle at the evil smiley face with its leering, s.h.i.t-eating grin.

The monitor exploded in sparks and smoke, the smiley face gone forever, and the room fell into silence and he was all alone.

"Greta?" Matthew called, stepping from room to room on the lower floor of the house. He climbed the stairs. Soft, pleasant music drifted out from the bedroom. He closed in on the bathroom, and found his wife in the tub. She raised her face from some sort of picture book or atlas propped on a silver bath tray table.

He lowered himself to the closed toilet seat. "It's over," he said.

"Thank G.o.d," Greta said. She closed her eyes and stretched her right arm out of the tub. Bubbles and soapy water dripped from her perfect hand onto the floor. "Darling, would you pa.s.s me the oil please?"

He handed her a bottle of spiced bath oil. She held it there, out of the tub, until she caught his eye. She led his vision to the bottle's cap and he uncapped it and held it while she squeezed the red liquid into the water. It spurted from the bottle and he was suddenly mesmerized by the mixture as it bled into the water.

He studied his wife with sullen fascination as she lay there with her eyes closed, gently oscillating her shoulders and legs, mixing up the oil and water. With her eyes still closed, she held out the bottle to him again. Accepting it, his hand touched hers for an instant. He shivered, and felt a sudden need to urinate.

He could not remember the last time he had seen her other hand naked, which was presently hidden somewhere under the water in the tub. Nor could he remember the last time they had made love, though he was pretty certain it was the evening before International Foods had thrown the yacht party for him to celebrate the success of Orange Fresh. Thinking of these things, he was momentarily hypnotized by the sight of her there in the tub, moving in the frothy pink water. His mind roared with the horrific image of her as she had appeared when the accident had occurred. Underwater. Stillness. Then her eyes bulging as her head splashed up out of the sea's redness. The screaming. The flailing. The blood. Splashing -

She was flicking bath water at him. "Matthew, are you here? I said I'm happy for you. Did everything work out okay?"

"Yes. Yes," he said, blinking. A few droplets had landed on his trousers. He brushed them away and said, "He's gone. It's over.

They all chose me over Peter."

"There," she said, "you see. I told you everything would work out just fine."

He thought about how she saw things. A few months ago, when he had felt doubt, she had helped him regain his focus and set the stage for today's meeting. Her persistent belief in him had finally won out, and ultimately he had believed in himself enough to begin the painstaking maneuvers necessary to topple Jones after he'd balked at Matthew's suggestion to make the Joey more compatible with ICP's computers. That, he understood now, was when it must have happened, when he had begun to live in his wife's presence without really noticing her anymore, focusing wholly on his work. The first stage of detachment had been after the accident. The second was after he had gotten his plan underway. He had finally and completely shut her out, without ever really meaning to. In both cases he had told himself that it was temporary, that things would eventually return to the way they had been. But now he understood that those times would never return. They couldn't, for it seemed all was lost on that day of the accident. He thought of the object - that was precisely how he thought of it, an object of his lost affection - which he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his briefcase. Lost. What was he going to do? How would he end up? How would they end up? He knew what she was thinking, what her own hopes were. That now that Peter Jones was out of the way, he'd spend more time with her.

Turning his wedding band round and round on his finger in his lap, hidden from her sight, he spoke. "This is just the beginning, honey," he said, cautious. "Now, slowly and carefully, I have to reveal my plan for engineering our products to connect with ICP's systems to the board and executive staff so that they believe I'm doing it to increase sales and market share." He watched her expression.

Sponging her neck, she said, "Well darling, now that that pest is out of your way, I'm sure you'll have no problem." There was an edge of warning in her delivery.

"Yes," he paused. "But there are many people in the company who still carry Peter's belief that ICP is bad and that Wallaby should concentrate on competing more firmly rather than yield to them."

"Darling, you've come this far, and you'll make it to the glorious end of your plan just fine. I just know it. Have you contacted William yet?"

"I sent him a message," Matthew said. He realized that he needed to check to see if William had received the memo and replied to it. His concern a.s.serted itself. "William's not going to be pleased. He wanted me to exhaust every possibility to keep Peter onboard. But after seeing the way he reacted I doubt he'll stick around." Matthew stood. He had to use the toilet...but rather than use this one he wanted to use the one downstairs. "I better go check my e-mail," he said, excusing himself.

He hurried downstairs to his library office. He turned on his computer and hung his jacket over the chair. His Joey was outfitted with every add-on option, including a color monitor, a CD-ROM drive, a laser printer, and a mouse. Seeing the mouse lying there, he abruptly remembered Laurence and the thoughts he'd had of her yesterday in his car; he recalled too the image of her lovely hand clutching the manila folder less than an hour ago in his office. While the computer started up, he went into the library's small toilet. He stood before the toilet and opened his fly. At the same time he closed his eyes, concentrating.

There came no flow. Instead, he felt himself hardening in his own hand. He locked the door, dropped his trousers to the floor, and seated himself. At the age of ten, Matthew Locke had had the good fortune of discovering masturbation. It had altered the course of his life forever. For whenever he became distracted from his studies, thinking about girls instead of geometry, he had simply relieved himself. It was to this dedication that he owed his success. It had enabled him to focus all of his energies on important things. He had achieved autonomous coupling - a boy and his hand. Even in college he favored this method. Of course there had been girls, but none of them ever proved worth the time or effort. Though this was the price he paid in order to come so far so fast, he had never seemed to fully grasp its relevance until the day he'd met Greta. The instant he'd laid eyes on her, her hands, he determined it was time to think about marrying. It was important to his career, and if he was going to do it, then why not with a woman who's hands were more alluring than his own?

Were.

But hers were not the hands he thought of now, holding him, stroking him. No, the hand he imagined in place of his own belonged to another woman, a girl, really, who he told himself he must resist.

He came, and she went.

It was one o'clock in the afternoon, and Peter was in bed.

He lay there staring at the ceiling. Time didn't matter anymore.

Every now and then he took a gulp of Scotch from the bottle he had opened after Ivy left. Normally he never drank hard liquor.

But today it seemed like the most natural thing to do. He needed something to help him escape from his own mind, something that would inevitably force him into sleep, where he could hide, even if just for a couple of hours, from his dilemma. It was too soon to try and think things through. Through? How, he wondered, does one think through being through? With every swallow from the bottle the reality of it all slipped a little farther away.

What he wanted to know was, what would they do for the future?

His instinctive reaction to anything that threatened Wallaby - in this case, his being flung from the company - provoked fear and anxiety for its future, beyond the potential misery of his personal fate.

He had given nearly ten years of his life to Wallaby. The time when it all began seemed like a lifetime ago.

He drifted.