Composing a Life

complexity of human emotions. Alice spent six months working with her father on some theoretical aspects of aeronautical engineering to see if she wanted to go back to theoretical research. “He was always a wonderful teacher, but for working together on problems it just didn’t work. He expected me to understand everything he did, but I was not allowed to disagree. It’s not that he didn’t hear what I said, he just sort of dismissed it. And he was giving me very plebian things to do, like reworking French technical reports. I don’t know. It’s the single thing that has bothered me most about my relations with my father. As a child, I didn’t know my mother could think—she was lovely and charming and quick tempered—but my father was really a hero to me. So after that I decided to abandon theoretical work and I joined a computer company.” Alice was married at that time to Paul, who was an industrial designer and a colleague. Since then, she has had her most intense relationships with scientists and engineers, men with whom she could share the pleasures of solving technical problems.
    Men and women often do their best work in tandem, with a clear sense of common direction and a degree of complementarity that allows not only a division of labor but contrasting approaches to the same problem. Work relationships of any kind are enlivened by difference combined with mutual commitment. Most societies, however, separate the work of men and women when production is no longer based in the family; the tendency is to regard passion or tenderness as distractions. Although we are extraordinarily romantic about marriage, we are curiously blind to the joys and benefits of real partnership. Modern ideas about the relationship between work and home, with a monetary value put on work and a tendency to devalue all forms of labor that do not bring in money, have sharpened this division. What is perhaps more serious is the fact that these separations, like the exclusion of the talents of large sections of the population, have caused us to forego important kinds of creativity. As I talked to my friends about their lives, I was as sharply struck by the diversity of partnerships as by the ingenuity shown in the combination of different kinds of commitments, including the work of homemaking and relationship building, the caring needed to nurture ideas and institutions.
    When Jack and Alice met at a party in 1979, Alice was at a point of transition. She was about to leave a job, change apartments, and acknowledge the end of a relationship that had been both romantic and collegial. Jack chimed in on a conversation between Alice and the hostess, who was also an engineer. The conversation moved from engineering careers to gastronomy, both of which fascinated him. Alice found him outrageous and outrageously attractive wearing his ragged jeans, enthusiastically attacking the buffet. They met for lunch and soon became lovers.
    Jack was living with his wife, Jean, and their two daughters in Cambridge. The affair with “Lady Alice” appeared to fit into a pattern which Jack told Alice had existed for a long time in his family, describing his household as an open marriage sustained by shared parenthood. When I went to Amherst, Barkev became a long-term weekday bachelor, and on the evenings when Jean worked late, Jack would fix lavish dinners for Barkev and Alice, or the three of them would cook together in his cramped Cambridge house, whose center was clearly the kitchen. The household seemed to settle into an amicable understanding about when Jack would be with his wife and daughters, when Jack would be with Alice, and when everyone would be together with the family and a multitude of other guests coming and going, Sunday-night barbecues in the yard with a butterflied leg of lamb and an extravagant series of different wines.
    In December 1981, the equilibrium in another part of Jack’s life fell apart. Orion Research, the company he had founded to design and manufacture scientific instruments, had absorbed his and Jean’s energies for years. Eventually, Jean became a professional counselor working in the gay community. Jack had remained with Orion, and it became his whole life. It had been successful and had expanded, but in the process Jack had lost majority ownership. There were enough people made uneasy by Jack’s iconoclastic style to support an ambitious coup by a vice president, who was able to point to the familiar problems