Composing a Life

of transition when a company becomes too large to reflect the vision of a single founder. In a sudden move, he and his cohorts presented themselves as acting for the good of the company, and, in the classic mode of coups, ended up occupying the positions of power themselves. Jack was informed that the board of directors no longer wanted him as president.
    Jack was devastated as the world he had built up crumbled. “He himself would never destroy anybody,” Alice said. “It just never really occurred to him that anyone could undermine him so. Orion meant so much to him. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that anyone whom he liked—loved, really—that they could remove the thing that was most important in his life. He was like a wild man, the pain was unbearable to watch. His mind was trying to think of solutions and they were wild, meshuga, because he was in so much pain.”
    In the weeks that followed, Jack zigzagged between gloom and the manic certainty that he had developed strategies to recover Orion, including an unsuccessful lawsuit. At that point, Alice decided that she could help by getting Jack involved in a new set of technological problems that would channel some of the energy he was putting into plots and counterplots and emotional turmoil. She persuaded him to go with her to various technical conferences and shows and started introducing him to her own area of specialization. Many years earlier a friend had commented to her, “The trouble with computers is not just that they are dumb. They are also blind, deaf, and quadriplegic.” Alice’s research for the space program and later for a medical-instrument company had zeroed in on questions of the human-machine interface, especially on ways to moderate that blindness, to make it possible to handle more visual information with computers. At the time she and Jack became lovers, she was working at Polaroid and had just completed the initial research on a system for computer-generated slides, eventually marketed under the trademark Palette.
    So Alice began to take Jack to trade shows. She was looking from the Polaroid point of view, always involving the transfer of information to film, when Jack suddenly said, “Hah! That’s what’s missing—the piece of paper. Why can’t we get all this very advanced visual material right onto plain paper?” Once Jack had identified a problem they could tackle, they rented space and persuaded a softwear designer to join them, becoming involved in a whole range of copying issues. Jack named the company Demonics, for “on-demand printing by electronics,” but it also referred to the printer’s devil Jack meant to replace, a multiple pun of the kind that delighted him. It was also a vintage specimen of Jack’s deviltry; in the same vein, Jack obtained quarters for the new company right next door to the Orion plant. Demonics started as a way of refocusing Jack’s energy; because it depended on both his entrepreneurial vision and Alice’s technical knowledge, it soon became a full-scale collaboration.
    I was following all this at a distance, as it evolved in a sort of counterpoint to my habitual patterns of relating professional and domestic life. Barkev would arrive each weekend, passing on Jack and Alice’s accounts of the drama episode by episode. Both of us were skeptical of their decision to start a company. Later, when Jack moved into Alice’s apartment, it seemed to us that they were overloading the relationship and that it would inevitably break down. To me, it echoed the intensity of my parents’ relationship, particularly when both of them were doing fieldwork; to Barkev, it went against the pattern he grew up with, which has always sounded to me like a long-term estrangement, lacking intimacy and held together for reasons of conviction. Even when we were first married, we looked with suspicion at couples who lived “in each other’s pockets” and did everything together. Our pattern, which involved spending months at a time apart, has nevertheless proved curiously resilient.
    Each of the women I talked to has experimented with combinations of work and intimacy. We form a spectrum ranging from mutual support of separate activities to Alice and Jack’s compacted layers of involvement. There is a special dynamic in hard creative work alongside someone you are in love with. The ideas flow differently, and there is a common vividness. In heterosexual couples, collaboration is valuable because