Composing a Life

partially partitioned kitchen area, and a single bedroom—Jack, who occupied the space of five people with his bursts of enthusiasm and vehemence, his waving arms, and his desire to prepare feasts for multitudes. Alice suddenly found that her love affair had mushroomed into every corner of her life. Meantime, she was carrying the main R&D load at work, desperately trying to develop a product before the money ran out.
    For her birthday, Jack bought Alice a television, “because I didn’t have one and he liked to watch TV, and I cried. All at once he was moving in, and he was going to change my life and fill it up with noise and clutter from other people, and I was just kind of the maid. So the next thing is, I do a big birthday party for his two girls and I work real hard—I’m always obsessed when I’m doing food—and I’m really stressed out at work and tired and no one is helping. So I go into the bedroom and put on walking shoes and leave. I walk for a couple of hours and cool down, and when I come back there’s nobody there but Jack. He’s washing the dishes and he’s looking so hurt that I can’t stand it and I immediately start to cry. I say, I was just trying to make myself feel good, not to hurt you, and he’s just so hurt, so cute.”
    After that, Jack went househunting, selling his Orion stock at the top of its market value. He had maintained a paradoxical image of penury and extravagance during all the years we had known him; now, he bought a palatial estate in Dover, called Riverbend because the Charles River curved gracefully across the bottom of its broad landscaped lawns. There was a small formal garden with a cast-iron statue of a rooster, two wild Canadian geese that lived at the river’s edge and came to the kitchen door for handouts every morning, and an extensive stable that became the home for the pair of peacocks that Jean gave him as a housewarming present. Above all, there were enough rooms for solitude. When Alice moved in with her harpsichord she also kept her North End apartment as a pied-à-terre where they could stay after working late in the city and a place she could retreat to by herself.
    Then began the siege—a desperate effort to build Demonics into a viable enterprise, while Jack’s money seemed to melt away on salaries and equipment. It was a race against time to develop the technology, with Jack peering over everyone’s shoulder and asking questions that reopened basic assumptions. The venture capitalists came and went, deciding one after the other that the whole project was too risky for them: Jack was seen as too much of a maverick, Alice’s role was too ambiguous. During this period, one venture capitalist explained to Alice that given the Orion history, Jack would never get financing in Boston. (After Jack’s death, when Alice became CEO, another venture capitalist was kind enough to explain to Alice that the company would never get financing under her leadership because she was a woman.) When Jack had put in two million dollars from the sale of his Orion stock and the money was almost gone, the staff of the company, now consisting of a dozen people, took across-the-board salary cuts. The most ominous fact was that Jack had poured in the money from the sale of the Orion stock without having paid capital-gains taxes.
    The break barely came in time. A Japanese company, Canon, recognized the complementarity between the Demonics technology and their new-generation copiers. They moved toward a multilayered relationship that would begin with a preliminary technology-transfer contract, with Demonics working on a set of Canon’s technical problems. Jack went on a negotiating trip to Japan in February 1985 and on a second one in April. He came back knowing they had won a breathing space and he would not go to jail for his unpaid taxes, and prepared a celebratory dinner of mussels and grilled salmon and fine wine with Alice and Barkev. The next afternoon, Jack died.
    During his battle for professional survival, Jack had put off the details of divorce and remarriage and writing a new will, so he left Alice neither an heir nor a widow. She moved quickly out of Riverbend, taking nothing except what was indisputably her property: her personal possessions, her harpsichord, and a stray dog that had adopted her and Jack. Jack’s portrait went up on the wall of her North End condo and his pillow, with a lingering scent of his presence, stayed in her bed. When she woke in