Usually this took till noon, and he would go to lunch with a group of programmers and that was the good time during the day, because he wasn't lying to anybody then, he wasn't hiding anything, he was just himself, talking about stuff with these guys. It dawned on him during one of those lunches, as they sat there bantering with each other or swapping stories across the table at Swensen's or Pizza Inn or Libby Hill, that this was really the first time in his life that he had been part of a group of guys like this. He had never been an athlete, part of the team or even part of a pickup game at school or in the neighborhood. His friends during his school years had always been girls. He liked the way they talked, he had things to say to them. And they didn't despise him for being smart and getting good grades, they weren't ashamed being smart the mselves, and so they could talk about ideas in a way that he never heard guys talking about anything, as if they mattered, as if they cared. His only male friends during high school and on into college had been the few who were like him, who hung out with the smart girls.
But these programmers were all male, and it was definitely a male kind of conversation, and yet there was none of that hierarchical one-upmanship that had made Step so uncomfortable with "the guys" in school. Or rather, there was, but it was centered around programming rather than athletics or cars, and on that playing field Step was a star-with Gallowglass, he shared the preeminent position in the hierarchy, and since he and Glass got along so well themselves there was no rivalry at all. Step belonged, and it felt good.
Lunch ended, though-supposedly after half an hour, but they always took an hour or more-and then back they went to Eight Bits Inc., where now Step usually went to his own office and actually worked on manuals, often for ga mes that weren't even finished yet. In fact, in the process of writing the manual he would really be designing the game, describing rules and features of the game that the programmer hadn't yet thought of. Or if he was writing about a game that was nearly done, he'd play the game over and over again to find bugs in the code or annoyances in the play of the game. Then he'd make notes and pass them on to the programmers.
Because every game had to pass through his hands in order to get its documentation written, Step had his finger on the pulse of every project in the company. He knew, he knew what was going on. And since Dicky did not, it meant that in a way Step was the real head of the creative division of Eight Bits Inc. Dicky had the title and the salary and the Sunday afternoon visits with Ray Keene at the Magazine Rack, but Step had the respect and the influence and-most important to him- the results, the games with his fingerprints all over them.
The only program he never fiddled with was Scribe 64. That was Glass's bailiwick, and Step had no intention of intruding. He was writing the documentation for the new update, which was adding right-and- left justification and Glass's new 60-character screen, and while he still tested it and found bugs and passed them on to Glass, Step never, never touched the code. Because he didn't need to-Glass knew what he was doing. And because that was the unspoken basis of their alliance, that Step would do nothing to weaken Glass's position at Eight Bits Inc. So even when Step found a bug, he would pass the information to Glass in private, never giving a clue to anybody else that there had been the slightest flaw in the kid's original code.
Five o'clock came and went every day, but it had nothing to do with Step's schedule. He was always in the middle of something. There was always a section of code that he had to finish fiddling with before he went home, so he could leave it for the programmer to look at in the morning. Or a game that he had to finish play-testing at the highest levels, while the programmer hung 'around and kibitzed with him. Supper-time meant going around the corner to the candy machine and dropping in quarters. After a l few candy bars there'd be a bag of potato chips because there was once a potato involved, which made it health food. And then a can of pop or even tomato juice, when Step was feeling really unrighteous about what he was doing to his body.
He was gaining weight, he could feel it. Some of his shirts were beginning to show a gap between the buttons when he sat down. His belt was getting less comfortable; he let it out a notch. Six weeks, and he was going to seed. But when during the day could he get any exercise? Back in Indiana he had ridden his bike fifty miles a week during the warm months and kept up on the exercise bike in the winter, but he could do that because he was keeping an academic schedule, which gave him plenty of free daylight hours.
Seven, eight, nine o'clock at night, depending on how stub born the bug was or how fascinating the game, and Step would at last go outside into the darkness and find the Renault, pop the locks and climb in. Then he'd head for home, saying to himself, I should have gotten away sooner, I should have been home for dinner. Most nights the kids were already in bed, or going to beds, before he got there; he could kiss them goodnight and hear a little bit about their day, but that was it, that was all.
It took him hours to unwind after the intensity of the day. He and DeAnne would talk, and now and then he'd help her fold laundry or do up the dishes from a dinner that he hadn't eaten, and sometimes she would have saved him something from dinner and then he'd eat it while they talked, even though he wasn't hungry. She always looked so tired, and it made him feel terrible. She was pregnant, after all, and even though this pregnancy hadn't had anything like the horrible morning sickness of the first three, he knew that it always left her feeling wrung out. When the other kids were on the way, Step had been home to take up the slack. He was no help now. In fact, he suspected that he was another drain on her energy, like the kids. She'd just be getting them down to bed, about to have a few moments to herself after having been on all day, and here came hubby, home from work and ready to be entertained.
So he tried to break away from her fairly early, to let her get to bed and get the sleep she needed while he wound himself down from the tension of the day. He watched TV, or went to bed and read a book. DeAnne would watch TV with him sometimes, but she didn't really engage with most shows-she had enjoyed
"M*A*S*H," but they'd had the final episode of that, and Step hadn't even been home to watch it with her. And when they lay in bed together, reading, she was so tired that he just didn't have the heart to make her stay awake just to make love, not unless she actually initiated it herself, which wasn't often. Even when she tried to stay awake to read something- he had bought her the new Anne Tyler novel, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, as soon as it came out in paperback-she'd end up asleep in moments, the book fallen over on her chest; he'd get up, slide her glasses off and lay them on top of the book on her nightstand, turn off her light, and then come back around to his side of the bed. Sacrificing his own sexual hunger for her sake made him feel both righteous and frustrated, a terrible combination because whatever satisfaction he gut from knowing he had let her have the sleep she needed so badly did nothing to assuage his longing for sexual release. I could sleep myself, he thought, if only she could see how much I need her; and then he felt guilty even for thinking that, because he didn't have to get up and feed the kids in the morning and get Stevie off to school, he didn't have to go through a day of constant housework and tending kids while carrying around this growth inside his belly that was sucking the energy out of him, so how could he dare to feel resentful that she was so tired, that she didn't reach out to him? Why couldn't he just be satisfied that he had let her sleep? Why couldn't he be satisfied?