Read Wetware for Free Online Page A

around a dull gray table.
    The head of each section (Currency, Trade, World Interest Rates, Stock, Futures) named one item that was cause for concern. Bad loans in Russia, an attempt to corner the futures market in copper in Brazil, erratic and seemingly chaotic movement in the Asian stock exchanges, the fact that some currency speculators had started to move against the UAD (United Asian Dollar, a currency modeled on the euro). Sometimes, when a section head was worried, the speech went on too long. And when they were close to panic, they tried to be cool, but this only made matters worse, since subdued hysteria only accentuated it. At these moments it was as though someone had released a rattlesnake on the floor and everyone tried to ignore it. When a department head went on too long, Blaine raised his fingers in a small gesture of dismissal and said, “I understand. Next.”
    At the end of the day, he asked his secretary if Leslie Carr had called, and he was told that she had and that he could reach her at home. He dialed her on his private phone, where he had put her number in its memory, idly wondering, as he did so, how long it would stay there. Blaine was not used to casual affairs, and so his curiosity was more a matter of ignorance than experience. It went without saying that the schedule of his life—the meetings, the time spent waiting for news of the markets, the execution of his strategies (talk or action)—established the hours in which he was able to see Carr.
    When they agreed to have dinner, she came to his apartment and kissed him at the door. He took her coat. They went into the library and sat in the comforting browns and greens, in the glow of the lights, beyond which the gilt titles of books gleamed. They heard the domestic clatter as the housekeeper worked in the kitchen, and as they sat together, Carr having a brandy and swirling the fluid around and watching the film of it on the crystal glass Blaine pressed into her hand, she found that she began to relax, and there, in that comfortable room, she realized how brittle and tense she had been during the day. Her relaxation came in a series of steps, the first one being his call. Then she went home and bathed and came to his apartment, getting a little relief at each ritualized moment. It built as she came into the lobby and then increased as she rose up to the twelfth floor, and continued through the drink and was amplified at dinner, a meal that they found set for them in the dining room. White china, delicate glasses, the roast beef, or pheasant, or venison on a silver platter, and the creamed spinach or roast potatoes or Yorkshire pudding in a silver bowl with a silver lid.
    After dinner, with the taste of a chocolate soufflé in her mouth and the tickle of champagne in her nose, they went into his room with its enormous bed, and out the window she saw that blue light from distant office buildings. She removed her dress and her bland, black underwear and stood there with her skin awash in the blue tint from the distant light. The sheets were Egyptian linen, and they were tinted blue in that romantic light. He sat down next to her, the enormous bed creaking with a piercing intimacy. It was the small, private sound she had been waiting for all her life. On the first night there, she started with what she thought of as her tricks, which she did with the intensity of someone beginning a long sprint, but after a few minutes Blaine said, “Shhh. Don’t worry. I just like being with you. Here. Let me put my arm around you.” She sat back and looked at the lights, concentrated on letting him hold her or whisper in her ear, all the while feeling that relaxation turn into a warmth and a slowly building intensity that left her mystified. When she fell asleep it was in the fading rustle of the Egyptian linen and in that blue tint from the light outside.
    From time to time, when she came home from work, she found a box of roses with the doorman of her