A Truck Full of Money (13 page)

Interleaf's offices occupied four floors, with the executives up top and the programmers at the bottom. You descended from a land of suits and dresses, potted plants, and sparkling clean desks, through an intermediate layer of ordinary decor, and finally arrived at software-engineering world, a crowded warren of cubicles and offices, with equipment and cardboard boxes scattered here and there. It was a place where you might pass a dog lying in a doorway, encounter a young man padding down a hallway in bare feet, spot a fish tank in a cubicle, startle at the squawk of a parrot from behind an office door.

Brenda White had started work on an upper floor, in accounts payable. She was in her twenties, a small, trim woman with warm brown eyes. She had gone to college at the main UMass campus in Amherst and had taken some programming courses there. She had liked them but ended up majoring in economics. She didn't much care for the subject or her job, but the boss of Interleaf told her that if she stuck it out in accounting for six months, she could pick her next assignment. One day in the cafeteria, she overheard a conversation among programmers. They sounded interesting. When her six months were up, she ventured, partly on a hunch, all the way downstairs to engineering.

At first Brenda worked as an assistant to the head of engineering services, a former philosophy major and part-time musician named Joe Mahoney, known informally as the vice president of vocabulary. Under Joe, Brenda began to make a new beginning as a coder. She found a manual for Lisp, and every programmer she asked for help seemed happy to oblige. Soon she was writing small programs in Lisp to automate Joe's email and several of his administrative chores, all to Joe's surprise. Her code was clever, he thought, not the sort of thing you'd expect from someone hired as an entry-level accountant. Why had she written it? “Why wouldn't I?” she replied. “It makes my life easier.” Her cheekiness delighted Joe. “Defensive, wiseass wit,” he remembered thinking. “She's probably got a one-fifty IQ. She's an autodidact.”

Joe had created and was running Interleaf's quality assurance team, a group of engineers who tested the programmers' code. Brenda volunteered to be a QA engineer. She took to the work at once. She felt she had a knack for it. Women had played crucial roles in the creation of the computer age, but by this time there wasn't much in the way of women's equality anywhere in hardware or software companies, or in the classrooms that fed them. On many scores, Interleaf was more progressive than most. But even at Interleaf it was mostly men who wrote code and women who tested it. One executive described quality assurance engineers as “handmaidens.”

Brenda would have raised her eyebrows at the notion. She was working among many brilliant programmers, in a role that often made her feel like a student—a student on her way to becoming a connoisseur of code, rating what she read by the relative absence of bugs in a program, the ease with which the code allowed bugs to be fixed, how much space the code took up, how well the parts of a program meshed with each other, how easy the whole thing was to grok. After a while she could study a piece of code and know which of several programmers had written it. Reading a well-wrought subroutine felt at times like going to an art museum. “My body just reacts to it,” she'd say. She didn't consider herself an expert judge, but the best coders at Interleaf were heroes to her. Outside of work, Brenda sometimes heard the tribe of software engineers labeled “nerdy,” and she would think,
But we're doing such cool things
—things like
WYSIWYG
interfaces and automatic pagination, which touched and improved the lives of people using their software, and always new things to come.

The programmers struck her as remarkably open and honest: “They just want to solve a problem, and in a clean way. They're creative and sort of innocent.” And yet they also seemed very sophisticated.

Her father had died when she was a baby. Her mother had remarried, and Brenda had grown up in an amalgamated family of six kids. They weren't poor, but six children had meant a tight budget, which had meant for instance that she had to go to the state university, where tuition was relatively low. (She remembered her mother telling her, “You can apply to any college you want, but you're going to UMass.”)

In Brenda's family, even bagels had been exotic—“Jewish food.” Now she was in Cambridge, going out to lunch from time to time with engineers and discovering there was such a thing as Indian cuisine and that she liked it. She had suffered some anxiety as a child and teenager, chiefly the occasional but frightening feeling that she was watching life from a distance, not just other people but herself as well. She felt she couldn't talk about this to her parents or her siblings, and when she tried to tell friends they were simply puzzled, which was worse because it made her feel like an oddity. No one she had known in school or college went to a therapist, not so far as she knew. But here at Interleaf engineering, she often heard colleagues talk openly about their disorders. They'd end conversations saying, “I have therapy. I gotta go,” just as if there was nothing to be ashamed of in visiting a therapist. She had never heard people upstairs in sales and marketing talk about therapy. Down here, she even met people who talked openly about being gay.

In Joe Mahoney's regime, most of the anointed coders, the members of the elite team, were assigned their own QA engineer. The best pairings married their professional identities. In a few cases, the relationship turned into an actual marriage. But when the young engineer Paul English arrived and Joe assigned Brenda to work with him, romance was off the table. Paul was happily married and so was Brenda—very happily married to a building contractor, a generous man with legions of friends, whose number soon included Paul. (Paul would say, “He's the guy that if you broke down at three in the morning and you're in Providence and it's January and it's icy rain, you want to have his number in your cellphone.”)

Brenda hadn't heard anything about Paul. She knew only that he would be writing a lot of the new Lisp code for the big revision of Interleaf's software, called Active Documents. She looked forward to working more deeply with Lisp and to searching for bugs in the code of another hotshot programmer. This felt in part like a game, a friendly competition—the “scrappy UMass grad,” as she thought of herself, finding bugs in the code of guys with “cred,” with advanced degrees in programming. It was wonderful, triumphant fun to sit down with a programmer who thought his code was perfect and say to him, “Oh, really? But what about this?”

At first her job was to write bits of code that would test the much more complex code that Paul was writing. She would type up her test code on her computer, send it to Paul, and then join him in his cubicle, three head-high walls enclosing a table. All the engineers named their computers—like pets, Brenda thought. The CTO, Steve Pelletier, named his machine Mulch. She called hers Spanky. And Paul's, as ever, was Speed. He'd bring up both his code and hers and place them side-by-side on Speed's screen. She always enjoyed the times when her test code made his code malfunction, when she could point at the two sets of code on the screen and say, “I found this problem. Why isn't this working?” He always took it well, but in truth this didn't happen often. He wrote very solid code, she thought. Sometimes, she'd deliver the cheery news of a bug and he would peer at the screen and say, “Yes, I accept the fact you found problems with my code, and I'll fix those, but let's look at your code.” She didn't feel he was saying, “Your code has problems, too,” but rather, “Let me show you something.” Invariably, he praised her for her efforts.

As the work progressed, she began to write more substantial programs, to test the concept behind Active Documents. She was the very first person writing in this new system. When she got stuck, she'd go to Paul's cubicle for help. She would explain what she was trying to do. And Paul would stare for a moment at her program on Speed's screen, and then he would put his fingers on his keyboard and something astonishing would happen. The word that came to her mind was “whirlwind.”

Like all members of his guild, Paul used “chorded” keyboard commands. To save a document, for instance, you don't bother with a cumbersome mouse. You press a finger down on one of the computer's nonalphanumeric keys, such as Option or Control, and with another finger you hit the S key. Paul had added at least one hundred chorded keyboard commands to his editing program. Partly thanks to them, he typed fast—120 words a minute, by his own calculation. And he wasn't just copying out a term paper. He was inventing complicated software.

Brenda would watch as his fingers flew around the keyboard, her lines of code vanishing from the screen and his new lines appearing. When he finished—rarely more than ten minutes later—she would return to her own desk and study his revision. “Oh, I see why he did that.”

Irritability often accompanies hypomania, but Paul almost never felt it when he was “keyboarding up” with someone else, and he never turned it on Brenda. She was an eager and diligent student, she was his partner, and she was very clever. He had long since noticed that she was nice to look at. She didn't wear makeup, at least so far as he could tell. She was pretty, certainly, and to most appearances confident, but he sensed something wounded in her. Maybe the circumstances—their both being newly married—freed him from any feelings of sexual attraction.

One day, he or Brenda—neither could remember which—made a remark about having grown up in a big Catholic family. They compared notes. They started swapping stories. He'd tell a story about one of his brothers, maybe Danny's bottle rocket device. She'd say, “You think that's bad?” and then tell a story of her own. Funny stories soon gave way to sadder ones, and to a sense that they had both been sensitive kids with harried parents, in families too large to serve their particular needs, families in which, as Brenda would say, “It was like, just suck it up, take an aspirin.”

This was the beginning of a long conversation. When Brenda brought her code to Paul in his cubicle, they talked about programming mainly. But they went out to lunch about once a week, and then they often shared their stories about anxiety, panic, depression. Paul didn't tell her about his diagnosis, but he described the hopelessness that sometimes settled over him—how on some nights he would sit by a window, looking out for hours, feeling paralyzed, waiting for the sun to free him. Most people she knew kept problems like that secret, usually out of shame, she thought. Here was someone willing to tell her, even sometimes with tears in his eyes, about his pain. It was a gift, and she returned it, telling him about her times of feeling separated from herself and everyone around her. No one had ever understood how much those feelings scared her, but Paul clearly did. He would listen, he was always interested. Brenda thought, “He gets that part of me.” Before she'd married her husband, she had found it necessary to ask a girlfriend if he was handsome. Paul probably also fit “in the category of a handsome man,” but that didn't matter. “I was so happy in my marriage,” she later said. “And it didn't ever even occur to me that, Oh my God, maybe I should be with
this
man. It was more like, I feel so happy to have met somebody who's felt this kind of terror that mental issues can present to you.” For his part, Paul thought Brenda was one of the most introspective people he'd ever met, and for that reason “fascinating.”

When someone new arrived, Paul, she noticed, often talked as if he'd never met such a splendid person before, and within a week or a month someone else would arrive and fall into what she called Paul's spotlight. She told him he had “a pedestal complex.” She wondered if she would fall off. He gave her no reason to think so, but their circumstances began to change. In 1991, about two years after she and Paul started working together, Joe Mahoney and some other executives left the company. In the reorganization, Paul became a manager. Meanwhile, Brenda had her first child. After her leave, she came to the office occasionally, but mostly she worked part-time from home. She and Paul still checked in on each other. He would ask her, “How you doin'?” She knew the question wasn't idle. But she saw him less and less. She didn't regret having children, far from it, but she did look fondly on her first years among programmers and on her sessions with Paul. “I lost my coding buddy,” she would say. “It was sad.”