We went to a movie. He held my hand all through the show. Afterwards he waited for me outside the ladies' room. When I walked back out into the lobby, there was Brian leaning against a wall, with all the other boyfriends. I felt strangely pleased at the sight of him, at his highschoolish, date-night good manners. It wasn't nostalgia- I had been a sullen, rebellious girl who drove off any boy who tried to get within a foot of me. No, it wasn't memory but the brief idea of some other life entirely. As he put his arm around me to make our way out, I had time to regret the morose young woman I'd been; to wish I had let a few more boys into my life to hold my hand at the movies and wait for me outside the ladies' .

Before I finally fell asleep, I remembered a conversation I'd had with an old friend , the one who recruited me into the communist party. We had both been pretty wild in our youth. I used to kid her that she'd slept with everybody-and she practically had. "How did we do it?" I asked her. "How did have so many lovers? And how did we go so blithely from one to the next?"

"You have it wrong," she said. "We weren't blithe. We suffered. We fell in love with all of them."

"Oh, right," I said. "I remember now."

I'll start to worry about the payroll clerks using the software I design . I'll wonder what I'm doing helping the IRS collect taxes. It will bother me that so many entities-employer, software company, bank, IRS-know so much about the simple act of someone getting paid for labor delivered. I'll think about the strange path of a paycheck direct-deposit, how it goes from employer to bank, company to company, while the person being paid is just a blip, the recipient's account a temporary way station, as the money flows through the bank's hands into the hands of a borrower, then out again through the great engine of commerce.

And I'll have to muddle through without certainties. Without my father's belief that the machinery of capital, if you worked hard and long, was benign in the long run, so benign you could even own a piece of it. Without my generation's macho leftism, which made us think we could smash the machine and build a better one. Without Brian's cocksureness that he was smart enough to know all the machine's little secrets, and so control it.