From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AMANDA.BRIGHT@HOME
Chapter 2
Justice takes on Megabyte, a little too much wine, a crowded restaurant and feeling alone.
Click here to read Chapter 1.
Amanda arrived at the restaurant shortly after 6:30. "The Sheik Kabob" was the place they went on the rare occasions they could afford to go out for dinner. It was only a few blocks away from their house, in a grotty stretch of shop fronts that had been converted into a grotty stretch of eateries. On a warm June night like this, you could sit outside under a ripped awning and sagging strings of Christmas lights and sear your tongue on greasy lamb vindaloo, or, next door, wait for your order of soggy Pad Thai while staring into murky aquariums of condemned lobsters and glum fish. When Bob and Amanda first moved into the neighborhood, they had diligently sampled every restaurant before settling upon the "Sheik Kabob" as the place in which they were least likely to contract ptomaine poisoning. A proud array of yellowed reviews taped to its front window declared it one of Washington's "Top 100 Cheap Eats" of 1982.
The tiny front entry was already jammed with people waiting for tables. Amanda politely elbowed her way in, muttering "excuse me" and "so sorry." She found Bob standing at the bar amidst a group of young men assessing their nightly vodkas. A muted game of baseball played itself out, unwatched, on a television dangling above their heads, while a harassed-looking maître d' hollered out the names of the lucky few cleared for landing at tables in the back.
"How long is the wait?" Amanda called to Bob, by way of greeting.
"He said 15 minutes," Bob shouted back over the head of a man beside him. "It may be longer," he added as she drew near. "I just got here."
She squeezed in beside him and felt, as always, the immediate relief of his burly presence. She loved meeting him this way, in a restaurant after work, as she had done when they were dating. Bob complained about having to wear a suit and tie to the office, but she liked it: He seemed worldly, grown-up, and--dare she think it?--manly and authoritative. Indeed, his arrival home at the end of the day was something she only half-jokingly likened to the landing of the Marines. Almost instantly, order and discipline would be restored amongst the rebellious natives, and she would greet him like a besieged and grateful villager. For some reason--a reason her egalitarian upbringing prevented her from probing too deeply--rioting children instantly fell into line at his command. They could be made to do all kinds of astonishing tasks they had seemed incapable of only 10 minutes earlier, such as going to play in their rooms, picking up their toys, leaving mommy alone, etc.
As for Amanda, she wore what she usually did on a casual evening out: a pair of baggy batik drawstring trousers, a white cotton T-shirt, and sandals. She'd put almost no further effort into her appearance, except to pull back her unruly muddy brown hair with a plastic clip and smear her lips lightly with clear gloss. Amanda had long ceased to compete with the moussed hair and stockinged legs of the after-work women. She possessed a whole closet full of good suits that grew more hopelessly outdated every year--padded shoulders, zippers, mini-skirts, all very 1980s. Every fall she vowed to give them away to charity, and every fall she hesitated. What if she were invited to a luncheon, or a meeting? What if she decided to return to work? These clothes might come back into fashion. They could be altered. And so the suits remained, hanging in their dry-cleaning bags like bodies in cryogenic suspension, awaiting the moment when they might see life again.
"We could go next door for Thai," Bob said loudly, through cupped hands.
"No," Amanda replied, remembering the sight of her stomach in a bathing suit earlier that afternoon. "Let's wait a few more minutes. I feel like one of their salad platters."
Bob nodded as if he'd heard her. By the time they were finally led to a table, they'd each worked their way through two glasses of the house's sour white (not a patch on that Californian stuff she'd been guzzling at Christine's). Amanda felt heavy, sluggish; the tiny buzz saws and hammers that had set to work on her brain after leaving Christine's returned to punch through her skull.
"You OK?" Bob asked as they sat down.
"Just tired."
Bob grasped her hand across the table. "Well, this news should cheer you up."
"I just got word from Frank . . ." Bob began. He was cut off by the arrival of a waiter, who thrust two oversized, leather-bound menus between them. "Vould you like to ear our speshools thiz ev'ning?"
Bob glared at the waiter, an affable, if overworked-looking, man wearing the red waistcoat, black bow tie, and green trousers of a lawn jockey.
"I think we know what we're going to have," Bob said tersely, taking the menus in his hand. "My wife will have a large Mediterranean salad, and I'll have the mixed shish kebab platter, thank you."
Bob turned to her. "Would you like anything more to drink?"
"No thank you," she said curtly. "Water is fine."
Bob shot her a quizzical look. "In that case I'll just have a beer," he told the waiter, handing him the menus.
"Are you angry with me?" Bob asked when the waiter had disappeared.
"No, no, not at all," said Amanda, rubbing her face wearily. "It's just--well, you didn't have to be rude to him, you know. He was only doing his job." What she was really trying to suppress was her irritation with him for ordering for her.
"Rude? I wasn't rude," Bob said defensively. "I just don't appreciate being cut dead in the middle of a sentence--an important sentence I might add--by an impatient waiter dropping a ten-pound menu in my face. Why don't they ever teach them--at Abdul's waitering school or wherever the hell they go--to pause and wait for a break in the conversation? Why do they always have to barge in?"
"That's really--really--oh." Amanda stared at him, hurt and astonished "I can't believe you'd say something like that. About someone who obviously works so hard for a living--for, like, sub-minimum wage. Just because he doesn't come from the same background as you. Just because he wasn't taught the same manners as you . . ."
"Amanda please," Bob said gently, taking her hand again. "Let's not turn this into a lecture on the evils of Western privilege. A) You know me better than that, and B) I have very important news I want to tell you. Please?"
Amanda took a sip of water and nodded, but removed her hand from his grasp.
"Word at the department is this," Bob said, lowering his voice. "Frank"--Frank was Bob's boss, Frank Sussman, head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division--"has agreed to launch a serious investigation into Megabyte's activities. Finally! It took some pressure from the Judiciary committee--the Senate may be holding its own inquiry by the way--but Frank now says that what Megabyte has been doing warrants DOJ action, a possible antitrust suit and--wait for it!--I'm going to be leading the investigation."
Amanda tensed. "Are you serious?"
Bob smiled. "Very serious."
This time they barely noticed when the waiter arrived with their food. Bob took to his speared meat like a happy savage while Amanda pushed hummus on to some pita. For the next few minutes the two ate in thoughtful silence. Amanda understood what a triumph this was for Bob. He had spent the past two years looking into the unsavory business tactics of the largest software manufacturer in the country. His efforts had been received with total indifference by his superiors, many of them holdovers from the last Republican administration. Amanda herself had begun to doubt that Bob would ever turn up solid evidence against Megabyte, although she was readily prepared to believe the worst of the accusations against the company: that it was maintaining a monopoly by thuggishly threatening its distributors if they did business with smaller, rival firms.
Of course the case was more complicated than that, and because it involved computers, it was filled with jargon and terms Amanda didn't fully grasp. Bob had once tried to explain the case to Amanda by sketching it on a paper napkin in this very restaurant. He used terms like "bundling browsers" and "licensing source codes" and "application programming interfaces" ("Those are called APIs," Bob said helpfully) and drew ballpoint arrows shooting this way and that. None of it made much sense except for Bob's analogy that Megabyte was "the Standard Oil" of our time, with its owner a former hippie named Mike Frith, standing in for the top-hatted, greedy, and merciless John D. Rockefeller. That Amanda got. She was proud that Bob saw it before anyone else--or anyone else, at least, in the Justice department.
For the past couple of years Bob had worked closely with a lawyer from Silicon Valley who represented some of the smaller computer companies Megabyte wanted to consume. This lawyer, as Bob had described him, was not your usual, high-priced attorney from Lawsuits 'R' Us. Indeed, Bob once confessed to Amanda that he dreaded ever having to bring this lawyer to the DOJ to meet the rest of his colleagues. Five minutes with "Sherwood J. Pressman" (and the lawyer insisted on using the whole ridiculous name down to the middle initial) would surely extinguish whatever sparks of interest Bob had managed to kindle.
Sherwood J. Pressman was a five-foot-three package of paranoia who spoke in long paragraphs that sounded as if they had been borrowed from the pages of an overwritten potboiler. Which, in fact, they were. Feeling that his clients' claims were not regarded with sufficient seriousness, Pressman crafted them into an extraordinary--and legally unprecedented--"non-fiction thriller," which he hoped some sympathetic editor would publish as a book. No one did. But the document circulated for some time in Silicon Valley, and eventually a copy found its way to Bob's desk. Bob was intrigued, if skeptical ("I find it hard to believe that even Mike Frith would say something as hokey as 'If you don't do what we say, we'll cut off your air supply,' " Bob sighed, as he read through the manuscript one evening in bed).
But as Bob dug through the book's claims and contacted the companies involved, he became convinced that there was something to it. Still, it was hard for him to transcend Pressman's personality. Bob met Pressman surreptitiously at a New Age coffee shop whenever the lawyer came to Washington, and prayed they wouldn't bump into one of his colleagues. They never did--Bob's colleagues hated the overpriced, tar-flavored drinks the shop served, preferring the watery stuff dispensed at the DOJ cafeteria. Pressman affronted even Amanda, whose own mildly activist days on campus had instilled in her a high tolerance for eccentricity in a good cause. Pressman was obsessed with Megabyte, and frequently called Bob in the middle of the night to describe its latest atrocity. Amanda had learned to hand over the phone without answering when it flashed Pressman's number, and she suppressed her exasperation when the freshly woken baby was squalling and her own sleep had been disrupted for the fourth time that night. That this had all at last come to something--well, that was a surprise.
Bob swallowed his mouthful of meat and took a sip of his beer. "A couple of things, I think," he said. "They just sort of came together. First, as you know, we got Frank. He's much more into these things than Goldsmith"--Bob's last boss--"ever was. He's pretty pissed that Megabyte just announced it's going to launch MB-98, its new software, with all these bells and whistles that violate pretty much every promise the company had made to DOJ. And I think I told you we got the attorney general from Texas on our side as well. There are a couple of big high-tech companies in his state, and they're furious with Megabyte. They say they're prepared to go on the record, which has been a problem because everyone's so frightened. And if the big guys go on the record, we can get the little guys to go along too. They're already organizing themselves into a lobby group. Certainly, that's what got the Senate involved. There may be hearings."
"Bob, this is simply amazing," Amanda said. "I can hardly believe it."
"Well believe it." He popped an olive in his mouth with the sassy confidence of a high school kid scoring a basket. He took her hand again and squeezed it. "The bad news is that you're not going to see much of me over the next few weeks--except on television. I'll be the shadowy guy standing behind Frank Sussman."
"That's OK," she said, hoping she sounded as if she meant it. "We'll manage." She hoped she did mean it. She didn't wish to be ungenerous towards Bob, or dampen his excitement. She was proud of him--her Bob taking on Megabyte! But this news was also unlike anything they had ever shared together. Until now, they'd always walked side by side through their marriage. Even when Amanda quit her job, she'd felt (after much reassurance from Bob) that she'd only made a lateral move, not a downward one. She toiled away running their home while he toiled away as an underling at Justice. Now there was this seismic shift, and she didn't know if she'd still be left standing on his level after the Earth had finished moving. She wiped up the last smear of hummus with her bread.
How was your day, by the way?" he asked solicitously. "You look exhausted."
Amanda felt a guilty rush. What would Bob think about the pool, the club, the afternoon drinking at Christine's house?
"You know," she said, wearily. "The usual."
Miss Crittenden, a Washington resident, is the author of "What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman." You can write to her at dcrittenden@amandabright.com.
To read Chapter 3, click here.
