When Rodney emerged innocently from the bathroom, wearing little-boy cotton pajamas and a fleck of toothpaste on his chin, I hated him as never in those years of entering his big house near the college, past the lawnmower and the oil cans in his garage, through the kitchen where he gobbled breakfast every day, past the shelf of his golf trophies, toward the mahogany guest bed. While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the center and let life come to him—so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.

Down in Nashua, as the Seventies dwindled into Jimmy Carter’s inflation and malaise, I lost track of the ins and outs of life in Pierce Junction. The possibility that Maureen and I might get together on a respectable basis had been early dismissed by her. Too many children, too much financial erosion, too much water over the dam. “Don’t you see, Marty?” she told me. “We’ve done it. We’d look at each other and all we’d see would be evidence of our sin!”

The quaint last word shocked me with the possibility that she—and Jeanne, and all the women—had been suffering in our sexual paradise, stressed and taxed by the divergence from monogamy. I felt insulted. So it was with, among other things, a pang of vengeful satisfaction that I heard of her sudden death, in a car driven late at night along Route 202 by, of all people, Spike Lancaster, a beefy, loud, hard-drinking restaurateur whose plain deficiencies had given Audrey, in our little set, a halo of forbearance. Spike and Audrey had nothing in common but bad eyesight. Maureen died, and he, the driver, came out of the crash with minor injuries and a rakish reputation that probably didn’t hurt business in his roadside restaurant—called, actually, the Lucky Shamrock.

I could hardly believe that, after sublime us, Maureen could have taken up with this brute, this simpleton. Served her right, getting her neck broken, that slender neck springing with its pulse from a circle of summer sunburn. These ugly, unworthy thoughts lasted only a second, of course—a lightning flicker of amoral neurons before the gentle rain of decent sadness began. But her death, and this final scandal, with its black skidmarks and shattering of safety glass, did shut down Pierce Junction for me.