He was really, he learned in Middle Falls, a remarkably ignorant and incomplete human being. His socialization had scarcely progressed beyond the Willow playground. MIT and IBM had been soldier brotherhoods, each man absorbed by his own survival, his own sheet of paper or computer screen, his log table or slide rule. New York had narrowed him further, crowding him tighter against a woman who was under social constraint to love him but not to see him, in the way that his mother had seen him, somehow fiercely, as a treasure of infinite value—herself projected into maleness and wider opportunity. Even Grammy with her dim eyes and cockeyed silver spectacles had seen him and loved him beyond reason. Once, coming up through the back yard in his shorts, he had felt his bowels begin to move and was unable to keep the call of nature back and ran crying toward the house, and it was Grammy who, wordlessly clucking, wiped the yellow diarrhea from his legs. In his dreams, repeatedly, his excrement overflowed the bowl, flooded the floor, caked all over his body, stunk up the room in which others, inches away, were having a dinner party. For all his good grades and test scores, he had been so ignorant of basic processes that in his freshman year at MIT he went for weeks without changing the case on his pillow, stupidly wondering why it was turning gray. Grammy and his mother had done his laundry; he had never thought about how his socks got back to his bureau, clean and balled, from where he had dropped them on the floor. Learning to cook never crossed his mind. He let Phyllis do it all, baby Floyd on her hip and the two toddlers squabbling at her knees. His family hadn’t had money for liquor; he didn’t understand the appeal of it, or the portions and customs of it. He let Phyllis mix the drinks on the rare occasions when they entertained another couple, in New York or, more stiltedly still, in the military in Germany—people they knew their lives would shed forever.