Ed had stood, laboriously, in delayed synchrony with Phyllis. There was a discussion among them as opaque and irrelevant to Owen as consultations among his parents overheard when he was three or four. He could have listened and understood, with the half of his mind that was clear and cold, but his attention was turned to the other half, which was experiencing an extraordinary happiness befalling him, permeating him like the fog of neutrinos that pour by the trillions out of the sun, even during, as now, nighttime. This was bliss: the slick texture of teak under his fingertips; the black and red and clay and cactus-green Navajo zigzags of thick wool under his eyes; the very grain of wood in the broad bleached floorboards, testifying to cycles of growth within a distant spruce forest; the clean white plane of the ceiling meeting the white-painted bricks of the Mervines’ exposed chimney; the horsey scent of Stacey’s damp hair, not far from where he was sitting; the soft, pecking sounds of adult conversation; the very feel of his awareness along the length of his body, as if consciousness were a silken robe tapping his skin wherever he chose to direct his attention; the enclosed air of this room, this parallelepiped clipped from the trillions of cubic feet of domestic space in America, snugly but freely full of human love, his for his wife and for his partner and now his partner’s partner, whose deeply tanned knee no longer showed beneath the glass coffee table because she had moved closer to his Danish armchair. These details, animate and inanimate, arrived on his neuronal structure with that lost purity, that flat enumerative wonder, of childhood illness, when one is confined to bed and relieved of every duty but the one to exist, to survive, to continue to be. How could he have so long mislaid so basic a treasure, this dimension of bliss in things?

Parental voices mixed in the hall; the sounds of a door opening and closing were followed by those of a car starting and receding. “What’s happening?” he asked Stacey, whose face had come closer to his own knees.

“Phyllis asked Ed to take her home. She felt like she might be sick.”

“Couldn’t she be sick here?”

Stacey’s face looked broader than he had ever noticed, and more intelligent, with kindness molding every molecule of the curving, insouciant lips. They had known each other for going on two years and he had never noticed this encompassing, angelic quality of hers before. She said, “And she’s worried about the babysitter.”

“Who’ll drive the babysitter home if Phyllis is so sick?”

“Ed will.”

“What about me?” Owen asked. “Why am I left out of all this?”

“You weren’t, you dear baby. She asked you to come home with her and you refused.”

“Refused?”