Somewhere in this thick net, he dreams, there is his rapidly burgeoning relationship with Julia, compact, firm, decisive, surprisingly sexy Julia, but he keeps losing her, it is just too hard to keep up the precarious secret connection—the hurried, hard-breathing phone calls, the panicky trysts where the edges of this town merge with the edges of another—and weeks go by, in his dream, without any connection being made, and his love object sinks deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the everyday, the respectable thick weave of citizenship and work and parenthood, and this relationship, forged in such a summer lightning of passion and mutual discovery, is cooling to nothing, like a holiday bond between children dissolved when vacation is over. Julia, uncontacted day after day, is withering smaller and smaller, and is falling through the network, to become forever lost beneath the barren busy-ness of “normal,” licit life. Panic wakes him; Owen awakes bereft, bewildered as it slowly dawns upon him, along with the wallpaper and the merciless seaside sunlight already burning in the chink beneath the windowshade, that it is Phyllis who is lost, sunk beneath the surface of things, and that he and Julia, long and lawfully married, have been for over twenty years living together in Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts.