One night of too much to drink at the Morrisseys’ house, perhaps New Year’s Eve, in that messy tail end after midnight, they had accidentally met in the upstairs hall—she was checking on a feverish child and he on his way to urinate, the only downstairs bathroom being attached to Ian’s off-limits studio. Ian was quite humorlessly strict about his studio being off limits to company. Veering toward each other like planets out of orbit, Owen and Alissa kissed. She pushed up so hard their teeth touched; he was startled, as he had been years ago by Alice Stottlemeyer. But this was no longer spin-the-bottle. Unhinged by celebratory champagne, roused by her party outfit of see-through blouse and cerise harem pants, he slid his right hand down her side and tucked it a moment into her crotch. She jumped back as if scalded. “Oh no you don’t,” she said, in the tough voice of a dance-hall hostess, as played by Barbara Stanwyck or Ann Sheridan in a black-and-white movie at the long-lost Scheherazade. There were layers to Alissa; there were layers to all women, he was discovering; the trick was to find the layer where you were welcome.

The Morrisseys entertained a lot, a sure sign of marital distress: they needed others to help them bear each other’s company. Ian Morrissey, a decade older than Alissa, was a magazine illustrator. As the world of middle-class magazines needing illustrations shrank, he had grown glum and sarcastic. The years had given him more gray hair than a man not much over forty should have, and trembling fingers stained by ink and nicotine, and a hollow-chested slump. He had acquired the idea that, while his own professional world, of dashingly glamorized women illustrating romantic short stories that always ended well, was yielding to sensational nonfiction and photographs airbrushed to within a few hairs of pornography, Owen and Ed were riding a technological wave steadily upward. He spoke of them derisively as “nerds.” Owen tried to explain to him how volatile and chancy the rapidly changing computer world was, and how he and Ed were facing ever younger and more innovative competition, but it had settled into Ian’s ego that he embodied a dying fine-arts tradition which was being crassly smothered under an onslaught of rock music, industrial robots, and psychopathic violence. He had grown a stubby goatee that made him look unshaven and sunk in the déshabille of failure.

“What you nerds don’t get, utterly don’t get,” he told Owen one night, “is those hideous machines of yours aren’t superhuman, they’re subhuman. Everything that made us human is going by the boards.”

“It’s just a device,” Owen said, determined to be amiable, feeling Alissa’s eyes insistently on him. “Like a hundred others—the steam engine, the automobile, the movie camera.”