“Yes, and they’ve all changed our tempo—speeded it up to the point that we don’t live at all.”

“What is it we do, then, Ian?” Phyllis asked. It was just the two of them to an informal dinner, there in the Morrisseys’ 1730 house in the older part of town. Unlike the Mackenzies, who at first had been their neighbors, the Morrisseys had remained loyal to the town center, near the Common. While Owen had been tinkering with the original DigitEyes, Ian had been up on his roof pointing the brick chimney; vigorous and optimistic, he had scraped and scorched the old lead housepaint from the clapboards, which then he had stained. Staining was supposedly the more authentic treatment, but it looked dark and ugly, temporary and cheap, to go with the low ceilings, the cracked plaster walls, and the shopworn folk-art oddments—duck decoys, jointed wooden dolls, a tin weathervane of a top-hatted man and bonneted woman—picked up at Connecticut roadside shops back when the couple, having left Manhattan, was freshly, acquisitively countrified. The whole house, even Ian’s neatly kept, fluorescent-lit studio, felt dusty; heart had gone out of their house, which made their invitations harder to refuse. The Mackenzie children did not like to come here to play, though the two Morrissey children were close in age to Gregory and Iris.

Phyllis’s careless soft voice drew attention to her. A third glass of wine, or a touch of intellectual stimulation, put an unaccustomed flush on her cheeks. Her distant beauty—that pallid head held high above the throngs in life’s mazy corridors—diminished the nervous, rounded attractions of Alissa, though Owen felt them curved around her discontent like the feathers of a plump bird nesting. Other people’s unhappiness, it occurred to him, had been his element since childhood; sensing it focused and invigorated him.