“Capitalism,” Ian asserted, “asks only one thing of us: that we consume. The stupider we are, the better consumers we are, not just of that sliced pap called bread and of dishwasher detergents that kill fish in the river, but of canned entertainment. The less friction it makes going in our ears and eyes, the more we can take in and pay for. There is no more art in the old sense of something made, by hand, by an artist responsible only to his eye and his sense of beauty. Huddled over his drawing pad trying to get the exact shading for the, let’s say, the stones of Venice or a patch of wildflowers, he was processing the external into something human; he was understanding it, and we could understand it with him, empathizing with his process of discovery, step by step. Music lays this right out in the dimension of time: we travel with the composer as he solves the problems, the key-changes, the resolution. You don’t need to understand anything to watch television; they want you so stupid you keep staring at the commercials.”

Phyllis said, “I wonder if that’s why the young are so rebellious, because we’ve become so stupid. If that’s why they want to go back to Nature and blow up banks. They’re trying to break the shell of everybody’s stupidity.”

“Thanks, Alissa,” Owen said, as their hostess placed a pleasantly tall, heavy-bottomed glass of ice water, its exterior slick with the rivuleted sweat of the heat differential. Was it an accident that Alissa, bending over to place a coaster beneath his glass, showed him, in the catenary curve of the loose neck of her peasant blouse, her breasts? Their tops were brown but there was white skin, too, deeper in shadow, and a dark cavity between them where he could thrust a finger, or a tongue, or even socket his erect penis. At Heron Pond, Phyllis and Alissa both in two-piece bathing suits, Phyllis’s made an effect on her upright body of two bands of white, whereas Alissa’s two bikini pieces were all adhesive arcs, little tucked triangles secured with bows of tinted string.