Owen flinched at the “was.” She was right: the program was becoming obsolete, and he was stuck in updating it, groping for the next thing. Tonight’s conversation, dragged out toward midnight by Ian’s pompous venting and Phyllis’s winsome egging him on, no longer interested him; he had satisfied himself that neither he nor Alissa owed Ian a thing. She, curled up on the sofa as if to melt into its cushions, was fighting sleep behind her flesh-colored glasses. Her lids looked pink and chafed, her thin smile patiently vengeful. In the car going home, Phyllis said, apropos of nothing, “She loathes him.”

Was she reading his mind, as it moved like a tracer point over Alissa’s remembered curves? He was startled, but believed that his wife was always right—a vault of wisdom he was in danger of totally forgetting the combination to, as he struck out on his own. “Really?” he said. “It’s just the same old Ian, rambling on. Why would she loathe him?”

“The same reason he loathes himself. Impotence.”

“Really?” The dark space his headlights probed seemed to deepen. It thrilled him to have her mention such things as potency and disaffection, coarse matters she usually disdained to touch.

“Well, figuratively, for sure. He’s beating a dead horse and knows it. Nothing is the same, suddenly. The middle-class magazines he fed off of are gone or dying. People watch television, and if they read it’s the tabloid at the supermarket checkout. Even The New Yorker has changed. It’s become strident, about Vietnam.”

“Everybody’s becoming strident,” he said, adding, in his sudden fitful fondness, “except you.”

“I’m strident inside,” Phyllis said, in a level, resigned tone, as their house, behind its semi-concealing curved driveway off Partridgeberry Road, took their headlights full on its white clapboards, behind which their four children slept.