The last summer of the ’sixties brought more news than comfort: Nixon and Kissinger trying to bomb their way to an acceptable surrender in Vietnam, Ted Kennedy drowning a starry-eyed young campaign worker at Chappaquiddick, the first man on the moon looking like a Puppetoon. Judy Garland dead, Bishop Pike gone missing, a pregnant Sharon Tate stabbed to death in Los Angeles, everywhere in the United States defiance and hatred of the government. But in Owen’s vicinity the news was Alissa Morrissey’s pregnancy, and his hidden tie to the event tugged him close to the dreadful, ruinous realm behind the headlines, where people made their bets and met the consequences. It affronted his innermost innocence that his body in experimenting with freedom could have thrown off, once again, a consequence as irrevocable as this, this living being whose cells daily multiplied along the majestic, ramifying routes laid down by DNA. Poor Ian preened, his pompous little goatee waggling as he parried the party jests, for though not ancient he was older than the others, and Alissa’s pregnancy, like the Biblical Sarah’s, had not been looked for. Owen felt a searing guilt toward Ian, whom he had never liked but who seemed in this biological event totally a victim, blindsided, smugly oblivious. Why so much tender remorse toward Ian, and so little toward the child that he feared to be his own, and even less toward Alissa? Swiftly she had sized up the situation and decided to jettison her lover to keep her baby safe. He thought back to his first triangle, his father and mother and himself. His mother had given him love and guidance and a sense of his life’s being a charmed one, but when his parents quarrelled his sympathy went always to his father, his wan, worried, literal-minded, beaten-down father. Men understand men, mechanisms with very few levers—a few earthy appetites, an atavistic warrior pride and stoicism. Women are shining moon-creatures, who hurt us when they withhold themselves, and again when they don’t.

xi. Developments in Hardware