Vanessa, meeting him downtown at noon, outside The Ugly Duckling, said simply, unsmiling, “Good for you, dear,” but kept walking. Alissa, crossing Branch Street to the elementary school with little Nina in tow, asked the child, “Want to show Mr. Mackenzie where your tooth came out?” Karen Jazinski had knocked once, that summer, on the door of Owen’s cell at E-O; since Julia was with him on the couch, looking with her decisive brunette coloring less like Manet’s Olympia than Goya’s Naked Maja, he couldn’t open the door, and Karen, perhaps sensing the pair of held breaths within, didn’t come knocking again. Trish Oglethorpe, for some odd reason, led the local forces of indignation, and passed by Julia in the supermarket as if she had been a wilting head of lettuce. Roscoe and Imogene Bisbee snubbed the new couple at the Silver Spoon, an overpriced candlelit restaurant in Upper Falls, where Owen and Julia had thought they were safe from recognition, among the faceless tract-dwellers.

This interim of disjunction dragged on for a year, and then there was worse. You don’t want to know. The papers and news hours are full of family breakdowns and intramural murder. Within the broken marriages there were grieving, backwards-looking interviews, not without their exhilarations of drunken truth-telling and wry hilarity. At a later, more legal stage, there were bitter differences over the division of property—especially bitter for the Mackenzies, who had stumbled into prosperity and been quick to turn it into cultural artifacts. Each Oriental carpet, abstract painting, and fifty-dollar art book had been jointly selected or, in the case of the books, bestowed with loving inscriptions as birthday or Christmas presents. A copy of Finnegans Wake from Phyllis to Owen for his twenty-fifth birthday—a tall square-spined volume, the front and back of the jacket identical, with Joyce’s fifteen-page list of typographical errors appended to the 1939 text—prompted an especially bitter dispute, though neither of them had made his or her way through more than five pages of it. They had both thought it would be more mathematical than it was, the author being one of the few whose brain could rank with that of the great mathematicians; but the holy text was all music, the music of phonetically misspelled speech, in a broad Irish accent and all of Europe peeping through the puns. In the era of their courtship and marriage, this book had represented the epitome of culture—fanatically wrought, monolithically aloof.