The Oglethorpes had bought the Dunhams’ rambling Victorian, with its spindlework and scalloped shingles, behind its palisade fence and lilac bushes, for themselves and their three children and what seemed, when they came bounding together over the slanting lawn in loose-jointed, crotch-sniffing welcome, a herd of golden retrievers. The Oglethorpes were both rather comically thin, he with an amiable discombobulation that appeared to seek to disown his embarrassing height (he was six four) with a distracting whirl of hand-flaps and misplaced guffaws, and she with a Twiggyesque knock-kneed winsomeness that chose to set itself off in filmy short shifts and school-uniformish, big-buttoned outfits, as if going shopping with Mommy. Her hair was a shiny, cedar-colored cap sometimes adorned with a big ribbon and bow. The Oglethorpes entertained almost as much as the departed Dunhams had. Perhaps the old house demanded it. Its rooms were scaled for life with servants and its steam heat clanged like a madman trapped in the walls with a hammer. Moving through its familiar rooms, now renovated and refurnished in a less reckless, eclectic style than Faye had favored, Owen frequently found himself pierced by a memory of her. He seemed to see her, flickering gaily through a doorway in one of her bright, improvised costumes, or treading toward him naked, silently barefoot, with a less smiling expression, tentative and imperilled, out of the second-floor back bathroom. He had come to know the brown tearstains on this little room’s turn-of-the-century porcelain and its high, industrial-strength showerhead, the size of a sunflower. That particular sentimental plumbing, he noticed, sneaking around upstairs while an Oglethorpe party raged downstairs, had been ruthlessly replaced.

The Oglethorpes fought off alcoholic calories with exercise, from dog-walking to tennis. The sight of them playing tennis was comical, especially when they teamed up together: so many angles of elbow and knee and of feet that in white sneakers projected like those of kangaroos as they hopped here and there with an occasional clash of rackets. Trish was the first woman Owen knew who had made jogging a part of her life, and it was somehow exciting to see her in unexpected parts of town, even along Partridgeberry Road, a good two miles from her house. In rainy weather she wore a short yellow slicker from which her naked legs seemed to dangle over the asphalt like a puppet’s, and an extensive rain hat down her back like the little girl’s on the Morton’s salt box. When Owen suggested her to Vanessa, in playful continuation of a fantasy that turned them both on, as their possible third, his lover said, “Not much meat on those bones, as Spencer Tracy said.”

Having seen the movie back at the Scheherazade, he finished the quotation: “But what there is, is choice.”