“Before, yes, but, not to sound like Ian, you had a nerdy quality, as though it hurt your eyes to look away from the computer—as if we were all slightly unreal to you. You don’t have that so much any more.”

“Well, thanks. I guess.”

Now she did take offense. “Forget I said anything,” she said. “I was just trying to be wifely. I’m human, you know.”

“Baby!” He went to her, suddenly stung. An image in two dimensions in his mind had popped into the third; he had forgotten she was human, he admired her so abstractly, as an image from his past, a faded route to his present condition. He hugged her; her face, at near the height of his own, felt hot; both their faces felt on the verge of tears. “You’re superhuman,” he told her, hoping to break them into laughter. This failing, he said, “Let’s make a date. I think there’s a problem with today; I have to check my calendar at work.”

“You don’t want to,” Phyllis said, right as always. “I’m not superhuman, I’m a failure in every respect except that I bore four healthy children. But even they, I didn’t do much of a job. We’re letting them grow up like weeds.”

There was truth in this, but against it he could have set their myriad usual gestures of parenting: the help with homework, the tucking in at night, the rote prayer to get their anxious small souls through to morning, the family trips to Nantucket and Disney World and Expo 67 in Montreal, the summer rentals in Maine, the countless lessons paid for, the countless evening meals shared in something like hilarity. From the outside, seen through the windows of the warm and expensive house on Partridgeberry Road, judged from the swing sets and hockey skates and dollhouses and golf clubs to be found in the basement, Owen and Phyllis had given all the signs of parenthood, but they had not, like some—like Owen’s own parents, perhaps—lived through their children, making the leap out of the ego into the DNA chain. Ian and Alissa, for instance, after their rocky patch, had submerged themselves in the needs and deeds of Nina and her two older siblings. Owen and Phyllis were alike in that their pet child was the child within, who still clamored for nurturing. “Tomorrow,” he promised her. “I just remembered, today’s my day to have lunch with Ed. He’s full of gloom these days.”

“Tomorrow’s my day for tennis at the club with Alissa, Vanessa, and Imogene. Except Imogene can’t play and got Trish for a substitute.”

“The next day, then,” he said, “or at night, after Floyd and Eve are in bed.” Gregory was a sophomore at Brown, and Iris in her first year at Smith.