Village wisdom recommends that a building should not have thirteen stories, nor an histoire thirteen chapters. Its dictates tend to caution and conservatism: toss a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder, and knock wood after claiming good health; keep your opinion under your hat, and don’t stick your head above the crowd. Haskells Crossing is a good place for lying low. It is Julia who ventures out, to shop and to join women’s groups, to have massages and manicures, while Owen cowers in the house, tinkering with the Internet—a frustrating mass of peremptorily severed connections and blithely illiterate misinformation, offered on what it would be kind to call a junior-high-school level—and with oil painting. He has taken it up. He keeps trying to capture on canvas their view of Massachusetts Bay, his own yew and euonymus bushes in the foreground and in the middle ground scattered islands and tilting sailboats and in the distance a horizon where a few oil tankers ply their viscid, geopolitically critical wares; but the harder he stirs the oils on his palette to get the exact colors, the muddier and more muted they become. The atomic brilliance of reality, its reserved but implacable pop-up quiddity—this effect Nature keeps to itself. With the last of his little Boston consultancies disbanded, he and Julia live comfortably on the proceeds of the sellout of E-O Data that Ed arranged in 1978 with the infant Apple corporation of Cupertino, California. Owen’s pioneering work on graphical interfaces was rolled into the Atari-derived visuals of Apple’s early microcomputers and into the Alto interface employed in the triumphantly successful Macintosh of 1984. The shares which Ed Mervine had accepted in part payment partook of this triumph, and he presciently unloaded at the right time, and in a curt note advised his old partner to do the same. Owen, ever passive, took this wise advice; Apple’s early elegance glimmered out as the chilling shadow of Microsoft overcast the entire computer world. As a program, Windows was kludgy and a chip-power hog, but its hold on IBM and its clones could not be broken, any more than the inefficient, left-hand-favoring early typewriter keyboard could, once lodged in thousands of machines, be changed.