Once, a dream of that house reminded him, his mother bought a wallpaper cleaner that consisted of a pink puttylike substance in a cylindrical container like the Quaker Oats box. He and his father were enlisted in rubbing a ball of this fleshy substance across the dingy pattern of big yellow roses and green thorny stems in his parents’ bedroom; when his childish turn came, he found the work strenuous and intimate, with his nose so close to the faintly rough, slightly paling grain of the hopeless immensities of paper. Invisible coal dust, wafted from thousands of chimneys, gradually turned gray the sweet-smelling, adhesive substance in his hands. The chore, whose enlistment seemed to mark, for little Owen, a step up into adult labors, remained in his mind as an instance of his mother’s heat—the friction of her resistance to the way things were. To his father and him, the wallpaper had seemed clean enough.

He wonders how suicidal Phyllis’s end had been. She had been delayed by her outburst at him and was speeding, to be sure, not even pausing to fasten her seat belt; but to arrange to skid on wet leaves, to achieve a rollover and a broken neck, seemed impossibly precise. And why end her life when she had a new mission, to save him from himself and Julia? No, the accident was just that, an absurd confluence of atoms in space-time, slipped through a flurry of unlikely odds. And yet she had become inconvenient to him, and Owen led, he was early convinced, a life charmed from above. God killed Phyllis, as a favor to him: from this blasphemous thought he seeks to shield himself with the fancy that Phyllis, the beautiful math major, had crossed herself out the way a redundant term is dropped from the denominator and the numerator of a complex fraction.