This is not entirely a compliment; Julia laughs at the jab, acknowledging that, yes, when he is in a room she finds an excuse to enter it; when he is closeted with his murmuring CPU, matching wits with the circuitry as it twirls an algorithm, at the rate of two hundred twenty billion cycles a second, through the AND and OR gates toward the conclusory IF … THEN … ELSE, she enters with a question about their health insurance or the yew and euonymus bushes waiting for him to trim them, as only he can do it, with his artistic eye—the lawn boys hack away, like bad barbers. They don’t take enough; they create holes and bald spots that never grow in. Or else she disturbs him on the terrace while he is trying for the hundredth time to render, with flake white, cobalt blue, ivory black, and a touch of Roman ochre, the look of rain clouds approaching above the sea’s horizon, their maddening near-colorlessness and their simultaneous elaborate structure and chaotic vapor, a mere brushstroke on wet paper in watercolor but in oils a labored accumulation of minutely three-dimensional touches that will be dry tomorrow. Since early childhood, Owen has sheltered from reality’s pressure and misalignments by focusing closely on a paper page, a plywood cutout, a blob of clay, or, under Buddy Rourke’s laconic guidance, a copper connection within a braid of color-coded wires. Julia sets up a human clamor against her husband’s exclusionary absorption in the inanimate.

He tells her, teasingly, of the house, “Maybe it’s too large and we should sell it.”

“Don’t torture me; you know I love it here. And love you. At times,” she tells him, “I look at you when you don’t know I’m looking and I get this shiver, a physical shiver.”

“After all these years?” he dutifully asks. Their infantile give and take, word by word, forms a music that never palls, scored for a thousand repeats.

“Oh yes,” she dutifully answers. “More, even, instead of less. Something about the way you look when you don’t think anybody’s looking at you.”

“So you don’t regret … us?”

“Oh no. Not really. I’m glad. Aren’t you?”

“Oh yes,” he says.

Yet she finds, he feels, more and more about him that panics her. “Don’t eat in the middle of the kitchen floor,” she suddenly cries, as if electrically shocked. “Eat over the sink if you must eat all the time. I never saw anybody eat so constantly; no wonder your teeth are always disgusting.”