“Don’t try to be funny, dear. It’s not funny. It’s your one flaw. And please look at me when I’m talking to you.” If he glanced away—say, at the newspaper on the kitchen table with its horrifying headlines of international and domestic tragedy—it was in the constructive spirit of multi-tasking, as mainframe computers used to do in the heyday of timesharing. It does seem to him, as Julia explains details of their health insurance or their next trip to Europe, that the English language in her mouth has too elaborate a syntax, expanding a simple thought graspable by the mind in a few billionths of a second into a paragraph a number of minutes long. One of the boys older than he back in Willow, probably Marty Naftzinger, who made a study of such matters, confided to him this piece of village wisdom: “The more a girl talks, the more she’ll fuck. Their mouths and their cunts,” Marty theorized, “are connected by this long nerve down their spines.”

Experience bore it out. Phyllis had talked reluctantly, as if the language of numbers had her tongue, or as if the basic imprecision of speech bothered her, whereas Julia in their very first meeting at the hospital fund-drive celebration dazzled him with the excellence of her pronunciation and the glittering completeness of her sentences. Talking for her, as for her husband, was a kind of delight, a public self-pleasuring, and one of Owen’s puzzlements concerned why a pair so well-matched had allowed itself to be split up. But ideality becomes by itself, in a couple, a reason for dissatisfaction and rebellion. Americans need to experience room for improvement, for progress.

Looking back, he is touched by how completely his two wives delivered what he asked. Phyllis had hoisted him up into Cambridge and the snob life of the mind, and Julia into Haskells Crossing and the life of bourgeois repose. If both lives were less than complete—less than his mother, who exaggerated his capacities, would have wished for him—then life itself is incomplete, a hasty approximation. It is a rough rehearsal, not a finished production.

The world tends to give us what we want, but what we receive will partake of the world’s imperfection.