At three in the morning, writhing on the wrinkled sheets, unable to find the door to healing self-forgetfulness, as close to his death as Grampy was on Mifflin Avenue but a more skeptical and less frequent reader of the Bible, Owen sees as if looking down into a suddenly illumined well that his charmed life has been a long torment of fear, desire, ambition, and guilt. Picturing himself in Middle Falls, he cannot imagine what drove him into so many hazardous passes and contorted positions: he was a puppet whose strings old age has snipped. Even his attempts at masturbation now fizzle; in his mind’s eye he runs the images of those moist, knowing engulfments, those grotesque postures of submission, but, just when he almost has it, has it in hand, the temperature or edge or whatever it is unexpectedly slithers away. The triggering mix of brute mechanics and sentimental illusion dissipates. The secret flees. The system crashes. The workable parameters, once so broad there was ample room for fatigue and ambivalence, draw in. At the far extreme of his pilgrimage, the self-induced orgasms of early adolescence recede. None since have been so intense, so absolute an escape. Similarly, he looks at the contents, the well-made furniture and lustrous crockery, of his present excellent white seaside house and cannot conjure upon them the Christmas gleam, the excited metaphysical urgency, that the shabby homely things in his grandfather’s house—the brass candlesticks and embroidered table runners, the paltry few books and toys and vases—had possessed in the pale December window-light.

What remains to him are moments of tender regard, in nakedness or on the way to it. Vanessa always achieved orgasm, but there was something brisk, even dismissive, in her way of seizing it, as opposed to Alissa’s whimpering, finger-sucking dissolution in cascading ripples of sensation that delivered her to what always seemed a fresh surprise. Dear Faye, apparently, flirted on the edge, but with an infectious, innocent gaiety that made her easy to love. Karen had been the least trouble; to her in her generation it had been no big deal, like a coffee break or a spasm of exercise after sitting too long on an airplane. No, this is not fair. She, too, and Jacqueline and Antoinette and Mirabella, especially Mirabella with her spun-sugar hair, brought transcendent value to the act, the supreme interaction. People must be romantic or fail to lift themselves above the deadpan copulation of sheep and squirrels. Phyllis’s impatient permission, in that Cape Cod cabin smelling of salt air and pine sap—Let’s just do it—set an unfortunate grudging tone, perhaps, but did let him enter a realm wherein his own mysterious existence needed no explaining. Things come, for the instant, clear. Owen’s past is like a sheet of inky-blue tissue paper held up to a light, so the holes pricked in it shine: these stars are the women who let him fuck them.