Though his mother, a great believer in Nature, often walked around naked on her way to and from the bathroom, and when he was a toddler shared the bathtub with him, Owen had curiously little idea of what a woman’s body looked like, as if, she being his mother, a thick veil intervened. It was only females of his own generation he could see, and who could guide him. Once, wrestling on the baked late-summer playground grass, after Miss Mull had gone home, with Doris Shanahan, a square-faced tomboy from the B-section of the eighth grade who whistled riding her bike and liked to hang around shooting baskets with boys, Owen looked up her shorts as she stood triumphant over him, straddling his face, and he saw, thanks to her underpants hanging loose, a few curly black hairs: it was as if he had never seen pubic hair before. He himself still had none. His seeing Doris’s was a sin, he knew, but it made him happy, and was real. It was knowledge, and knowledge, all the elders of Willow agreed, was good to have.

iii. The Husband

When Owen awakes and discovers that Julia is out of bed, he goes forth in search of her, the two of them enacting semi-comic routines in which they consciously—as if this will placate its advance—flirt with senility.

“Where are you, sweetness?” he calls.

“Here, darling,” she answers, from some far-off room; but the deteriorating quality of his hearing is such that he cannot tell if she is upstairs or downstairs.

“Where’s here?” he shouts, growing irritated.

Her hearing too is not what it had once been, nor her need to respond to him. She falls silent, like a car radio in a tunnel. What a child she still is, he thinks to himself, to believe that “here” explained everything, as if she is the center of the universe. How amazingly selfish!

Still, without being selfish she could not have given him what he so much desired at the time they met: a new center for his life. Spotting self-love in the other had been their point de départ. His first wife had been relatively selfless, as if her self were something she had absent-mindedly left in another room, like a pair of reading glasses.