In his dream he saw nothing peculiar in the duplicated Julias, but felt something headlong and dangerous in her speed. Slow down, darling, slow down. Now several cars were coming up the driveway, which is too narrow for automobiles to pass. To cope with this difficulty, the men driving the cars conducted unprecedented maneuvers—one Volkswagen Bug, that fabled, notoriously unsafe ’sixties vehicle of counterculture rebellion and conspicuous thrift, backed right down off the driveway onto a grassy ramp that Owen had never noticed before. Another vehicle pulled a clattering trailer; he realized that these men were his weekly lawn crew. But it wasn’t as simple as that; when he came back into the house, a family of three Chinese, identically blobby, like inflated dolls or swollen gray ticks, were sitting in his living room, silent but expectant. They, and the lawn crew—morbidly tan men who smoke cigarettes while they noisily ride their mowers around and around, missing many corners and scalping many a high spot—appeared to assume, wrongly, that in Julia’s absence (she has gone to Boston, in duplicate) he will know what to do, what courtesies to extend, what orders to give. He was the owner, the host, the proprietor, the boss—a role he has never quite grown into. Born young, he has stayed young: a charmed life has kept him so. Nonplussed, he woke up.

He wants to describe all this to Julia, to make her laugh. He wants to discuss with her the dream’s possible connections to real life. A few years ago, they visited China for three weeks—another senility-fending maneuver. All the couples they know in Haskells Crossing take trips, in the quick-closing window between retirement and death. Like children trading bubble-gum cards they swap the names of restaurants and hotels, museums, and temples that must not be missed, local guides who must be sought out and consulted. The whole globe has been colonized by Haskells Crossing and its companion community, Haven-by-the-Sea, sending out pilgrims who tread the same paths, in one another’s footsteps, eating in the same restaurants, using the same guides, even encountering the same memorably persistent souvenir-saleswomen in the shadow of the Great Wall. Also, Owen’s career in computers has given him many Asian-American colleagues, some of them as opaquely expectant and uncoöperative as the figures in his dream. Come to think of it, on a business trip to Chicago last winter he and Julia saw, in the Art Institute, an enigmatic installation of identically smiling, gray spray-painted, pajama-clad artificial Chinamen standing around the marble railings of the majestic central staircase.