Owen imagines Julia laughing with him as he tests these possible connections to the imaginary Oriental visitors, who had been so self-contained, so non-nonplussably pleased in the Mackenzies’ living room, which had been reconfigured into a largely empty room with a sloping floor. Was the slope an oneiric reference to slant eyes, or to the slanting floor of the Scheherazade back in Willow, where he had watched many a Charlie Chan movie?

He wants to share this dream especially because it was, under its discontinuities, somehow all about Julia. His desire that she not come to ruin in the driveway; his heart leaping in fear that she might slip on wet leaves and fatally crash. So many of his dreams are not about her, drawing heavily, as on the raft of the mattress they drift together through their private universes, upon a fraught territory left behind twenty-five years ago—the domestic confusions and commensurate griefs in the town of Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Phyllis had played, with a dramatically understated affect, the role of his wife. Often in his dreams the wife-figure is ambiguous, misty-faced, and could be either woman. Phyllis, a stately dirty-blonde, had been taller, retaining from her student days a certain bohemian insouciance, and Julia, a compact, long-lashed brunette, with controlled passages of frosting in her sleek coiffure, is snappier in her dress and in her way of moving: but both acquire in his dreams a recessive, generic wifeliness.

Falls. Fragility. If an intruding stranger or psychiatrist asked him why he loved Julia so, Owen might have dredged up an erotic memory generated, a few years ago, in the convalescent aftermath of her breaking her leg—one bone in her ankle and another in her foot—while hurrying to pass him on the back stairs. He had felt her, like a pursuing predator, breathing impatiently behind him; then he heard the sharp monosyllable “Oh!” as she flipped into the air, having slipped on the narrowest part of the triangular, carpeted treads in her new, smooth-soled Belgians. She flew through the air for a second, hurtling past him in the foreshortened manner of an angel plunging earthward with its announcement, and then she landed on the hall carpet, lying there motionless. He hurried to her with a thudding chest. A sudden disaster on life’s stage: what was his role? Julia softly pronounced, while her second husband knelt anxiously above her, “I heard two breaks. Pop-pop.” This strict accountancy in the very pit of emergency was just like her: efficient, no-nonsense. As she lay there, showing her hushed profile, and he knelt helpless beside her, swallowing the sudden enormity of this domestic event, she asked, “Could you take off my sweater? Gently.” She added, “I’m hot. I think I might faint.”

“What shall we do?” he asked her.

She was silent, as if she had fainted.