“Talk about golf. You love golf.”

“But not golfers necessarily. It’s pathetic, it’s all we can talk about, you can see the wives start to fidget and move away. The wives didn’t use to get so bored in Middle Falls, I wonder what we talked about.”

“You talked about how you wanted to fuck them, without exactly saying so.”

“Oh, surely not.”

“I was there.”

“Bless you for that. Right there, playing the game with the best of them.” She doesn’t like to be reminded of that. To mollify his stab, he asks, in a child’s whine, “What am I going to do between now and the Achesons?” Owen used to work in every spare minute; he developed his first marketable program, DigitEyes, using a clumsy mix of machine code and the early version of FORTRAN he had learned at IBM, in a garage behind the clapboarded semi-detached he and Phyllis had rented on Common Lane for their first year and a half in Middle Falls. In Haskells Crossing, his garage, much larger than that historic one, is taken up with three cars and with lawn equipment he never touches, as well as cartons and cartons of prep-school and college texts abandoned by their combined children by previous marriages.

“Go to the club and play golf,” Julia suggests. “Or help me weed the hosta and cut back the ivy. It all looks like shit.” She has a genteel manner but a salty tongue.