In their two dark and dank basement rooms, whose little windows looked out on a leafy cat motel, Owen and Phyllis were gingerly immersed in one another. They learned the noises and movements each made while asleep and how each’s bowel movements smelled, even though the bathroom door was closed tight and an overhead fan could be switched on. Their bedroom was so small one of them had to sleep against the wall, and because he was the one who had to get up and go to work five mornings a week, she gave him the outside, which meant that if she had to arise in the night—having drunk too much wine at her parents’ table, perhaps, or at a spicy Greek restaurant with another young graduate couple—she slithered carefully across him, a constellation of touches passing close overhead. He would fall back asleep, in his dreams explaining to himself that he was married, that the body was that of his wife. She was still shy, and any passerby on the sidewalk could see into their windows with a downward glance, but on the stickiest nights she slept naked. His wife’s body never failed to move him. They made love less than he had imagined when a virgin, and the blame, he felt, was as much his as hers; he studied at night, and so did she, while WCRB emitted classical music on the top of the bureau in the corner. Even half-heard, a Beethoven symphony or Schubert sonata is demanding, leaving nothing to say that cannot be expressed with a sigh and the slap of a book at last shutting. When, on the eve of his reporting to Fort Devens for induction into the Army, she announced a missed period, it was as if she had become pregnant by a process of osmosis rather than a distinct instance of intercourse.

It was always he who initiated what contacts there were. Given his overexcited clumsiness once engaged, especially when a condom, hard-squeezing and smelling disgustingly of its rubber, had been utilized, as the alternative to her inserting a slathered diaphragm (she would emerge from the bathroom blushing), he could not blame her. He never could blame Phyllis for anything; perhaps this was a defect, a deformity, in their relationship. She was a year older, and he trusted her to be right; he never got over his first awed sightings of her in the halls of MIT’s busy maze of numbered buildings, its set of sets. How unattainable she had seemed! Just the notion of talking to her, of intruding himself into the sphere of her attention, had seemed blasphemous.