In that honeymoon week on the Cape they had walked on the beach toward Provincetown, a beach belonging to her girlhood summers, and, though it was still too cool for bathing suits, at a quiet shallow place she had taken off her shoes and waded in, her tugged-up skirt exposing half of her thighs and all of the swell and taper of her long white calves. Some young male walkers coming south from Provincetown had stopped to stare. They were burly and boisterous, and it did not occur to Owen that they might be homosexual. He was convinced they wanted his wife; they wanted to seize and rape her on the empty beach. With the force of a blow from behind, he awoke to his inability to protect her—his sheltered treasure, his innocent exhibitionist, his ex-virgin by the sea. He was a pathetic groom. The hazed sky was high and merciless. Beyond her sand-colored head of hair, guilelessly bowed in study of the shells and crabholes revealed in the suds of the surf’s retreat, there was only icy ocean and Portugal.

vii. On the Way to Middle Falls

His last dream before awaking is of a party, a party back in Middle Falls, though it seems to be in a skyscraper and has the gloss and high color of a party in a movie, a ’fifties movie, or a present-day film’s retro ’fifties, where the women are too dressed up, in powdery colors and wide-skirted, sharply cinched taffeta and rigidly waved hair. In the dream he slowly notices how the two female guests he is talking to, one of them seated beside him and the other standing, are both dressed in painted china, rigid carapaces with shiny sculptural edges, as if they are eighteenth-century figurines. In looking at the paintings of Copley or Gainsborough or Ingres, Owen can lose himself in the folds of silk, the semi-stiff fall and buckle of fabric, the highlights and the crevasses so passionately pursued by the painter’s brush at a remove from the rouged, indolent faces; these party clothes are like that, frozen ceramic, though the women’s arms appear soft and alive, gesturing playfully, and their voices and expressions animated and gracious, acknowledging no discomfort or impediment to their motions. Envious, Owen, feeling by comparison ill-dressed, finds himself in front of their host’s (whoever he is) closet, with its ranks of polished shoes and tweed jackets, looking for a porcelain suit he can put on. He is distracted from his search by noise from the party: an elderly guest has passed out, a halo of sleeping dogs around his head, and there seems to be a fox loose in the house. Eve, Owen’s younger daughter, is tearfully protecting the animal. This, then, is his house, the big clapboarded one on Partridgeberry Road in Middle Falls, Connecticut. So he is the mysterious host, humiliatingly ill-clad without a porcelain suit. He wakes up.