“Ed, you are too much.” In his nervous excitement at this vista opening up, Owen had eaten too much, taking for dessert a pecan pie he didn’t want. He was twenty-seven years old and what he ate showed up, as a little pot belly. “I’ll mention what you said to Phyllis. You’re right about one thing, we have to do something, this new kid will give me three under four. But what’s the attraction for you? You’re a bachelor, the city is made for you. You’re a native.”

“Not really. There’s a lot more nature in the Bronx than people know. The Botanical Garden, Pelham Bay Park. I like to fish, to take hikes. Manhattan eats you up. It’s too fucking full of nervous, ambitious women. My mother wasn’t like that. She was just like I imagine yours was, contented, always shelling peas into a yellow bowl, with a blue stripe around it.”

This wasn’t quite how Owen, looking back, saw his mother; Grammy had done most of the kitchen work until she was bedridden. And, unlike Ed, he had already chosen his wife, who was as different from his mother as she could be, except that both women gave off a little scent of dissatisfaction. He was comfortable with this scent, it confirmed his first thought about life, that he was lucky to have been born a boy. MIT and IBM had done nothing to contradict this insight.

When he described this conversation to Phyllis, she appeared not uninterested. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy, and moved around the apartment, back and forth between the two rooms, with trips to the kitchenette and bathroom, at a stately backward tilt, her lovely long neck holding her head high, as Ed had noticed. When had Ed noticed? They had had him to dinner once or twice, and in return he came up with three tickets for Camelot, with Julie Andrews. “He could be right,” she said. “You should give your creativity a chance.”

“What creativity?”

He had always felt mathematically inferior to her, earth-bound, relatively muddy in his thinking, though he had done creditably at MIT and received faithful raises from IBM, even as costs mounted in its huge New Product Line gamble. He was both sorry and in some pocket of his heart relieved that she had relegated her Ph.D. thesis to the dustbin of old Symphony programs and Browne & Nichols report cards; nobody wants a wife smarter than he. “You’re artistic,” she told him, blushing in the unaccustomed exercise of appraising her husband. “You love wandering through the Met upstairs, and over at the Modern.”