Among things Julie Smith dislikes most are: greeting cards, adoptive parents who adopt without first looking inside themselves and evaluating their capacity for love, the smell of sulphur, John Updike, insects with antennae, and animals in general.

“If the girl plays ball, then you, deMott, you start in on helping the kid shelter her income. Tell her we’ll give her shelter through MGE. Take her from the seventy bracket to something more like a twenty. Capisce? She’s got to play ball, with a carrot like that.”

That first year, ratings slip a bit, as they always do. They level out at incredible. MGE stock splits three times in nine months. Alex buys a car so expensive he’s afraid to drive it. He takes the bus to work. Dee and the cue-card lady acquire property in the canyons. Faye explores IRA’s with the help of Muffy deMott. Julie moves to a bungalow in Burbank, continues to live on fruit and seeds, and sends everything after her minimal, post-shelter taxes to the Palo Verde Psychiatric Hospital in Tucson. She turns down a People cover. Faye explains to the People people that Julie is basically a private person.

Faye's thongs slap. She wipes her forehead and considers.

"I'm in love with a guy and we get engaged and I start going over to his parents' house with him for dinner. One night I'm setting the table and I hear his father in the living room laughingly tell the guy that the penalty for bigamy is two wives. And the guy laughts too."

Meanwhile, below the Staff Garage below the street, in the hugely echoing and deserted Executive Garage, the Account Representative had ripped the spreading cloth from the queer recession and was positively having at the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production's defective heart. He administered CPR, beating at the soft dent of a chest's breastbone, alternating quartered beatings with infusions of breath down through the senior stricken executive's full but faintly blue lips and tilted head and into the rising sunken chest, the chest falling, the Account Representative taking affordable time and breath at every possible fourth-beat pause to call "Help" in the directions of the quiet street as, using CPR, he kept the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production minimally alive, until help could arrive, as he had been trained and certified by the petite new-Bohemian almond-eyed Red Cross volunteer instructor—by whom, he remembered, all the students had volunteered to be straddled and infused, and whom the Account Representative had, one spontaneous and quartz-lit evening, bought a cup of coffee and a slice of nine-grain toast, and had asked to the Sales Trainees' Annual Formal, and had married—certified by her to do, one never knowing when it could save a life, he seduced utterly by his fiancee's dictum that you erred, in doubt, always on the side of prepared care and readiness to preserve minimal life-function, until help could arrive, his arms and lumbar beginning now to burn as he beat, bent, at the supine senior executive, pausing to call "Help" again and loosen his own stiff collar, sweat moving oily on the tight skin beneath his own newer lined topcoat and gray knit clothes, his own breath coming harder as he kept the inca-pacitated Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production mini-mallY alive, pending the arrival of help, at well past ten, amid Complete emptiness, calling "Help" unheard, the happily married and blankly kind grandfather of one person's own life now literally the junior executive's, to have and to hold, for a lifetime, amid swirls of forgotten exhaust, beneath the composed and watchful eye of his decapitated cycle's light.

"Lyndon looked over at my corner only once, when I lit a smoke, baring his teeth until I put the long cigarette out in a low ceramic receptacle I prayed was an ashtray."

[...] eyes yolked with a high blue film of heartfelt pain, open and staring at the bedroom's skylight through Duverger's narrow fingers [...]

'And then all of a sudden it's like he suddenly wasn't there.'

'At this point she'd bring up how I seemed suddenly distant. I would explain in response that I had gotten, suddenly, over champagne, an idea for a truly central piece on the application of state variable techniques to the analysis of small-signal linear control systems. A piece that could have formed the crux of my whole senior year's thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months.'

'He went to his Dad's office at the University and I didn't see him for two days.'

'She claims that's when she began to feel differently about things. No doubt this new Statistics person comforted her while I spent two sleepless, Coke-and-pizza fueled days on a piece that ended up empty and unfeasible. I went to her for comfort and found her almost hostile. Her eyes were dark and she was silent and trying with every fiber to look Unhappy. She practically had her forearm to her forehead. It was distressed-maiden/wronged-woman scenario."

[...]

'She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realising that they were, in fact, the "me" she seemed so jealously to covet.'

'I was home again for Christmas: as of the evening of 27/12, we were drinking champagne, lying on her leopard-skin rug.'

'I told him a hundred times it wasn't a leopard-skin rug: the last tenant just had a dog.'

'Look: a huge black bird has curved through the corner of my sight and let loose a strangely lovely berry rainbow of guano on the center of the windshield near Smyrna, Maine; and under the arc of this spectrum from a remote height a unit of memories is laid out and systematized like colored print on the gray, chewed-looking two-lane road ahead of me. The trip I took with my family here to Prosopopeia, just two summers ago, and how she braved her own stone-faced parents' disapproval to come along, how she and my sister discovered they could be friends, how she and I touched knees instead of holding hands on the airplane because my mother was seated next to her and she felt embarrassed. I remember with my gut the unbreathable promise of a whole new kind of distance implicit in the dizzying new height we all seemed to reach in the airplane on this long, storm-threatened flight, up to where the sky first turned cold and then darkened to cadet and we smelled space just above. How the shapes of a whole terrain of clouds, from inside the sky, took on the modal solidity of the real: shaggy buffalo heads; tattered bridges; the topology of states; political profiles; intricately etched turds. We flew away over the flat summer board games of Indiana and Ohio. Thunderstorms over Pennsylvania were great anvils that narrowed darkly to rain on Counties. We had a steel belly. I remember a jutting, carbuncular ruby ring on the finger of an Indian woman in the seat across the aisle, a dot stained into her forehead, robes so full they seemed to foam. Her dark husband, in a business suit, with white eyes and White teeth and impossibly well-combed hair.'