After a second round of drinks, Diana went down to the cabin. The sun hurt her eyes—it had been like that since she’d started researching her dissertation, “Crisis and Catharsis in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.” She had promised James she would cut down the hours she spent viewing, but lately she found that everything in her life—the telephone calls, the endless, hopeful pounding of their son Daniel’s basketball against the garage door as he struggled to match his father, the bills and invitations—seemed like nothing but distractions from Hitchcock’s tense, dreamlike world, where even the clicking of heels was significant. Diana often felt weirdly nostalgic as she watched, as if her own life had been like that once—dreamy, Technicolor—but had lost these qualities through some misstep of her own.