Stern's wife, too, became sullen, mostly about having no friends. For a while, a distant cousin of Stern's named Barbie visited and served as a companion to her. But she centered everything, the food in the middle of plates, flower vases in the center of tables. She even put Stern's son in the exact center of the couch as he watched television. Stern's wife finally wearied of her because of having to listen to her constant teen-age questions. Though she was far out of her twenties, she would ask Stern's wife, "Do you think it's sinful to allow petting on a first date?" and "Will I lose Phil if I don't let him go as far as he wants?" When she left, Stern's wife had no one, and when he asked her about this, she said, "I don't need anyone," and this infuriated Stern. "You've got to have friends," he screamed at her, and then he had a picture of all three of them, his wife, his son, himself, sitting on the lawn, sucking blankets, shaking and trying to rock themselves to sleep. He had met his wife at college after being rejected by a young girl with musical voice and tangles of blond hair who acted in Arthur Wing Pinero plays, doing deep, curtsying walk-ons that made Stern weak in his middle. He had scrupulously avoided taking the blond girl to bed, preferring to think of her as "not the kind of girl you do that with" until, disgustedly, she refused to see him, telling him, "Someday you'll understand." A week later, he met his wife, a girl with great eyes and shining black hair and no music in her voice, and, after an anecdote or two to establish his charm, he went with her to a blackened golf course and, with clenched teeth and sourness, drove his fat hand through her summer-smelling petticoats and, as she moaned "God no," kissed her and tried not to think of curtsies. Later that first night, he went into her a little, and they both froze and clung to each other. Stern at that time boarded off campus with a trembling old ex-bass fiddle player who sat each night wearing truss-like old-man belts and gadgets and twanged his instrument in the basement. The old man was not particularly nice to Stern. He feigned munificence by asking Stern to have glasses of milk but actually used him as a sourness tester. At night, while the old man sat in his bands and trusses, Stern would spirit the petticoated girl into his room, undressing her swiftly and then tasting and biting her, going at her with anger and closed eyes to drive away all traces of Victorian curtsies. She was the only daughter of a man who had missed great opportunities as a baseball executive and now lived with silver tongue and failing eyesight in an Oregon apartment. Her mother was Hungarian, had lost three children in infancy, and spent her time crocheting bitterly, dreaming of three dead sons. Lean of funds, they had sent the girl, with heavy trunk-loads of petticoats, for a single year of college and then no more. She dated