“The real downer is the climate,” says Joe, hauling on the ropes of the dumbwaiter in response to his wife’s shout. “They probably fix that too.”

“When I think what the weather’s like right now in Claremont!” Debby exclaims a moment later, pouring coffee. “It makes me feel really stupid and cheated. Well, hell, we werecheated. You know, maybe I told you before”-she has-“we rented this house by mail; the agent sent us a photograph and description. The morning we got here, off the plane, Flask Walk was so pretty: the sun was shining for once, and when the taxi stopped it looked just like the picture, only better because it was in color, a perfect Georgian cottage. And I thought well, damn it, it’s really worth all that rent and plane fare and those eight hellish hours with Jakie on the plane. And then we went inside, and the back of the house wasn’t there, like it had been sliced off. Of course the real estate agent hadn’t said anything about that.” The Vogeler’s house is on a sharp-angled corner; it consists of a basement kitchen, a sitting room, and two bedrooms, one above the other. Each room is narrowly triangular, the shape of a piece of pie cut far less generously than those Debby has just served.

“‘Drawing room eighteen by twelve feet at best,’ the description said,” she goes on. “I thought that meant not counting the baseboards or the closets or something. And this awful plastic furniture, squeezed into the corners. And of course there wasn’t any garden. It made me feel kind of dizzy and kind of crazy, all at the same time. I just burst out crying, and then of course Jakie started bawling too, the way babies do when you’re upset.”