I had become someone to whom several things could happen at once. It was a shock to realize that the willingness to live complexly—doubly, trebly—to throw open one’s windows to all weathers, was the ordinary experience of most men. Yielding to one human ritual is yielding to all. It is like being a sharecropper come North. We fanatics are simple men, unused to toilets, traffic. I had slums in me. Behind my life now, in its nooks and crannies and unseen corners, was a texture of domesticity, thick as atmosphere, as complexly there as government—its highways, national parks, armies—implicit in a postage stamp. One night—we had made the book club selections for August; had decided not to take a phonograph recording that month; had chosen an alternate musical for Show-of-the-Month—I suddenly noticed that Margaret spoke with an accent. It was odd that I had never heard it before, and then I realized, Why of course, it’s new—as if in marrying me she had disfigured herself, had actually canted her tongue or ruined her mouth so that the sounds came out off-center, muffled, and with some eccentric emphasis.
