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can’t get interested in science. Maybe they want
     to do something contrarian or rebellious.” She could all at once imagine that Charlie Rider, a lifelong Hartley resident,
     had found his way to be an individual by having an experience with an extraterrestrial. She leaned over her place setting
     toward her husband. “And it’s not drag racing or drug addiction or gang mayhem. It’s harmless.”
    “Harmless? Most abductees, a huge percentage, say that their encounters with UFOs have had a devastating effect on their lives.”
     With his mouth full he said, “And it’s not far-fetched to say that occultism has on occasion gone hand in hand with reactionary
     ideologies.” He swallowed, swiping his mouth with his napkin. “Maybe it’s harmless here, in our somewhat stable democracy.
     But you could make a connection without that much trouble, connecting, for example, Theosophy with Nazi ideology.”
    “Uh-huh,” she said. She didn’t think that Charlie Rider had had a frightening encounter with his Silver People—as he’d called
     them—or that he’d turn his beliefs toward fascism. He was in the minority, surely, one of those who had tripped the light
     fantastic with the space travelers, who had had a jolly night out. “One could argue,” she pressed on, “that perfectly ordinary
     people need to detach religious impulses from any entrenched creed, and so they fall into the refreshment of the occult. But
     I’ll settle for the globes’ being weather balloons, even though I think I’m disappointed.”
    There were several reasons Frank knew everything. In the course of a thirty-year career in the law, eight as public defender,
     four as district attorney, and finally holding forth from various benches, including now the bench of the state supreme court,
     he had seen cases that touched on a great many subjects. His capacious mind was superbly organized, and so there was very
     little he forgot, very little in the archive he could not access. But the real cause of his erudition, Jenna often said, was
     his abuse of literature. His addiction was a joke in the family—Frank the user, the biblioholic—and it was also something
     of a problem. He read, his wife thought, pathologically. It was fine to read the Russian novels again and again, fine to read
     criticism, the belletristic essay, military history, science, biography, collections of letters, and the occasional grocery-store
     mystery. It was not fine that early in the marriage they had had strife when Jenna banned him from reading at dinner, that
     she had to prohibit him from turning on the light immediately following sexual intercourse—as if for everyone postcoital entertainment
     always included V. S. Pritchett—and that she had once caught him in the shower, one hand thrust from the curtain, reading
     her father’s inscribed first-edition copy of Bertrand Russell’s
History of Western Philosophy
. She liked to tell her friends, and on occasion her radio audience, how frightened Frank became if there wasn’t printed matter
     near his person. Their car had once broken down, and for some unexplained—perhaps paranormal—reason, they’d had no reading
     material for the two hours they’d had to wait for rescue. Frank had almost gone mad. There had not even been the Saab manual.
     He sweated and he paced, reciting all the soliloquies that were his set pieces, roving through
Othello
,
Lear
,
Merchant
,
Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
As You Like It
,
Hamlet
, and a few sonnets as well. He had, however, learned to cope without a book over the sacred dinner hour, and in fact, when
     he had made a dazzling effort, driving to upscale markets to buy Chilean sea bass and cranking out pasta by hand, he was happy
     to linger at the table with his port and his wife.
    If Jenna had to choose between the asset of Frank’s erudition and his pleasure in the new kitchen, she would be tempted, even
     though she relied on his intellect for her work, to tip