Thomas and Angie’s relationship and breakup

Thomas Birdsey’s brief relationship with Angie Constantine moves from an unexpected courtship to an imagined family future and then an abrupt breakup. For Dominick Birdsey, the affair first looks like evidence that his brother can participate in ordinary young-adult life; its ending instead reveals a private fixation that Angie cannot accept, and leaves Dominick managing the consequences for both families.

An Unexpected Courtship

Angie, Dessa Constantine’s younger sister, initially approaches Thomas through a rivalry with Dessa: in Dominick’s account, Angie decides that if Dessa wants Dominick, then the closest substitute is his twin. Angie suggests that the four young people drive to Ocean Beach for miniature golf. On the ride home, she and Thomas begin kissing in the back seat. Dominick finds the scene funny because Thomas appears to be responding to Angie’s attention, but the humor is uneasy: Thomas’s behavior has often been unpredictable, and Dominick cannot take his apparent ease for granted.

The encounter becomes a relationship quickly. Angie and Thomas go out on successive nights, and Dominick later sees Thomas studying the marks Angie has left on his chest and neck in the bathroom mirror. He warns his brother not to do anything that might damage Dominick’s relationship with Dessa. Thomas looks bewildered by the warning, as though romance, sex, and the possibility of conflict between brothers belong to a world he does not understand. The mirror scene makes the twins’ closeness and difference visible at once: Dominick treats Thomas’s relationship as a threat to his own, while Thomas seems absorbed in the unfamiliar evidence of being desired.

A Relationship at College

At the University of Connecticut, Thomas’s relationship with Angie continues while he shares a room with Randall Deitz. When Dominick asks Deitz how living with his brother is going, Deitz gives a cautious assessment: Thomas is different. The comment sits alongside the affair as another measure of how difficult Thomas is for others to read. Meanwhile, Dominick and Dessa are strained by demanding classes and problems with a car Dominick bought from Dell Weeks. Against that background, Thomas’s apparently flourishing romance offers Dominick a reassuring contrast.

Angie drives to the university on weekends and stays overnight, taking advantage of the fact that Deitz is away working at a pharmacy. Her parents object. Big Gene Constantine threatens to fire her from her trainee accountant job at the dealership unless she behaves as they expect. Angie defies him; her father’s disapproval is part of the attraction, and a way to command attention. Dominick also recognizes a less flattering element in the relationship: Angie is, in part, using Thomas. Even so, he welcomes the affair as proof that Thomas is normal enough to share the ordinary routines of a couple.

The Promised Future and the Breakup

The romance briefly appears to be moving toward marriage and family. Angie calls Dessa in Boston to say that she and Thomas are in love and may become engaged; she also thinks she may be pregnant. She says they want children and a family soon. Dessa phones Dominick in tears. He waits until Angie has left the dorm parking lot, then confronts Thomas, whose academic probation and precarious standing at school already worry him. Dominick fears the reaction of both the Constantine and Birdsey families. Thomas, however, seems unable to grasp the complications Dominick sees. Angie later tells Dessa that she was only late and had miscounted, and that there had never been a pregnancy. The anticipated child, which had made the couple’s future seem suddenly concrete, disappears from the story as quickly as it arose.

The decisive rupture follows something Thomas does that Angie initially refuses to discuss. She breaks up with him and describes him as profoundly strange. She eventually explains that Thomas had bought The Lives of the Martyred Saints and become absorbed in its accounts of persecution. He repeatedly asked Angie to read the material aloud while they were together; his response to it unsettled and frightened her. The episode is presented through Angie’s account as relayed by Dominick, so the narrative records both her distress and the limits of what she was willing to disclose at first. Its consequence is clear even without further explanation: the relationship’s intimacy has become inseparable from a fixation that Angie cannot share.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

There is no further talk of a baby, and Angie wants a boyfriend who fits her idea of normal life, including dancing and socializing with other couples. A few months later, at Angie’s suggestion, Dominick introduces her to Leo Blood. Dominick promises to arrange the introduction if she stops spreading stories about Thomas. Angie and Leo become a lasting couple, surviving two children, separations and reconciliations, Leo’s drug rehabilitation, and his affairs. Against that durable partnership, Angie’s month-long romance with Thomas seems almost impossible to imagine in retrospect.

The relationship matters partly because it gives Dominick a temporary, self-serving reassurance: Thomas’s ability to sustain a romance seems to confirm the normality Dominick wants to believe in. Yet the affair does not resolve the brothers’ difference or relieve Dominick of his protective vigilance. Instead, it exposes how easily Thomas’s private intensity can break the ordinary shape others try to give his life. For Angie, the romance ends in rejection; for Dominick, it becomes a brief interval in which hope, embarrassment, and fear are bound together.