The "right spouse"?

A sentence from Ian McEwan's short story about Michael Beard's courtship of Maisie Farmer deflates both the romance of that "poetic" courtship and the romantic assumption of Friday's post on how we know we chose "the right spouse":

He [Michael] was to count that misty, sunny November afternoon, along the Cherwell river by the Rainbow Bridge, as the point at which the first of his marriages began. [Emphasis mine] [from "The Use of Poetry," in today's issue of The New Yorker]

    E. B. White might have married someone other than Katherine Angell and, with luck, have found as good an indicator that that was the right one as "tooth twine" had been that it was Katherine. And I....
    And you.

McEwan's story of Michael Beard's first courtship is too good to be Beard's whole story. One hopes that "The Use of Poetry" is the opening chapter of "his novel Solar," which The New Yorker's notes on contributors promise "is due out in the spring."
    A clue that it might be is that the Michael Beard character is interested in photons (a basic unit of light) and decades later will win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Just the sort of delicious story that Ian McEwan has been setting before us for three decades.