Instead of navigating the crowd and trying to find the lavatory, he wandered outside onto the patio, where the air was cool and thick with fog, and the relative quiet was soothing. By the pool a group of men was looking up at the sky. He made out Richard among them, and one of the young Communists. Henry followed their line of sight but there was nothing to see through the haze. Maybe they were inspecting the fog itself. He walked away from them, along the side of the house, into the darkness of the yard. The grass was damp and overgrown. He ran into a bush near the back corner of the house and stepped around it to a hedge. The glare of a streetlight on Madison Avenue came through the trees. He was surprised to find that his glass was almost empty. He downed the rest of it, dropped it into the grass, unzipped his trousers, and let go—at last!—into the hedge.

What a night! He smiled up at the streetlight. It seemed to be telling him that his life was going to be brilliant. And it really was, it was really going to be brilliant. This was a party he would remember for the rest of his life—because it would mark the true beginning of his life. Yes. He would apply for that scholarship again. Forget Emory, he could go to Princeton. Marblehead, Nantucket: they would be places in his life. He and Effie would not speak often of their honeymoon, but when they did, they would say, Do you remember that party at Clara’s? Do you remember how we were? How you told Clara she was an awful person? And they would laugh about it, and they would have no memory of the first few days. God was pleased with them—he was thankful for that.

He shook himself and zipped up and was about to make the trek back inside when he heard something, so close he thought it might be coming from the other side of the hedge: a woman breathing. Under that, a steady rhythm that at first he couldn’t make sense of, until the woman cried, “Oh!” and again, “Oh! Oh!”