The previous year, after they’d all got back from Mexico, Dick Alpert had bought a house in Newton a few blocks from the one Tim had leased from the irate professor of international law (who was suing him for damages). The idea was to keep the inner circle together, to keep the experiment of Zihuatanejo in full flower, and most of the core group moved in, including Tim and his kids, Ken and Fanchon, Charlie and Alice, Rick and Paulette Roberts and their two kids and an assortment of unattached grad students. She and Fitz had been invited to join them—expressly, both by Dick and Tim—but in the end, though they hashed it out over the course of three excruciating days, they declined. She’d wanted to say yes, an enthusiastic yes, because she’d re-imprinted on the whole group (her brothers and sisters, as she’d begun to think of them, her family, her true family) and it was so powerful, so far beyond anything in her experience, she couldn’t imagine having her frame of reference reduced to three again. But Fitz, who’d been so jealous of Ken and Fanchon when they’d first moved into Tim’s, was the one who nixed it. He needed to focus on his studies, that’s what he said, that’s what he insisted upon, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to do it in an atmosphere where somebody was bound to be tripping no matter what hour of the day or what day of the week it was. “Look, Joanie,” he pleaded, and he was pleading with himself as much as with her, “if I don’t bear down here we’re going to wind up back in Beacon—or worse.”

“You can always go to the library,” she said.

“It’s not that—it’s the evenings, the nights. You know how it is—a nonstop party. Which is great, I’m not saying it isn’t. But what am I supposed to do? Lock myself in my room?”

Something sang in her head then, a snatch of one of the ragas Tim liked to play during sessions—an aural flashback, she thought: How about that?—and through the chiming of the sitar and the thump of the tablas she said, “We could try. And if it doesn’t work out—”

“What? Go out and try to find a place in the middle of the semester? Are you crazy? We’re talking about my degree here, Joanie, my life. I mean, do you really want to go back to being married to a high school psychologist?”