The Beatles—she would come to love them, but not yet, not now—drove everybody from the room except her, Fitz, Tim and Alice, and after ten minutes of them, Fitz pushed himself up from the table, hollered over the music so Charlie could hear him—“I hope they stay in England and die a quick death!”—and then hovered at her side a moment before saying, “I’m beat. I’m going up to bed. You coming?”

She really didn’t feel like moving. She was too content, the music notwithstanding. “Give me a minute,” she said, holding up the snifter in evidence. “Just till I finish this.” Fitz’s eyes were bloodshot. He wavered a bit, his eyes blunted in the candlelight. Then he shrugged and went off to find their bed in their new room in the house that was as big as the world.

When both sides of the album had played, Charlie went to the stereo, put on side one again and came dancing back across the room, snapping his fingers and rotating his hips. He tried to persuade Alice to get up and dance with him, but she just gave him a numb smile and stared right through him. Then he came to her and she pointed to her brandy glass and said, “This dance is already taken.” Tim laughed. Then he raised his eyebrows and shot his eyes to heaven, and that was funny, so she laughed along with him. It was almost as if he were putting on a performance for her, Tim the academic, connoisseur of Bach, Mozart and Chopin, devotee of modern jazz, and here he was on their first night of living together tolerating this nadir of low culture in the service of group harmony, mutual support—and yes, as the Beatles so persistently had it—love.

“Listen,” he said, and he leaned into her and cupped his hand to her ear to be heard over the music, “I know when I’m beat: let’s abandon the field to the Beatles.”

She pulled back from him to look him in the face, then shrugged and smiled. “Yeah,” she said, “good idea,” mouthing the words because she knew he wouldn’t hear her with his bad ear—he had trouble hearing when there was ambient noise, and this was as ambient as noise got.

Then they were rising from the table and he was bending over Alice with the same offer of rescue and the two of them followed Tim out of the room, across the hall and up the stairs to the second floor while Charlie danced and throbbed in the dining room and the Beatles screamed out their love. “I’ve got a stereo up in my room,” Tim called over his shoulder, “and it’s pretty good quality, you’ll be surprised.”