After dinner most evenings they retired to the library or the big sitting room, the fire snapping and crackling merrily away while they played cards and board games, read poetry or Hesse aloud or listened as one of the men read from whatever paper or book he was working on, including Fitz, who had a beautiful speaking voice, his cadences so measured it was as if he were singing. Sometimes the children took part, but most often they went off on their own. They had homework to occupy them, of course, and one or the other of the adults would make an effort to supervise them and offer up help where they could. On weekends, the kids tended to drift down to the village to horse around, kick a ball in the park or sit giggling in a booth at the diner over egg creams or sundaes, and that was fine, utterly harmless, because Millbrook was as safe a town as any in the country. And while the kids were off exerting their independence and entertaining themselves and their school friends, the adults participated in regular Saturday night sessions, experimenting with mood and ambience, but always secure, no matter how rugged a given portion of a given trip might be, in the setting. Nobody had to drive home. Nobody had to deliver himself up to the external world. And nobody had to confront his demons alone.

Was it an idyll? Was she happy? Did she love Fitz even more because of the experience of Ken and Tim and Charlie and her sisterhood with the other women? Did she live in the moment as she never had before? Her days, from breakfast at seven and ushering the kids off to school to taking a morning walk around the lake and making her way through the household chores—gladly, gladly—were consecrated to experience. She’d never seen nature the way she saw it now, never before opened up to it like Thoreau or Siddhartha or the gurus Dick was always quoting, and she filled her days with it, ambling through the fields, hiking, rowing, meditating, watching the sun rise high to saturate the lake with its transformative power before peeling off her clothes and plunging into the water that was pure enough and cold enough to take the breath out of her. So yes, it was an idyll. And yes, she was happier than ever before. And yes, yes, yes, she loved Fitz all the more and Ken, Tim and Charlie too, her erotic life a dream of the flesh and the mind both.