Maybe it was nine o’clock. Maybe Fitz was in another room with another person, with people, lots of people, and she was out in the hallway watching the front door pull open and shut on four hoboes and a very small tiger—a Tigger—with shopping bags that bulged and sagged and gave up their contents in multiform array (You want some candy, Mom?), until she was alone there once more with the taste of chocolate in her mouth and the door was opening again, this time on two girls, two young women, dressed like vampires, like streetwalkers, like presidents’ wives, if presidents’ wives were tramps.

Chapter 6

6.

For days after the party—the main party, the big one on Saturday night—she kept running into people she’d never seen before in the hallways or the library or one of the twelve bathrooms, as if the festivities were still in full swing. It was disconcerting, to say the least. And annoying, that too. One couple (the man turned out to be a psychologist friend of Tim’s who was dosing himself with LSD in the hope of recovering from an addiction to amphetamines and alcohol) seemed to have moved into one of the vacant rooms on the second floor with a steamer trunk and a dozen cardboard boxes of belongings, which they promptly scattered all over the house. They appeared only at meals, sitting passively at the end of the table among the children, waiting to be fed, and the thing was, both of them had long beaky noses and feathery hair so that they looked like nothing so much as baby birds in a nest—nestlings, that was what they were, and that was how she wound up referring to them for the first week or so, as in, Anybody seen the Nestlings yet?

And Hollingshead—it was clear he was here to stay as well. He’d brought a sour-faced woman with him who’d dressed as a pussycat at the party—or maybe it was a Playboy bunny—and he went around telling everybody he was with her for the sex only and that when you came right down to it, he didn’t even like her. Well, fine. Nobody else liked her either. She was a complainer, nothing about the house or the food or the noise level or the frequency of the sessions or the quality of the marijuana or even the martinis quite up to her standards. Charlie called her a downer, another descriptor he dug out of his Beat dictionary, and the whole household had to put up with her nagging presence—three meals a day and right there in your face every time you turned around—till at the end of the week somebody drove her to the station in Poughkeepsie and she was gone, never to be seen again.