The music (no Beatles, though that was what Corey would have wanted or would have thought he wanted) segued from the brittle tinkling of the MJQ to Ravi Shankar, master of the extended raga that beat on in your brain till your brain was all the way across the world in India, perched high on a palanquin on the back of an elephant framed against the white peaks of the Himalayas. Which was a funny image—a brain riding an elephant—and she had to step back from herself a moment and give out with a little laugh that no one seemed to notice, and just as well. They were tripping, or soon would be, and she wasn’t. What she was doing was sipping her second martini and watching the kids furtively from her perch on the couch alongside Fitz, Ken and Fanchon, already beginning to regret her resolution.

But the kids. They were in another world now, intense, expectant, their faces just beginning to register what was happening inside them, the relentless beat drawing them in degree by degree, Richard tapping his foot, Ronald drumming on one knee, Nancy suddenly up on her knees and drawing circles in the air with both hands as her mind rushed off to explain something her tongue couldn’t keep up with. And Corey. He wasn’t musically inclined, not as far as she could see, and he’d told her and Fitz more than once that jazz was boring and that you could take the boredom to the third power with Indian music, but he was beginning to nod his head in time to the beat, if ever so marginally. Richard—his hair grown out and worked up into a pompadour since school began—said something that got them all laughing and then Corey said something and Nancy took it up and they kept on laughing till they were rolling on the floor in sheer abandon and then sitting up to clap along with the music and laugh some more. They were opening up, even Ronald, the quiet one, and she could see the excitement in their eyes.