By this point, Fitz, who’d had too much to drink, was sunk into the couch, his chin pressed to his chest, snoring lightly. She didn’t consult him. She didn’t need to. Everything was as fine as fine could be. She got up and made her way across the room, dodging people laid out like corpses in the flickering shadows, nobody talking now and the only sound the airy repeated figures of Ravi Shankar’s sitar and the ceaseless tapping of the frenetic little drums.

She found Tim in the far corner, stretched out on his back in a heap of pillows with Peggy beside him, her head resting on his shoulder and her hair so disordered it looked as if she’d been out in a windstorm. She had one hand inside Tim’s shirt, dreamily massaging his chest, her hand flexing and releasing over and over again. Tim’s eyes were closed, but he was seeing things, that was for sure: if everybody else had taken 250 mics, he would have done double that or even three times it, because he’d tripped more than all of them combined and needed larger and larger doses to get him where he wanted to go. Which, after two martinis that had had no effect on her whatsoever, was where she wanted to go too.

“Tim,” she whispered, standing over him as the candles flickered and the music thumped and rattled on.

His eyes flashed open, two dark gouges in the shadowy architecture of his face. He saw her, or seemed to see her, and smiled.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she said.

He didn’t ask why or what had taken her so long or say yes or say no—he just said, “My right front pocket,” and in the next moment she was bending over him and slipping her hand into his pocket like a thief. Or a lover. She had been his lover and would be again, all in the family, but not tonight. Tonight—and here she shot a look around the room only to see that nobody was stirring, let alone watching her—she was going to shake one pill from the bottle . . . no, two. Why not two?

Chapter 7

7.