Fitz tried to settle in, tried to move forward with his work, but outside the bubble of academe—outside Harvard—he was finding it increasingly difficult to focus, especially when everything seemed to revolve around group dynamics, group consciousness, group being. It was one thing to live as one big happy family in a Mexican hotel, where the hired staff took care of the necessities, and another when you had to divide up the responsibilities in a household that was overrun with guests on the weekends and now numbered twenty-nine full-time residents, including Lori, who’d just appeared one day and never left; Hollingshead, who never strayed far from the source of the sacrament; and Maynard and Flora Lu Ferguson and their five children, who moved in after the first of the year. With their monkey. Which, as far as he could see, wrought more destruction and chaos than all the children combined.

He had a cage, this monkey, but he was rarely in it because why should he want to be confined when he could run screeching through the corridors and smear the walls with shit? You could come across him anywhere, leering down at you from the chandelier, popping out from behind the toilet the minute you dropped your pants and settled down with the newspaper, snaking a leathery hand out from beneath the dining room table to filch your morning pancake or evening dessert. Fruit? Forget it. Nobody that winter ever ate an apple, orange, banana or grapefruit that didn’t display the impress of a set of simian teeth.

He had to admit he’d never cared all that much for monkeys. As an undergrad, his work-study scholarship had required him to look after twenty of them in the primate lab, which meant he’d been regularly scratched, bitten and bombarded with monkey spittle, urine and worse. Monkeys were foul, mean-spirited and far too intelligent for their own or anybody’s else’s good and they belonged in a cage—or better yet, back in the jungle they came from. He tried to speak to Flora Lu about the situation, but in the end the monkey had his way because he could never quite bring himself to mention it. The fact was, he always seemed to be tongue-tied in her presence—she was an exotic, a celebrity’s wife, and some part of him couldn’t get past that no matter how many times she sat across the table from him at dinner, sipping, chewing and plying her fork like any other woman, like Joanie or Fanchon or Paulette.