What was it? Nothing quite fit right, as if the world were a suit of clothes that had shrunk in the dryer and had to be pinched and tugged till it stretched back out again. Joanie didn’t come to bed the second night he was back—or the third night either. He saw her at meals, in the hallway, on the staircase and around the fire at night, when everybody was chatty and expansive and the drinks and marijuana circulated and every subject imaginable was batted around, from women’s lib to Johnson and civil rights to jazz and rock and roll and the eating of bush meat in Africa, including monkeys, which, according to Charlie, who’d been in Gambia for a week once, tasted just like monkey, but he didn’t seem to have much to say to her because the essential thing, the thing the whole household had to understand, was that she wasn’t Lori. Nothing against her—she was his wife, she was Joanie, and he loved her—but he wasn’t imprinted on her, not anymore. It was Lori he wanted, Lori he obsessed over, Lori he needed to be with through every minute of every day.

Which was problematic on a number of counts. The first being that the fundamental purpose of the experiment was to dissolve sexual jealousy and exclusivity, not encourage it, and the second that Lori didn’t seem to feel the same way about him, or at least she didn’t make it apparent in any way he could see. There she was, just as she’d been before, slump-shouldered, dark, enigmatic, huddled at the end of the table with the other kids—with Nancy, Corey, Jackie, Suzie—or stretched out on the couch beside Tim, who, she’d confided, was her God, and accordingly had had her any number of times and ways. He’d learned about that in detail, about how she’d seen Tim’s picture in a magazine and felt an instant connection—karma—and cultivated Nancy so she could get her foot in the door and get close to him, get close to them all, and to the sacrament. He’d learned too that the kids—no surprise—had their own forms and rituals, a society within a society, and that some of them (Not Corey, not yet, don’t worry) kept pushing the limits. Jackie had spent two days locked in his room at the top of the south tower, tripping on an astonishing 1,000 mics, and she herself, along with Nancy and a guy she knew from Bard (Toby Husted?) had done more than half that up on Ecstasy Hill the weekend they’d all gone camping back in October.

And then there was Joanie.