“Stranger things,” he said. “You were pretty far gone yourself.”

“Flo’s all broken up about it,” Alice put in. “She loved that monkey.”

“Badminton, are you nuts?” another voice rang out, and they all looked up briefly to see a balding man with a beard and pot belly who might have been Ginsberg, but wasn’t, striding across the room. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

To Lori, he said, “You remember any of that?”

“I went swimming.”

“I thought you were going to wind up the same way as the monkey—I thought you were the monkey, at least at first—”

“Hah!” she said, and her face lit up for the first time. “Me a monkey? Monkeys climb trees, don’t they? And then they screw up there, way high up in the highest branches?” Her eyes fell shut, almost involuntarily, as if she weren’t even there, and then they snapped open again. “You want to climb a tree, Fitz? Is that what you want?” She pushed back her chair and rose, pausing a moment to glance round the table. “Urk, urk, urk, I’m a monkey,” she said, humping her back and scratching under her arms. “Monkey see,” she said, looking at him now, only him, “monkey do.”

That afternoon, after most of the guests had left or were in the process of leaving, he was out on the veranda with a set of mismatched tools, trying to repair a porch swing that had collapsed under the collective weight of half a dozen enthusiasts who’d apparently been trying to get it airborne the night before. It was a relatively simple task, which involved replacing a bent eyebolt and two slats of the seat, and he was thankful for it, thankful to be focusing for once on something other than himself. And Lori. Always Lori. In his clearer moments, which, regrettably, seemed to be increasingly rare, he’d tried to analyze it, this compulsion to be with her, to have her, to chase after her even if it meant alienating his wife and son and making a fool of himself in front of everybody else. And for what? She was nothing special, as Joanie had kept telling him, no different from a million other half-educated teenage girls out there in the world—but she wasn’t out there in the world, she was here, with him, and he’d gone to a place with her that week in the meditation house he couldn’t begin to describe if he wrote ten theses. And there was a subject: LSD-25 and Sexual Obsession. How would they like that at Harvard?