After the second round of martinis, somebody mentioned pizza. It was getting late and no one had eaten, let alone Suzie and Jackie, who were immured in their rooms and presumably getting by on the sort of junk food adolescents preferred (in Corey’s case it was Cheez Doodles, M&M’s and red licorice whips), and so everybody tossed a few bills on the coffee table, preferences were noted and Ken and Charlie volunteered to go pick up the pizza. The door slammed. The record changed. The wall went gray and then it went dark. Tim was deep in conversation with Rick Roberts, Dick and one of the blondes—not Peggy this time, but Brenda again—and Fitz found himself thinking about Joanie, who he really should call to tell her he wouldn’t be home for dinner, but Fanchon was right there beside him on the couch, and Alice, who’d mysteriously appeared, was beside her and everything began to feel so absolutely tranquil after the tension of the meeting he couldn’t help pushing it to the back of his mind.

Fanchon was sitting with one leg folded under her and the other stretched out on the carpet. She’d been talking about a film she’d seen recently—one he hadn’t seen and had already forgotten the title of—when she shifted closer to him and dropped her voice. “Tim is thinking of holding a session tonight, for all of us, because—well, because the time is right, n’est-ce pas?” She let out a soft purring laugh. “And I, for one, am more than ready. What about you, Fitz?” And without waiting for an answer, which was going to be no, definitely no, because he had a ten o’clock class in the morning and he had to go home to his wife and his son, she turned to Alice. “And you, Alice? What about it? You don’t have work in the morning, do you? It is Friday, end of the week, no? What do you say, T.G.I.F.? Or E.F? Is it E.F.?”

Alice, her hair catching the light of the lamp in streaks of individuated color, red, red-gold, strawberry, blonde, said she didn’t know. Then she laughed and said, “Make that a strong maybe. I actually don’t have to be in tomorrow till half-past ten—”

“And you, Fitz?” Fanchon said, shifting her face to him now and casually laying a hand on his thigh, just above the knee, as if his thigh were the arm of the couch and not his thigh at all, not at all flesh and blood and susceptible to touch, pressure, suggestion. “Tonight is a special night—call it a what, a graduation ceremony?”