He looked into her eyes, then away again. The room was different than he remembered it, more cluttered, messier, as if the research didn’t extend to anything as earth-bound as housecleaning. There were pill bottles scattered around—on the mantelpiece, the side table, even a few on the floor. And the wall behind the couch now sported a decoration done in careful vibrant orange brushstrokes, and what was it? A square with four openings and a circle in the middle.

Fanchon saw him studying it. “You like it?”

He didn’t know really. It was carefully done, not an errant drip of paint, but somehow it offended his sense of proportion because this was an old house, a beautiful house, the sort of house he envisioned himself living in one day, and now the wainscoting was ruined—or desecrated anyway.

“This,” Fanchon said, and her hand lifted from his thigh to gesture at the design and then float back down again so that he was all the more conscious of it, conscious to the point of feeling himself begin to stir, “is my handiwork. It is copied from a book of Tibetan patterns. You know what it is called?”

He didn’t have a clue.

“A mandala. The circle inside a square is meant to represent the universe. Isn’t that lovely?”

He supposed so, though to his mind a period print, Degas, Renoir, even Currier and Ives, would have been more appropriate—and less permanent. Fanchon was searching his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Very nice.”

She clapped her hands, delighted. “And there,” she said, pointing across the room to where Tim was seated on the floor now, in the lotus position, as were Rick Roberts, Brenda, Dick and one of Dick’s young protégés, the five of them hunkered over their drinks and cigarettes. “You see that boring, boring wall behind Tim? I am thinking the same pattern there, but maybe in a shade of canary, or how do you say it, this jaune fruit from Hawaii, very prickly on the outside?”

“Pineapple,” Alice put in.

“Yes, yes! This is it exactly!” Fanchon exclaimed. “Pineapple. What do you think?”