Joanie was outgoing, creative, bright, as bright as anybody he knew—probably, IQ-wise, brighter than he was—and she needed more engagement with life than sitting in a gloomy back room typing out cards for the catalog and filing the same books on the same shelves day after day, as she’d let him know on a regular basis over the course of the winter (“Christ, Fitz, work bores me to tears, you know that?”). He hadn’t wanted to hear it—better for him if she just put her head down and brought in the paycheck until he got his degree—but he could see that now in a way he couldn’t before, as if the drug had opened his eyes. She’d been a mother since she was nineteen and motherhood didn’t allow for much sowing of wild oats or even social life. And, of course, he’d been in the same boat, forced to grow up the instant she came to him at the beginning of their sophomore year and told him she was pregnant. It was life lived in the traces, nose to the grindstone, everything in abeyance till the goal was achieved. That was why they went to Tim’s, that was why they were there week after week, stepping across the threshold into a new life that made the old one seem like so much worn carpeting.

Tim wasn’t there the second weekend—he was in New York with the other blonde, Peggy, who aside from being beautiful was heiress to some sort of staggering fortune, the rumor of which had just begun to sift down to the inner circle—but the session went on without him, Dick and Hollingshead presiding. It was an act of defiance really, since not only had the department slapped their hands and shackled the project, but the press had got hold of the story, which was reported first in the Harvard Crimson and then jumped to the Boston Herald, a disaster all the way around. The Herald was the worst sort of rag, interested only in selling copies and distorting the truth, and the headline it ran—HALLUCINATION DRUG FOUGHT AT HARVARD, 350 STUDENTS TAKE PILLS—was not only inflammatory but inaccurate and an embarrassment for the department and the university. Tim laughed it off. Dick got angry. People began to look over their shoulders, but the sessions went on.