“Feed him salads,” Owen suggested. The half of his head that was not icy and lucid was being squeezed to one side, above his right ear. “And lots of loving.” Or did he just think that last phrase? Stacey registered no reaction, moving about the living room clearing glasses and ashtrays. Was he really such a homosexual, Owen asked himself, that he was trying to provide for Ed’s sex life? When Stacey came off her high she would see she’d been spurned, and be pissed off. Already she was moving in and out of the room, back and forth into the kitchen, with an excessive, closing-up-shop energy. He could not stop thinking about her loose warm mouth, with regret and a sour sense of righteousness. She was Ed’s, Phyllis was his; did things have to be that simple?

Stacey’s housekeeping would have soon come down to how to get him out of here, but the other couple pushed at the front door and were back. “What happened?” Owen asked them, looking down to make sure his fly was zipped.

Phyllis followed the direction of his glance but was in her stately mood, above it all. “Ed drove me toward home but then, just being out, with the car windows down, I felt better and thought we should come back. Didn’t you two miss us?”

“We did,” Owen told her. “We felt abandoned. We had run out of conversation.”

“Then let’s go home, dear. Are you too stoned to drive? I still feel too detached.”

Ed and Stacey were murmuring together, so that Owen felt cruelly excluded from the couple. He rose, hunching a bit in case anything still showed. He had uxoriously extricated himself from his partner’s wife’s mouth, but her aggression had reopened him to possibilities. Polymorphous life beckoned. The dark gods were in fashion. Everyone was sinning, including the government. He resolved in his heart to become a seducer. He would never treat his poor prick that cruel way again.

It was 1967. Walt Rostow averred, “Victory is just around the corner.” Robert McNamara, not sure this was so, resigned the office of Secretary of Defense to become head of the World Bank. H. Rap Brown claimed of the black riots in Newark and Detroit that they were a dress rehearsal for revolution. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West. Lunar Orbiter V was launched, to obtain a complete mapping of the moon’s surface, including the dark side. Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali announced, “I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.” In San Francisco, an estimated hundred thousand hippies claimed “Haight Is Love,” and Golden Gate Park played host to a giant “Be-In.”

x. Village Sex—V