Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

'What sense does that make?' I asked. 'Why's she stick with the guy?'

Lucy hitched her slender shoulders. 'She told Michael he's like the greatest actor she ever met.'

'Actor?' I'd heard similar remarks about Eddgar regularly -that he was a chameleon, a phony. But I hardly expected that from June.

'It was a compliment, I think,' Lucy said. 'You know, like a great actor makes Shakespeare even greater? Or maybe, he's at his best onstage?'

'That dude doesn't even know who he is if he's not onstage,' said Hobie, who'd been listening with his joint from his usual outpost on the rug.

I was unsettled by all of this. Neither Michael nor June ever spoke a word to me about their affair, but I felt the silence we all maintained made us – me, in particular – conspirators against Eddgar, even, possibly, Nile. The whole arrangement suggested things about love, the world of women and men, that I didn't understand, or perhaps even wish to know. After that, I was always uneasy whenever Michael and June were together, pretending to be indifferent to one another.

'From what I hear, Graeme's parties are really wild,' Sonny told me as we approached the little Victorian coach house in the city where Graeme was living. It was late January, near the end of the semester. I could see that Sonny had weighed saying anything at all. I was carrying a half-gallon jug of wine in a paper bag and she was wearing a black shawl and a floor-length skirt made from an old American flag. Her hair, freshly washed, lifted in the city winds. I thought what I always thought, that she was gorgeous. 'We'll just see, okay? But I may not want to stay long.'

'He's your buddy.' I'd thought it was sporting of me to come in the fust place, but Graeme had promised it would not be the usual departmental party, with people talking about Foucault as if he were an intimate. Sonny found Graeme endlessly intriguing. He was ironic and complex, and egalitarian in manner, and she admired his innovative if grandiose structuralist theories. Graeme claimed that the Western societies were in the midst of altering the episteme – the ultimate generative structure from which all thought in the culture devolved, a kind of girdle on the brain that loosened and changed shape only at critical historical moments, one of which was now.

'Sonny!' Graeme cried, as we came through the door. He was lit already. Both arms were aloft, a clipped roach in one hand glowing amid a twirl of fragrant smoke. He came crashing down upon her in a stifling embrace and, without a glance at me, swept her into the living room and the midst of the dense, gabbling party crowd. I realized gradually that Graeme had been honest in a way. This party was nothing like ones we ordinarily went to. An expectant, high-voltage energy charged the air and the crowd was far more funky-looking than the Damon contingent – leggy sinuous women with miniskirts and ironed hair, men in beads. Plangent sitar ragas groaned from speakers hidden amid the deep human undergrowth in the room.

That night people seldom spoke of politics – the war or Loyell Eddgar – which were the staples of university conversation. Here there was only one topic and frequent references to bacchic adventures that had occurred before. The guests tirelessly discussed open relationships, always concluding that anyone who refused to take part was not simply unhip but somehow dangerous. A girl whom I encountered while I was putting down our coats uttered the Weatherman dogma that one purpose of the revolution was to destroy monogamy.

This young woman, named Dagmar, remained by me most of the evening. She was a student of Graeme's, a junior in one of his undergraduate courses. Dagmar was blond, with a cheeky face and imposing breasts, barely concealed by a stretch top she wore braless. It did not occur to me until later that Graeme might have inspired her role as my escort, or distraction.

Whenever I tried to find a sight line to Sonny, she seemed unapproachable. There were always a dozen people around Graeme. His long form and whitish pageboy remained bent over Sonny, his arm loitering about her shoulder. At one point, I broke free to offer to fetch Sonny a drink. There were mescal and tequila available, and a tremendous amount of dope. In the first instant she glanced over, Sonny seemed somewhat startled to see me, then reached for my hand in a way that seemed so paltry and apologetic that I fled back to Dagmar immediately.

Near midnight, virtually at the stroke of the hour, a group of men and women stalked through the living room entirely unclothed, the dark pubic regions and swinging parts shocking and incongruous as the clink and chatter of the party went on. A moment later, someone switched off most of the lights.

'Are you ready?' Dagmar asked.

'For what?'

'For what's happening. Come on, Seth. Be mellow. Don't hassle it.' She touched the heavy buckle on my jeans, and I jolted back protectively. Dagmar took this response antagonistically. She eyed me fiercely and tended to herself. Her little miniskirt slid to the floor, then she unsnapped the body stocking and peeled that off too. She was revealed at instants by the oscillating shadows of a lava lamp. Drunk and stoned, besotted by the evening, I found it hard to deal with the cruel edge of this invitation. Dagmar's breasts were very large but tiny-nippled, blued by a heavy network of veins. We confronted each other without speaking, then she moved off with an insolent toss of her soiled blond hair. I heard the determined thud as she pounded up the stairs.

I careered through the first floor. Sonny and Graeme were gone. Forlornly, I considered the staircase up to the bedrooms. Utterly bewildered about what I might do next, I headed up. In Graeme's bedroom, I was relieved to see no sign of Sonny. But most of the group which had capered naked around the living room were there, six or seven men and women, applying body paint freely to one another with their hands. One fellow had sprouted an impressive hard-on, which a young lady was obligingly swirling in a kind of Day-Glo green from a squeeze bottle. Two other groups were engaged in various states of intercourse. On the waterbed, three people, two men and a woman, were entwined, a nest of butts and legs, in what I took to be a post-coital trance, while below, on the semi-privacy of the shag rug, another couple was grinding away. The guy, who was on top, had a belly so huge it looked almost as if there were a foreign object between him and the woman beneath him. When she turned my way, I recognized Dagmar. She gave me a vaporous smile and lifted one hand, still pudgy with baby fat, even as she jolted with the fat man' s emphatic thrusts. I thought she was waving and timidly waved back; I realized then she had been beckoning me inside.

'On the bus or off the bus, m'boy.' Graeme had caught me by the elbow. He was in an improbable getup, dressed only in briefs and dark elastic socks attached to calf garters. A few errant hairs grew amid the spots on his sternum. He tried to edge me from the door, but I was too spaced-out to move. The room stank with cat pee, and I noticed only now shadowy forms within the waterbed mattress which I recognized as goldfish. Graeme was gone momentarily. When he returned, Sonny spoke behind me.

'Come here, baby.' She stood down the narrow hall, which was yellowed by a Chinese paper shade that covered the single bulb. If anything, she appeared prim and collected in her flag skirt.

'One of those girls asked me to sleep with her.' I was well enough out of it that this struck me as some kind of explanation of my conduct.

' "Women." Which one?'

I turned back to the bedroom to point, but the door was closed now and Graeme was gone.

'Did you?'

'Hell no.' I was slow. 'What about you and Graeme?' I asked. She seemed to shake her head.