6   When I opened my eyes I felt confused. My body told me that it was morning, but the room was pitch-dark. I began to experience more strange sensations. The pillow under my head seemed to have lost its firmness, and the blanket over me felt heavier than normal. It gradually dawned on me that I was not in my bed, not in my bedroom, not in my house… Then I began to feel the stirring of another body in bed with me. A faint scent came into my consciousness. It was that of a woman. Who was it? And where was I? I had no recollection of going home with anyone from Ann and Jeff’s party. In fact, I had no recollection at all of how the party ended. But I did remember a woman whom they introduced to me and with whom I danced between drinks. What was her name? When I try to remember a name, my first routine is to go through the alphabet and, at each letter, think of names that start with it. This time it didn’t take me long. As soon as I got to C, I remembered. Her name was Chris. I still had no idea of what had happened. I touched my penis, and it felt dry and pristine. I felt around me for traces of ejaculation, or perhaps a discarded condom, but there were none. My movements evidently told the woman that I was awake. “Hi, Gary,” she whispered as she moved toward me. “Hi, Chris,” I whispered back. She was silent for a few seconds, and then, in a normal speaking voice that sounded familiar, she said, “Did you call me Chris?” “Er…” I began, feeling my skin flush with embarrassment. “Who are you?” “I’m Ann,” she said and laughed. “Jeff and I tried to hook you up with Chris, but you didn’t seem to be into her. So Jeff went to bed with Chris and, since you were in no condition to drive home, I went to bed with you. But you didn’t seem to be into me either!” She laughed again. By this time our bodies were touching, my left side to her right, with both of us on our backs. I could feel her right breast, generous and mature (or, as I might put it under different circumstances, large and pendulous), spilling over onto me. “I could get into you now,” I said. I’m not usually so direct, but the fact that Ann and Jeff aren’t married, and that their relationship is widely known as an open one, somehow made it natural. “Make yourself at home.” “I would, except that at home I know where the condoms are,” I said. She turned onto her right side, reached over me with her left arm to the nightstand on my side, and picked something up. She handed me a condom, already unwrapped, that had probably been waiting for me all night. I felt ready, and quickly put it on. I then took Ann into my arms and we held each other for a long time before our lips met. I felt grateful for the almost maternal warmth that she exuded. I had felt nothing like it in a long time, certainly not with Kaycee.   I had often wondered what the breakfast arrangements were in Ann and Jeff’s flat – which, though large, was on one level – after each of them had spent the night with a different lover. But I decided not to find out this time. At a future time, perhaps – Ann had said, “Let’s do this again some time.” But I was eager to get to my hike on a morning that promised to be, for the first time in several weeks, free of fog. My mind still felt foggy, though, as I was driving home. I turned on NPR to listen to Weekend Edition Saturday, but Daniel Schorr was on vacation and Scott Simon was talking to someone named Jonah Goldberg – wasn’t he the son of the woman who was involved with Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky? – who was giving a ridiculously optimistic assessment of the prospects of democracy in Iraq. Those Jewish neocon idiots, I said to myself as I changed to KDFC. But that supposed classical station was in the midst of a long commercial break. I turned the radio off, and tried to think. I had always thought of myself as someone who never gets drunk. But Ann could have meant nothing else when she told me that I had been in no condition to drive. And yet, when I woke up in her bed, I felt nothing that I would think of as a hangover. But the fact remained that I still could not remember how I ended up in bed with her. I did have a faint memory of Chris, and in that memory she seemed rather attractive – a slim brunette (possibly dyed) in a low-cut dress, and fun to dance with. What, then, did Ann mean by my not seeming to be into her? I would talk to Ann about it, I decided as I entered my driveway. After checking my answering machine and seeing that it showed a pleasing zero, I had a bowl of cereal with some berries and nuts, to which I added some slices of apple, using half of the last survivor of the bagful of Gravensteins that Greg had brought me when he came home for a few days during the break between summer and fall classes; he had stopped off in Sebastopol, where his new girlfriend Rebecca’s family owns an orchard. I brushed my teeth, showered, got dressed for hiking and put together a change of clothing that would make me more lawyerlike, for the deposition. Where would I change? At Robin’s, of course, when I would pick her up to take her to Sarah Scott’s house for the deposition. Lastly, I put together a sandwich for lunch on the hike. I was among the first to arrive at the Rock Spring parking lot. Rose Bargallo was among the few already there, back in her masculine hiker guise. The morning was clear and crisp, and promised a splendid hike. Rose greeted me by saying, “I’ve already got some poop for you.” “Really?” “Yes. I’ve found out that our friend worked at Shell for a year and then got out of petrochemicals into biotech or pharmaceuticals. At least, that’s the reason he gave Shell for quitting. They don’t know which company he went to work for, but they thought it might be local, since he didn’t give them a change of address. There seem to be around five pharmaceutical companies in Houston, and I’ll start calling them Monday.” “That’s great, Rose.” “There’s more. I’ve found a bunch of Stones living in the Medford area, and I’ll contact them to find out if any of them are related to Andy and if they’ve kept in touch with him.” “Wow! You don’t waste time, do you?” “I guess you’ve noticed that,” she said, flashing a smile that was not unlike the one with which she had greeted Jerry Brucker the previous morning. An SUV-load of hikers arrived, all of them living in or around Noe Valley. In our group, carpooling makes driving a gas-guzzler venial, even to a Prius owner like me. Rose greeted the newcomers, and I took advantage of my momentary solitude by calling Robin James on my cell phone and telling her answering machine that I would probably need to change clothes at her place. When I finished, I turned off my phone, since the hike was about to begin.   When I got to Robin’s house I was still feeling sweaty. By midday the weather had turned quite warm, with the temperature in the eighties, and the ocean breeze didn’t make itself felt until the last phase of the hike. Robin offered me a freshly made lemonade, from the lemons growing in her backyard, while she explained her absence from the hike: she had fallen behind with a couple of very long transcriptions and needed to catch up. I took a quick shower in her recently remodeled bathroom, changed my clothes, and off we went to Sarah Scott’s house. My hiking clothes, bundled in a plastic bag, and Robin’s equipment bag, containing her stenotype, tape recorder, and a small folding table to set them on, were in the trunk of my car. Two teenage girls, on their way out of the house, greeted us at the door. One of them, evidently the older, turned her head and shouted behind her, “Mom! The people you’re expecting are here!” The girls proceeded to a BMW that was parked in the driveway and got into it, with the older one in the driver’s seat. As she began to back out, Sarah came to the door. “Come in!” she said. “I’m Sarah Scott.” She continued talking as we stepped into the house, which spoke clearly, if silently, of its occupants’ wealth. “I was Sarah Davidson when I roomed with Laura. Here’s the two of us,” she said as she pointed to a five-by-seven color photograph, its cherrywood frame leaning on a side table, of two young women in jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts, “in seventy-two.” One of the two young women in the picture was unmistakably Laura Perino, looking, except for the dress, exactly as she did in the picture that Libby had shown me. The other, a slim, pretty girl with dark blond hair, bore very little resemblance to the jowly, matronly platinum blonde who was standing here with us. It appeared that Sarah had married well, or at least wealthily, and then let herself go. She led us to a small sitting room leading off from the main living room. As Robin began to set up her equipment, I explained to Sarah that the proceedings would be informal. She could talk about Laura Perino’s life in nineteen-seventy-two in any order she chose. Robin would then prepare an affidavit on the basis of her statements and bring it back to Sarah at her convenience. After reading it over carefully, Sarah would sign it under oath – Robin was a notary public as well as a court reporter – and that would be it, unless the court had some questions. “It’s all really very simple,” Sarah began once Robin had turned her tape recorder on. “Peter Hart was an absolutely dashing young man. He had been on the San Francisco scene for only a year or two, after graduating from Stanford, but he was already a legend. He was out of my league, but Laura was more ambitious, not to mention a lot prettier, and she got to meet him. And she fell totally in love with him. They dated for a couple of months, though I’m sure he saw other girls, and then he left, just like that. He called her one evening and said, ‘Bye, I’m going away for the summer.’ She was devastated, and didn’t go out the whole summer. She took a two-week vacation…” “Was she working?” I asked. “Yes, she had an office job at the City of Paris – that was a department store, where Neiman Marcus is now…” “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.” “No, it’s okay. Anyway, she went back home to Oregon for a two-week vacation, but other than that she did nothing all summer except work. She got a promotion, in fact. But then in the fall she started getting invited to parties again. Peter was back in town, but he didn’t contact her. Some rumors started going around about him – you know what I mean…” “Yes.” “Anyway, Laura didn’t believe them. And then she met him at this party. I was out of town that weekend, but she told me all about it when I got back. ‘Don’t believe the rumors you’ve heard about Peter Hart,’ she said to me. But she also said that she wasn’t in love with him any more, and that she was no longer interested in the whole San Francisco scene. With her promotion she needed to stick around for a few months more, maybe till the end of the year, but then she was going to go back to Oregon. And a few weeks later she discovered she was pregnant.” “So,” I said, “would you say that, to the best of your knowledge, around the probable time of conception Laura Perino had no sex partners other than Peter Hart?” “More than that,” Sarah said. “I’m absolutely sure of it.” “We can never be absolutely sure of anything, Mrs. Scott,” I said. “For legal purposes, ‘to the best of one’s knowledge’ is as far as we need to go.” “All right then, to the best of my knowledge I’m sure. And call me Sarah.” “And so, when Ms. James – I mean Robin – prepares the affidavit containing what you’ve just told us, are you prepared to sign it under oath?” “Absolutely – there I go again – yes, I am.” “Well, then, thank you very much for your time and your help, Sarah. Robin will contact you when the affidavit is ready.” “Yes,” Robin said. “I’m a little bit behind, but this shouldn’t take too long. It’ll be some time early next week. And I live in Corte Madera, just over the ridge from here.” “It was a pleasure,” Sarah said. “Laura is a dear friend, and I’ll do anything to help her and Libby.” I drove Robin back to her house, and then home over the Golden Gate Bridge. As usual on a Saturday afternoon, bridge traffic into the city was slow. I was beginning to feel tired, and quite unsure of whether I wanted to go to yet another party. The drive took almost an hour, and after I entered my house, I dropped my bag of hiking clothes on the hallway floor and plopped myself on my bed.   It was only when I woke up from my nap that it hit me: other than working on her case, I had not given Libby Schlemmer the woman any conscious thought all day. But my subconscious made up for the gap. Though I couldn’t remember much of my dream, Libby had definitely been in it. Or was it Chris? Or an amalgam of the two? Was Chris the pseudo-Libby I had thought about a week earlier? I was feeling confused. I was also feeling hungry. The morning cereal and the sandwich were all I’d had to eat, and I had nothing prepared for dinner. It was seven o’clock. The weather outside was windy and clear; the sun wouldn’t set for another forty-five minutes. The invitation to Roberta’s party was for eight o’clock. She is a good cook, and usually has food available right away. I ate the rest of the morning’s apple, bidding farewell to the Gravenstein crop of 2005. The apple also reminded me – circuitously, since my computer is not an Apple – that I hadn’t checked my e-mail since the day before. My office laptop contains lots of confidential data, and it can be opened only with a password after being shut down, something I always do when I finish working. At home I’m not so security-conscious, since I use my old desktop only for e-mail and Web-browsing, and so I just make it hibernate, letting my e-mail screen come up when I stir it awake. This time there were two personal messages: one from Greg and another from Ann Mason. Greg informed me that his first week of classes had gone well, and that he was glad that he had enrolled in the summer term so that he could lighten his load in the fall and have more time to study for the GRE. Not to mention that I met Rebecca, he added. He thanked me for my support, more necessary this time than in previous years because he had not taken a summer job. Greg’s e-mail language, at least when addressed to me, is that of old-fashioned letter writing: traditional capitalization and punctuation, no smiley or BTW or AFAIK. It may, of course, be different with his peers. Ann, on the other hand, though she is around my age, has embraced youthful text-messaging conventions; perhaps it’s because she is a middle-school teacher. Her message was, “hi gary, hope u had a gd day. i njoyd ur compny. jeff sez hi. love ann.” I decided to reply to Ann right away. I hesitated between adopting her style and writing in my normal way, but the hesitation was brief. I had a very good day, starting with a lovely morning, I wrote. Then I added another paragraph: There’s something I’m curious about, and perhaps you could help me, since I don’t remember much of how my evening ended last night. What gave you the idea that I “wasn’t into” Chris? What I can recall is that she was rather nice. Who is she, anyway? In a concession to her style I ended with Love, Gary.   The gathering at Roberta’s, unlike Ann and Jeff’s party, was one where I knew everybody. Roberta is also a lawyer, working in the City Attorney’s office, and she was originally Margo’s friend – they had met over some legal dealings – before becoming our joint friend. Then she had a falling-out with Margo, possibly also over some legal dealings (but perhaps not), and we stopped seeing her. I ran into her at the Hall of Justice shortly after our divorce, we had lunch together, and we became friends again. The food – an eclectic mix of several cuisines – was delicious, and I ate my fill while chatting with various acquaintances. I took care not to drink too much wine. In spite of my nap I still felt tired, and I was among the first – but not the first – to say good night.