And the greatest of these, of course, was sex.

I don't remember how I worked all this out philosophically. But for some reason, the other two persons of my trinity-power and money-were things to be disdained. They were motive forces for them, you know, for society's evil masters, the greedy, the corrupt, the makers of orthodoxy.

Sex, though-sex was for us. It was the expressive medium of the liberated, the unconventional, the unbowed, the Natural Man. When it came to sex, there was nothing-nothing consensual-that could repel or alienate such enlightened folk as we. Anyone who questioned that doctrine or looked askance at some sexual practice, anyone who even wondered aloud if perhaps, like any other appetite-for food, say, or alcohol or material goods-our sexual desire might occasionally require discipline or restraint, was painfully irrelevant, grossly out of the loop, unhip in the extreme. No, no. A free man, a natural man, a new man-so my theories went-threw off hypocrisy and explored his sexuality to its depths.

My depths, unfortunately, had been forged in the fire of a very unhappy youth. Rage at my mother's fate, confusion at my father's, a wellspring of pent violence opened by my brother's bullying brutality all played a part. And when I really delved into the nature of my desires-and how, given my theories, could I do otherwise?-I discovered I had a simmering penchant for cruelty. This had to be developed-so I decreed in the name of liberation and integrity-not to mention the fact that it turned me on.

Which brings me to Lauren Goldberg.

Lauren was the child of a teacher-slash-filmmaker and the paralegal-slash-wannabe-artist whom he divorced. The years of their marriage, of course, were Lauren's golden era. Till the age of eight, she could trust and believe in family and love and the gentle guidance of the teachers at her private school. After that, her world was all recriminations and disillusionment and shifting sand-plus the cold chaos of public education when the parental breakup sent the family budget to hell. The contrast between these two periods was the source of-or at least the excuse for-all Lauren's bitterness and all her yearning.