That was how it was, according to my theories.

In practice, my personality was disintegrating and I was plunging into a dull fog of depression, illuminated by sharp flashes of suicidal despair. Go figure.

It happened slowly at first, then it happened fast, like a child going down a playground slide, push, push, then picking up speed, then falling finally plump into the sandpit below. That was how I fell-plump-into That Night in Bedford.

That's what we always called it, Lauren and I: That Night in Bedford. As in "I can't stop thinking about That Night in Bedford." Or: "After That Night in Bedford, nothing was the same."

That Night in Bedford, we rented a car and drove up to Westchester to meet a new couple involved in The Scene. He was some kind of Wall Street guy, maybe forty, hopped-up, snappy. She was his wife, a Realtor, a little younger but not much. She was brimming with forced sophistication, broad, limp-wristed gestures, loud laughter. She actually said, That's just delightful, darling. She said it several times, in fact, during the course of the evening.

They had a spectacular sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane. She called it that when she gave us the directions: "It's a sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane." They invited Lauren and me to stay with them for the weekend.

I won't pretend I don't remember what happened. That would be nice, but I remember only too well, in spite of the chemical fog that was curling through the twisted byways of my brain at the time. The blow-by-blow of it doesn't matter much anymore. The point is: It ended with the woman sobbing. The wife, the Realtor. All her pretense at sophistication gone. Curled naked on the floor in a corner of the master bedroom, weirdly small-looking under the ceiling's enormous, exposed wooden beams. Her hand was wedged between her legs, and she was sobbing so convulsively, I thought she might rupture something. Lauren was in the master bathroom puking up pills. And me, I was holding my head in one hand and trying to find my clothes with the other.