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returned to his chair. “There are several options for the evening,” he said. “I called Chick Jacoby, and we can get a table at Clarence’s. Or we can go around the corner and see the new Woody Allen movie. Or we can go to the Marty Leskys’ who are having a party with a lot of movie stars.”
    “A veritable olio,” she replied.
    “Do you have a preference?”
    “Yes.”
    “What?”
    “Let me see how you look with this on,” she said, opening her bag and tossing the rubber across the room to him.
    “You are surprising, Gus,” she said thirty minutes later.
    “How so?”
    “I mean, you look like and act like you have no interest in this sort of thing whatsoever, and, actually, you’re terribly good at it.”
    “Well, so are you.”
    “But everybody knows about me, so I’m no surprise. Do you always wait for the lady to make the first move?”
    “I suppose.”
    “Are you, as they say, involved at the moment?”
    “I’m more for the quick encounter than for romance,” said Gus. “I have been a failure at romance.”
    “Is that a nice way of telling me no repeats?”
    “No, no. It just means, let’s wait until we bump into each other at the bookshop again.”
    She lay back against the pillows, opened her bag, took out a gold mirror, and examined herself. “Look, my color’s marvelous. I always feel so much better after a good fuck.”
    He laughed.
    “You should laugh more, Gus,” said Matilda. “You sound nice laughing. Sometimes I think that beneath that very calm veneer of yours, you are exploding with thoughts that none of us know anything about.”
    Dressed, they moved from the bedroom back into the living room. Matilda looked at the photographs on one of Gus’s tables.
    “May I suggest something to you?” she asked.
    “Of course.”
    “Why don’t you remove those pictures of your dead child from your apartment? It’s just a constant reminder.”
    There was a silence before he replied. “May I suggest something to you?” he asked.
    “Of course,” she answered, unaware of the steel in his voice.
    “Mind your own fucking business.”
    Matilda, scarlet, replied, “But I just meant—”
    “I understand what you meant.” He breathed deeply. “Now, about tonight. What will it be?”
    “You’re livid with me,” she said.
    “I’ll get over it.”
    “I think I should just go back to the country.”
    “No, you shouldn’t just go back to the country. We have had a misunderstanding. There is a part of my life I do not share, that’s all, just as I’m sure there is a part of your life that you do not share. We are people of a certain age. We should be able to deal with a crisis. Right?”
    “I suppose.”
    “Now, about tonight, what will it be?”
    “You’re not just being polite because we had a sort of date?”
    “Of course not.”
    “Let’s go to Marty Lesley’s movie-star party. I’m so glad you know all those Hollywood people, Gus. I read in Mavis Jones’s column that Faye Converse is going to be there.”
    “Perfect.”
    “You know Faye Converse, don’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “I read the story you wrote about her.”
    “I like her.”
    “You’re strange, Gus.”
    “How?”
    “You listen to all of us talk, but you never say anything about yourself.”
    Gus looked at Matilda but did not reply.
    “I better keep my mouth shut and quit when I’m ahead,” she said, and they both laughed.

6
    Very few people would have guessed that Loelia Manchester was one of the unhappiest women in New York. For twenty years the dazzling blond society figure was known as the girl who never missed a party, no matter where. She had once been reported, in the same fortnight, to have danced at balls at a maharanee’s palace in Jaipur, and a German prince’s castle in Regensburg, and an industrialist’s villa in Palm Beach, and it was true. She flew to Paris thrice a year for her clothes, and was so often photographed in the fashion and society press, for no other reason