But I do remember. Most of it. We circulated and looked at all the money. Was that so-and-so? Hadn’t that old lady once dated Mick Jagger? In the Manhattan Room we discovered that it didn’t matter how much money was spent on a wedding, the music could still be wrong. After a couple more drinks, we danced anyway and I thought how the dress I was wearing had been worth all the money and the swimming disgust paying for it had made me feel.

In the atrium, we watched a wicked-looking old gent try his luck with a pair of fifty-somethings. They were far enough away that we couldn’t hear them, so I voiced the old chap and Peter the ladies.

“You’re both as lithe as eels.”

“Octavia and I have very strict rules when it comes to three-ways.”

I remember needing to pee but not wanting to go because Peter’s eyes were suddenly gentle and unguarded, and then really having to pee, dashing to the ladies’, whacking on some lipstick, and then quick to get more drinks, because I didn’t want to lose it, that lovely cloak of gaiety and wildness and freedom, with its concealed lining of panic.

The young smoker was waiting at the bar. He looked like an advert for a very expensive, morally dubious product.

“How old are you?” The words slipped out of my mouth. He leaned in to whisper an answer. “As old as all that?”

When his bridesmaid showed up, I slid off the stool and laughed at how regretful he looked.

We kept circulating, Peter and I, drinks in hand, floating down green marbled corridors, descending carpeted stairways where there were giant vases and tiny couches for passersby to swoon upon, overcome by the weight of their vast fortunes. So I swooned, falling like a leaf and landing to show the maximum of chest and leg.

“Fucking socialist death duties, Darling! I’m going to have to sell Granny’s island.”

“But Kirrin’s been in the family since William the Conqueror, Bunty!”

I laughed harder than the joke deserved and glanced in the mirror, at my stockinged legs and lipsticked smile, at Peter’s tie undone just so. The self-assured handsome man, the black-haired laughing lady reclining in her midnight blue silk dress. Look how well we were doing in our adult disguises! The children we had been—a boyish girl, a girlish boy—no more than tiny points of light under the skin.