Oliver, patrician as ever, came over to say hello. His bride was waving to him from the other side of the ballroom, and Oliver waved back, beaming, as though he hadn’t seen her in years. I complimented him on his speech. It had been rather good. He’d started off by saying something provocative, about getting married in an age when two-thirds of marriages ended in divorce. Then it had been witty. He’d got some laughs talking about how sweet Aria was, how trusting and kind and determined to see the best in people, which meant that if they ever divorced, he could take her to the cleaners. Finally, he’d arrived at sincerity: He couldn’t imagine not being with her, but if anyone was going to break his heart and ruin him and leave him a shell of a human being, he wanted it to be Aria, because she was worth it. His voice got a little thick toward the end and my eyes had pricked with tears, and I found myself thinking that Oliver would be all right now, that Oliver would be safe, as though marriage was, despite all evidence to the contrary, a sheltered harbor, an Ithaca beyond war and monsters and the wrecking storms.

“You know, I thought you might be Andrea’s mystery man,” Oliver was saying to Peter. “We all think she’s got one, you know.” Then he asked what I had been like when I was younger.

“Oh Hobbesian. Absolutely Hobbesian.” Oliver didn’t get it, so Peter explained. “Nasty, brutish, and short. From Hobbes’s definition of the life of mankind.” Oliver had looked away. Peter swallowed and just for an instant a crack opened up and I glimpsed another Peter. The Peter who was always quick and clever, but not quite clever enough to hide it, so people were unkind to him, how unkindness seemed to follow him wherever he went, till he took on a hunted, slinking quality, which was when it really got bad.

My eyes fell on the smoker. There was something about him. He threw me a wink and then mimed smoking a cigarette from where he sat at a table of friends. When I turned back, I thought I heard Peter say, “She was our queen.”

“I’ll be right back.”

I made my way to the River Doors. It was raining and everyone had gone inside. I counted to three and turned and there was the smoker, and didn’t he look happy. A couple of cigarettes, my drink, a slug from his hip flask, and the evening began to tear like tissue paper. It was like ripping the wrapping off a gift. Inside was a box of glittering fragments and darkness.