“Son of a bitch. It isn’t working fast enough,” she decided after the fourth miniature vodka, and got up to get the Percocet she had taken for a root canal out of her Hermès makeup bag.

After Barry left the table Samantha felt as if she were sitting naked in the middle of Park Avenue. It was worse than humiliating. She hated herself with a venom that had yet to dissipate. She took two Percocet, gulped down a Diet Coke, and ripped open a bag of Famous Amos cookies.

Finally, Samantha began to feel the effects of the drugs, the alcohol, and the chocolate swirling together in her body. Secretly, Samantha always envied women like Adrienne Strong-Rodman, whose switches were always on. For them, there was always something to strive for—a richer husband, a more impressive job, another degree, more power, more notoriety. Samantha had never been ambitious in that way. She knew most of her life that other people envied her and she found their jealousies enviable. At least they knew they wished they were her. She, on the other hand, had no idea what she really wanted.

Samantha took the remote control from the side of the bed. She mostly never watched television, since she and Charlie went out at night and in the past few years she preferred to read. She clicked on a beautiful woman eating worms on a survival show in Africa. When the woman finished swallowing, she said, “I don’t believe Sharon really ate hers. I think she keeps chocolate kisses in her pockets.”

“Bitch,” Samantha snapped at her, and changed the channel. She clicked past familiar faces laughing on an episode of Friends, a tour of a forty-million-dollar home owned by Jennifer Lopez, the details of a local fire in Denver, and a rerun of Jeopardy! and finally settled on Jil Taillou’s mother being interviewed by Jane Pauley in a gated assisted-living community somewhere in Arizona.

“It’s a terrible thing that this should happen in this country,” Jil’s mother said, crying, with a thick Hungarian accent. “My son Julius loved this country. He loved the people and the art. Who would do such a thing?”

“Mrs. Taittenbaum, that’s what we all want to know.” Jane touched her shoulder.

Samantha sat at the edge of the bed. “Poor Jil. Poor sweet Jil.”

Jane was back seated behind her reporter’s desk. “As of today, the responsibility for the suicide bombing that took Jil Taillou’s life has been claimed by a solo avenger from an upstate New York militia and the Newark cell of Holy Hezbollah. But in either case, all our hearts are with Mrs. Taittenbaum in Phoenix, Arizona.”

Samantha clicked off the TV and opened another vodka mini. “God bless you, Jil, and God bless your mother in Arizona,” she toasted as she slugged it down and lay back on the bed.