Frankie felt she had no choice but to answer. “A banana split!”

“Correct! That’s Princeton for one hundred points! GoTigers!” Charlie slapped Frankie on the back. Suddenly, Frankie remembered that Charlie’s father was a veterinarian in Omaha and Charlie had spent his freshman summer with his dad containing an outbreak of sheep parasites on a Navajo reservation.

“Anyone want a cookie?” Samantha offered a plate of Florentine lace goodies to the table.

“I have to say, ever since 9/11 I’ve been eating up a storm. Mashed potatoes, peanut butter and jelly, and any cookie or cake I can get my hands on. Charlie, I bet your office is booming with people breaking out from eating too much junk.” Jil then bit into his second cookie.

“Oh Jil darling, Charlie’s clients don’t eat junk.” Samantha took a sip of dessert wine. “They just make sure to nibble enough rabbit food so they can put a little butt fat in his refrigerator.”

“Excuse me?” Frankie had had enough wine to admit she was lost.

“Francesca, my refrigerator is the most exclusive club for butt fat in the country,” Charlie nonchalantly explained.

Samantha put her arm on Charlie. “My husband invented the natural alternative to Botox. I can’t believe you haven’t read You Can Stay Forever Young. Charlie was the first dermatologist guru.”

“Francesca, please don’t read it. I just inject a patient’s own fat cells back into wrinkles and crevices instead of questionable foreign substances.” Charlie elaborated further. “I’m even doing it now with some of the burn victims from the Trade Center.”

“Did you go down there?” Frankie asked.

“Right away. I’m still working with a woman who severed her hand.”

“Oh God, life will never be the same.” Jil reached out for another cookie.

“Honestly, Charlie’s just legitimizing keeping Adrienne Strong-Rodman’s butt fat in his refrigerator because he has a social conscience.” Samantha lit another cigarette.

Charlie pulled his wife over toward him. “Honey, as long as your butt is in my house and not in my refrigerator, I’m a happy man.”

Jil smiled. “I tell you, the best tonic these days, even better than mashed potatoes or great art, is being with two people who are really in love. Isn’t that right, Dr. Weissman?”

“Oh yes. Absolutely,” Frankie said while her mind drifted to reading Samantha’s first marriage announcement in the Times: “Samantha Bagley to marry Pearson Stimson Phillips.” Samantha was getting her M.F.A. in art history from NYU, and Pearson was a graduate of Exeter and Harvard, and currently working in the Training Division of J. P. Morgan. He also had a brief stint on the United States Olympic water polo team. Two years later, Frankie got a call from a high school friend asking if she’d heard that Pearson went off to live in San Francisco with Rick Feldstein, his lover and former roommate from Exeter. Samantha left the country for Paris for two years, ostensibly to do research for her master’s. Watching Samantha and Charlie cuddle now, Frankie wondered if she married him because there would be no surprises. If she was his ideal, perhaps he was her semblance of order.