Samantha had sung barefoot once after a dinner celebrating Grey Navez’s divorce settlement. Now because of that damn magazine, she thought she’d never live it down.

“I’m really not much of a singer anymore.”

“Nonsense. We’ll do a duet. Do you know ‘Honey Bun’ from South Pacific?”

“‘A hundred and one pounds of fun’?” Samantha looked up at him.

“‘Get a load of honey bun tonight!’ We’ve got a date in the living room after dessert!”

As Albert moved on to the next guest, Samantha thought he must love Judy deeply, otherwise why would such an intelligent man care whether or not she sang barefoot in his living room.

“I would be very disappointed if my girls worked.” Judy turned to Grey Navez’s current boyfriend, Lewis Franklin, the African-American head of Mergers and Acquisitions at Crédit Suisse First Boston. “I mean, why would they want to waste their life being lawyers when they’ll have large enough trust funds to be genuine artists.”

Samantha knew that Lewis had grown up in a Baltimore project and had been an ABC, “A Better Chance,” student at Lawrenceville. She also knew he had the social grace to move the conversation.

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Lewis replied. “It’s so hard to get into schools in New York. I just worry about my kids getting into kindergarten altogether.”

“I have a relationship with every headmaster and headmistress in Manhattan,” Dr. Arnie Berkowitz proclaimed with pride. “Where do you want your kid to go? I’ll get them in.”

“That doesn’t sound very fair.” Clarice looked up from her star-anise-and-ginger-infused smoked salmon.

“It’s only because I’ve really treated most of the kids from the best families in this city.” Arnie spoke while he swallowed a vine leaf mint oxtail ravioli accompanying the salmon. “My compliments to the chef.” Arnie raised his fork.

In Samantha’s mind, Dr. Berkowitz was the Tartuffe of the Upper East Side. He was a charlatan who manipulated titans of industry in their most vulnerable spots.

“We’re pulling our kid out of Dalton.” Paul Rodman leaned back. “You gotta be nuts to keep your kid in a New York City school when every other day there’s an orange alert. Especially a school with a lot of celebrity Jews.”

“There’s no alternative to a school with celebrity Jews, if you’re talking about the first tier,” Dr. Arnie remarked without a hint of self-consciousness.

“Adrienne’s starting her own school in the Hamptons.”

“That’s very impressive.” Samantha’s eyes surveyed Adrienne’s breast implants. “Do you have a degree in education?”

“I have a Ph.D. in child development plus I know who to hire and that’s all you need. I’ve got the ex-headmaster of Westminster to set the place up. We’re paying him a fortune. We’re going to have every kid making their own movie by age ten.”

“Why would you want to do that?” Samantha asked.

Adrienne directly addressed her. “Do you think they should be wasting their time learning the multiplication tables? We have calculators for that. I want to take education into the twenty-first century.”