“A man’s got to eat. I made a killing on it. Dr. Kildare was gay and having an affair with Dr. Ben Casey. When can I see you again?”

“I’m very busy. The Central Park Conservancy benefit is coming up.” She lit a cigarette.

“And what? They want you to set the table? I need to see you again.”

“I don’t think that I should.” Samantha puffed on her cigarette.

“If you waste time thinking about what you should or shouldn’t do, life’ll amount to absolutely nothing. That I can promise you,” he said definitively.

“Don’t you ever have second thoughts?” she asked him.

“No.”

The flat assuredness of Barry’s answer gave Samantha the same kind of tingle up her leg as if he were still pressing against it.

“I’ll send a car for you at noon. Let’s have lunch at Chanterelle.”

“What’s wrong with the restaurant at the motor lodge?”

“I don’t like their cheese plate as much as Chanterelle’s. I’ll see you later.” Barry hung up.

Samantha pulled her feet under the Pratesi blanket Charlie had bought her last fall as an anniversary gift. When he brought it home he told her, “Darling, if the world blows up, we can always snuggle under our blanket.” Charlie loved her, but he was also very predictable. He gave her a blanket every year.

The idea of a woman’s life being defined by powerful men never really came into Samantha’s perspective until Grey Navez explained to her that women ten years younger than them get the right job at the right Wall Street bank in order to marry the right money.

“Honey, the better nursery schools in New York are chock-full of mothers who graduated Columbia and Stanford Business, and even Yale Law School,” Grey assured Samantha over coffee at Payard. “These girls can’t wait to give up their work once they nab their security blanket, and then those nursery schools have the best-run bake sales in the country.”

When Samantha was growing up in New York, she had no idea whose family did or didn’t have real money. In fact, money was something her parents never talked about. Her first husband’s family had a compound in Bar Harbor, Maine, where Samantha now believed he had sex for the first time with his Exeter roommate. But they drove a beat-up station wagon and his mother, Pussy (a nickname for Elizabeth), took pride in eating frozen fish sticks and peas on television trays. No one Samantha knew had a private plane, though in retrospect, they all probably could have afforded one.