“That’s the stress talking,” she said—and then she bought a fifty-thousand-dollar giant tortoise shell and all I could do was picture her wearing it. Before she could say anything else, a well-preserved man with perfectly round glasses and pale hair stepped into the inches between us, elbowing me out of the way until I got the hint and stepped backward.

“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he told Tortoise. “A phenomenal artist. You simply must.” Then he took her by the wrist and stepped back into me again, and I smacked into the nearest wall. When he turned again I ducked, narrowly avoiding a shoulder to the face.

The pale-haired man marched her across the room. Tortoise gave me a halfhearted, slightly embarrassed little wave goodbye.

He never even glanced in my direction.

I was used to it. Art has a way of putting everyone at their most transactional. I’m invisible until someone calculates my value. I drank heavily that night, primarily to cushion the anxiety generated by everyone’s behavior, and also to force myself to stay at the party and talk to people in the hope that something would come of it.

It paid off.

At some point during drink number six, I found myself talking to Susan Bricklings-Young, wiry descendant of the Peabody sugar dynasty and one of my favorite elder exemplars in the human-being-category of “robust New England alcoholic rich person.”

“You ought to go upstate,” she drawled in her low voice—Katharine Hepburn on lithium. “What’s that place? That place that used to be called Granger’s—you know, it was one of those terrific places where you could come for the summer and dawnce—it was restricted, terrible, but true. What is it called?”

Something twitched in my brain, an errant spark trailing the metal tines of a plug from an unsafe wall outlet, but it didn’t connect. I shrugged.

“This is going to kill me. Oh, what is it called? I should know. Mother and Father simply ah-dored it up there when I was a gurl. It was the country. Mostly fahr-ms and fah-rests. And—”

While she yammered away, waxing nostalgic about the time before black people could vote, I saw young Susan in Connecticut, petting a borzoi in a room full of peeling yellow silk wallpaper. Surrounded by Radcliffe tennis trophies and lace-sleeved ball gowns, she picked up the phone and accepted an invitation to a restricted hotel as though it were nothing. I wondered how many rifles she owned. A lot, I guessed.

“And then those mahrvelous artists bought it and gave it that boring name,” she finished, effortlessly depositing her empty glass on a tray with her right hand while another ice-filled tumbler of vodka appeared in her left. “What is it called? I buy reams of Marlin’s work every yeahr and I still can’t remember. Dammit, I’m old.”

Marlin. The plug slammed back into the outlet.