With firm but gentle pressure, he guided me toward people I hadn’t seen in years. They took turns declaring to me how long it had been. No one brought up the past—I didn’t expect them to. It was polite society, after all. But don’t believe for a second we weren’t all aware of it. What gave it away? The pause after the greeting, stalling with a sip of their drinks, that initial floundering in the dead air between hello and it’s been a while! I could imagine them thinking, God, what to say to this girl? Gradually, I shifted my camera on its strap higher on my chest, making it a breastplate, a piece of armor.

Jack easily steered conversation into banal territory: Ambassador and Mrs. Frederick Sterns, just back from a cruise to Antarctica—“Too damn cold, too many penguins.” Bunny Mills—“I design garden benches. Susie can show you the look book.” Dr. Jennifer Cohen—“When was the last time you saw a dentist?” Her practice was in Middletown, though she only worked on Mondays now. “That’s the day the golf course is closed. Now, remind us what you do?”

As I explained what I did outside of Rhode Island, I was shortly reminded of this fact: when those who haven’t left the closed loop of Newport/New York/Palm Beach are in the company of one who has, they find themselves earnestly inspecting the curiosity before them as one might an indecipherable gallery installation. I was an oddity—past, present, and future.

Servers strolled around with more appetizers, which was a nice distraction, and gave me something to do with my hands. Balls of sweet melon and buttery prosciutto, gazpacho shooters that were too salty, scallops on sticks—I sampled them all as the sun sank below the Cottage’s roof and cornice decorated with plaster scrolls and shells.

A late arrival—a girl from our high school who’d once bad-mouthed me all over town after I’d gotten too handsy with a guy she evidently liked at a party—had a very exuberant greeting for Jack and a lukewarm greeting for me. Her ambivalence at my presence did not prevent her from filling us in on her current life as an accessories editor at Vogue. “You should email me,” she said without enthusiasm, tossing her long, effortlessly waved hair over her shoulder. No contact information was offered. Perhaps she presumed she was just that well known. For her job in fashion. Not because her CEO father had fleeced his company of millions, then not two months later threw her a lavish twenty-first birthday party at Eden Rock St. Barths.