“Well, I guess so. Sure, that will do.” Archibald led the way into a crowded parlor filled with tables covered with white tablecloths. Drunk fraternity boys were eating steaks at every table. It looked very grand to me, crowded and noisy and smoky and impenetrable. Exciting. I pulled in my stomach and stood up straight and tucked in my chin and smiled and smiled and smiled. Archibald led us to a table and I sat down and continued to smile.

“What do you want?” Stanley asked. “What do you want to eat?”

“I don’t care. Whatever you want.”

“Well, make up your mind. Read the menu. You want a fillet? The girls usually get fillets.”

“Sure. That’s fine.”

“How do you want it cooked?”

“I don’t care. However you have yours.”

“A fillet,” he told the waiter. “Medium rare, for the lady, and I’ll have the ten-ounce strip, rare. And bring us a martini. Doubles. Two of them.”

“With olives,” I said. “I want a lot of olives.”

“A lot of olives. Give her lots of olives.”

* * *

The table next to us had noticed us at last. The young men called over to Stanley, teasing him and asking who I was. I guess I was very beautiful, with my golden skin and hair, in my Davidow, the suit of all suits, my face soft and golden in the candlelight, my terrible innocence and golden youth. Sometimes I knew that I was lovely. Sometimes I knew it and drew strength from the knowledge. Sometimes I even knew that I was smart, smarter than almost anyone I knew, smarter than the rest of them. But mostly I thought I had to work to make them like me.

“We ought to be sitting over there,” Stanley said. “Archibald should have saved me a place at the big table.”

The martinis came. We drank them. Talk flowed back and forth from our table to the next. I was introduced. A boy who knew my brother got up from the big table and came to ours and kissed my hand. “Dudley’s sister,” he exclaimed. “This girl is Dudley Manning’s sister. Her brother’s famous. Her brother’s the craziest boy in the South.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Stanley said. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“He trained for the Olympics in the four-forty,” my hand-kissing admirer said. “He’s a god. He beat me in every meet last year.”

“He’s good at sports,” I said. “He’s a genius. He has a photographic memory. He lost his eye. He can only see out of one eye but he was great at basketball anyway. He turns his head to shoot. Still, he had to be a guard. He would have been a forward.”