“I don’t know much about music,” Angie started. “I mean I’m sure you’re a genius, don’t get me wrong. But I personally think it’s fairly corn-ball even when Bach recycles ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ in about eighty other pieces, and he wrote the fuckin’ ‘Fortress,’ right? At Sweet Briar, in art class, all these twitty debs would clip out their favorite Vogue models—including that trampy girl-child you’re shtupping—and they would glue photos to canvas board and think they’d actually done something. If I can’t paint it from scratch, I never use it, except maybe some real object I’d fasten directly to canvas. But then, I’m old-fashioned. I have an aversion to quoting if it’s only lifting. But that’s just Modernist me. So your pop song and the hymn, I guess they were really played the night it sank?” He nodded. “Robbie, I’m sure you know what you’re doing, darling. If not, there’s always a place for you in Male Prostitution. Matter of fact, my Granny Byrnes just sent me this fifty-dollar bill. What can Hart and I get off you for that, you OrganGrinderMonkey?”

“For fifty? How you two feel about some dandruff?”

Others, referring to our composer, resorted to the radiant. “Robert’s so bright, brilliant really, outshines others, such a fuckin’ star.” RobertRobertRobert.

Usually, familiarity breeds disinterest. Just our luck, she told me, we get the one on earth where familiarity only … breeds.

He liked boys. Then he liked girls, then a girl’d introduced him to a former boyfriend. Conversions abounded. I reminded him, I was a boy. Ang a girlie, why not just stay home, give at the office? Why not do some Hospitality pineapple popovers for friends?

His glitzy or dorky or well-known boys, the ones he brought to an ever-busier fourposter, I only scoffed at. Angie shredded his showy taste in starlets and Carnaby bird leftovers. “Cheap,” Angie judged them. “I hate to use the word ‘cheap.’ I do. But they paint their lips, and some I’m told actually henna. What are they, in the larger moral scheme of the universe? Buncha fuckin’ whores.”

Robert Christian Gustafson was seeing the post-deb daughter of a UN lady personage who’d been Adlai Stevenson’s mistress, a spoilt Madeleine who now modeled just for fun, not needing the money. Her advanced makeup and tulip of a face were on every fashion mag that year, making Angie insane with jealousy and vicious jokes. (She acquired a Vogue subscription and a dartboard the same day.)