Philip said, “Kate, take a leap . . .”

The truth was I wanted to gush about all three, even the burgundy that we’d been forbidden from tasting. “Well,” I said, “I would have to say—”

That was when Tim, out of nowhere, decided to tell an unrelated story. It was about a famous writer who suffered from depression and decided one day, because living was so hard and terrible, that he was going to kill himself.

The guests looked around. No one knew what to say. There had been no transition whatsoever. After a cold, dead silence, Wally Walker spoke. “Who was the writer?”

“I don’t remember,” Tim said. “But he’s famous.”

I had to laugh.

Tim went on to explain that this famous writer whose name he couldn’t seem to remember had taken elaborate steps to prepare for his suicide. When asked what those actual preparations entailed, Tim didn’t know! “But it’s really beside the point,” he said, digging his hole even deeper. “Because just as the famous writer was about to kill himself, he happened to hear on the radio the Four Last Songs by Strauss. The irrefutable beauty of the music made it impossible for him to do it. Suddenly, he wanted to live!”

Tim might as well have strapped a bomb to his own body. Not only was he committing a kind of social suicide, he was taking the party with him.

“And your point?” Wally Walker asked as he cut off the tip of a Cuban cigar.

“It’s not a point. It’s a question. What is it in life that you value so much—what work of art, what piece of music or building or natural wonder—could you imagine having a similar effect on you?”

Someone: “That’s awfully deep.”

Someone else: “Too deep for me.”

Philip passed the humidor.

I wanted to shout: These people rule the world. They have no concept of wanting to kill themselves!

“Well, okay, then,” Tim continued. “Forget the suicide part of my story. Just think about what you find beautiful.”

Philip sounded bemused when he said, “Are you asking what we like?”

“I’m asking what you, uhm, hold in awe.”

“This wine,” Penelope Winston joked.

“And my cigar, Philip, it’s like smoking God.”

“Yes,” Philip replied, “if only God could be smoked.”

The evening went on to a discussion as to whether Croatia was the new Prague and what to do in Dubai if you have only a day, and then Anna Brody, who sat opposite us, her face flushed from the wine, her eyes partially closed with the glazed look of a really good buzz, spoke: “The cry of a baby.”

“What was that, darling?”

“Bach. Sophie, even on a bad day.”

Except for the slow rolling clouds of cigar smoke, everything seemed to stop.

Anna closed her eyes and kept going. “A first kiss, my father’s cologne, the Gettysburg Address, de Kooning’s Woman I, the top of the Chrysler Building, a swim in the warm Caribbean sea or any warm sea, baby teeth, Rilke and Rimbaud, thinking of or touching the giant clams in Palau, the cathedral at Chartres because it’s unfinished, Monet’s hay-stacks, a ripe peach . . .”