When Sybil had disappeared into the crowd, Desmond leaned against the burgundy wall and surveyed the crowd. The guests were friends or acquaintances, former teaching colleagues, magazine editors he’d worked for, and two ex-boyfriends. He felt removed from most of them, as if he’d left town years ago and was viewing his friends from a different city and a different life than the one in which he’d met them. There was a vase of lilies on the table near him, and the sweet funereal stench of them was overpowering, making him feel even more dreamy and lost. It was hard to maintain close friendships when you were in a relationship; it seemed disloyal to discuss the intimate emotional details of your life, and besides, most people—even the ones who loved to gossip in lewd detail about their every anonymous sexual encounter—practically blushed at the particulars of domestic happiness or the mere hint of connubial sexual contentment.

After scanning the room several times, Desmond was certain his editor hadn’t shown up after all. They’d been having some problems communicating lately, an optimistic way of saying she hadn’t returned a couple of his calls, and he’d been hoping she’d put in an appearance. His biography of Pauline Anderton was significantly overdue. Whenever his editor mentioned this to him, Desmond longed to remind her that, given Anderton’s slide into obscurity, it wasn’t as if anyone was waiting for the book, but that hardly seemed to strengthen his case.

Several people came over to wish him well, and then quickly cast furtive glances around the room and asked if he knew what was going on. Speculation ran from a death in Velan’s family to the possibility that the hotel chain had fired him. Most of the ideas seemed to boil down to revenge fantasies in which Velan was punished in one way or another for his smug beauty. Desmond couldn’t help but feel a little cheated out of the attention he didn’t want. Velan obviously hadn’t planned the death of one of his relatives to steal his thunder, but it always worked out somehow that he became the center of attention. Velan was standing by the window berating a waiter for chatting with one of the guests (translation: for being twenty-five years old) in a smoldering voice that was halfway between insulting and flirtatious. It was a mystery how Peter put up with this outrageous behavior, most of which seemed to have been learned from the tail end of Joan Crawford’s movie career. Maybe, Desmond thought, true love was an acute form of tolerance.

Kevin, a friend who was nearly as tall as Desmond, but a good deal fleshier and almost ferociously handsome, came and stood beside him and watched Velan’s performance. Once the tirade had subsided, he said, “It must be awful to have so little impulse control.”