“So where’s your date, by the way?” Sylvia asked.

“The fellas I talk to wouldn’t wanna be here.”

“They might have if you’d told them it was a Dance Theater of Harlem event.”

“Oh, it’s not about ballet or anything like that. It’s about the people they’d have to deal with. The men I talk to would see right straight through this bullshit. This has nothing to do with ballet or the United Negro College Fund. Come on now, Syl, you’re older than me. You know that. If it was all about helping they’d donate the money at the end of the year and claim it on their taxes. Why pay a toll from Jersey to be here, and add to your expenses? But it’s all about macking. They make it seem like only ghetto people mack. It’s the same thing. This is like Bentley’s on a Friday night. But instead of mail room clerks in their one tired suit, you have CPAs in their one tuxedo.”

“By the way,” Sylvia asked, through a laugh, “how’d you get tickets to this?”

“Well, you only needed two, right? It’s not like you have a family or anything.”

As she laughed with Boogie Boo, Sylvia asked herself, Is this really how I want to live my life … surrounded by these people? She didn’t. Then why, she asked, did I telephone Lewis and make up with him two weeks ago?

“Virge.”

“Lou.”

“How’re you doing?”

A photographer for Jet magazine was right on cue, documenting this historic occasion for black posterity. Two black men in black tuxedos hugging.

“So how’ve you been, stranger?” Virgil asked, keeping his arm around Lewis’s shoulders.

“Good. Just busy trying to make some money.”

“And how’s that going?”

“Let’s put it this way. If I complained I’d be ungrateful. They believe in me. No one asks any questions.”

The lights blinked.

“What’re you doing later?” Virgil asked as they headed back to their seats. “Come uptown with me for a private after-party. A little group’s getting together.”

He whispered the details in Lewis’s ear, nibbling a bit on his earlobe.

“You’re gonna get yourself in trouble,” Lewis said with a chuckle. “You’re looking too good tonight.”

“Oh, I keep forgetting,” Virgil muttered, as Sylvia approached, “that we’re not like that anymore.”

“And I think it might be best if it stayed that way.”

They’d been “like that” as a matter of convenience five years ago. The involvement lasted a few months, then petered out after they both realized that the essence of the attraction had been neither love nor lust, but status—like the feeling of wanting to drive a Rolls but not really wanting to own one.

They remained in touch, however, which wasn’t difficult, the black bourgeoisie being so small and inbred, and washed each other’s back over the years. But it was always conditional. Scrub for scrub. A rule that was never made explicit, seeing that they both accepted recompense as a very basic principle.