“Let’s sleep on it,” Ted said in a lame waffle.

“Fuck you, you dummies!” Warlock kicked over the coffee table. “You made your feeb bed, die in it.” He strode toward the door; they followed at a dead run with Gloria rubbing her bird’s nest against his hip bone. He looked down at the pendulous amethyst between her breasts. Ted had a strong grip on his elbow.

“We’ll sign, Mom, it’s our only shot. I have doubts that he’ll bring it off but it’s our only chance.”

They signed, then drank a few bottles of prime bubbly. Gloria’s fey friend, the decorator and nightclub owner, came over and cooked them an overlight dinner of truffled omelettes, and an asparagus mousse with poached eggs buried mysteriously in the middle. Warlock was still hungry until the gay blade produced a Bon Vivant soup can with a false bottom, containing the white powder that Warlock had previously met head-on with mixed results. Palm Beach was not the town that catered to impoliteness, so he allowed his name to be written in the stuff on a black mirror. The man began with a “Hock” of Hockney.

“No. It’s Warlock. Write Warlock.” He snorted it through to the “l” before the substance began falling out of his nose.

“Bravo!” they all yelled, except Captain Ted who thought drugs an inimical attack on good sense. He kissed Gloria goodbye and caught a cab for a charter back to Key West.

It was a night not to be forgotten. She held him through his fits of weeping, fits of dread and paranoia, fits of the self-contempt every cuckold feels—the “aren’t I enough” school of self-flagellation with berserk anger hanging in the background, just over the lip of consciousness. Her payoff came near dawn when they threw each other the sort of sorrow-drowning fuck that opens new horizons—in this case, a rendezvous in London in May.

“Why are you so wonderful?” he asked drowsily.

“Tennis, my masseur, plastic surgery, swimming and a lot of practice,” she said frankly.

To be truthful, as shot through with chicanery and deceit as she was, Warlock did not, on a subliminal level, want to lose Diana. As March waned she became merry as a lark over the approaching spring. He had persuaded her that his deep depression was a result of being strafed by some Cuban thugs with Uzi machine guns. Only his ability to swim great lengths underwater had saved his skin. When she returned from work, Warlock had a not totally pleasant tendency to try to rub her article for signs of telltale dampness. But then jealousy, after self-pity, is the most destructive human emotion.