“Sorry, I cannot,” Utte says. She talks very quietly. “It was very nice to meet you,” she says to me, and she shakes my hand. “I will maybe see you—” She gestures toward the ceiling, toward where her studio is. Over dinner she’d told me about her work: portraits of people drawn as what they hope to be in the future—pilots, nurses, authors, living in a house in the countryside, fathers, mothers—that fit into lockets for those people to wear around their necks. She had said she could draw me, and I’d told her I’d think about what I want to be in the future. She squeezes my hand. “Good luck with opening night,” she says. Then she moves on to saying goodbye to the next person. “Thank you, Shakti,” she says. Shakti is wrapping some leftovers in foil for Utte to take home. The pug is back on the floor and is cautiously making its way over to me. “Danke schoen, danke schoen,” Utte says, while leaving.

“Pass the pig?” Maria asks me.

“Umm,” I say.

“This is Pig.” Maria picks up the pug. “He’s my dog and, usually, when there’s a nice group of us up here, we play a game called pass the pig—”

She’s interrupted by Ben shouting “Pass the pig!” again. Anju looks over her shoulder at him from the sink, where she is washing her glass. I notice that she looks a little put out. She whispers something to Shakti, who is standing next to her, and Shakti nods.

“Okay, yes, Ben,” Maria says. “So, anyway, we each go around the kitchen to find something to put on our faces, like butter, cream cheese, things like that, and I’ll check them all to make sure they are safe for him to eat.” As she says this, she nuzzles her face into the folds on Pig’s neck. “Little cutie,” she adds. “And then we each lie down, pass Pig along, and whoever’s face Pig kisses for the longest is the winner. He’s a fickle little thing, so his favorite food changes a lot.” She shrugs her shoulders. “So, yeah . . . I know it’s a bit lame, and maybe a bit disgusting,” she laughs. “But it’s become a tradition.”

“Oh, okay,” I say. “What does the winner get?”

“Renown! Honor!” Ben booms.

It’s kind of like being a kid again, playing hide-and-seek, or egg hunting at Easter. I watch James cover Ben’s face in peanut butter, and spread butter on his own face. Anju decorates her face with cream cheese. She has two circles of it on her cheeks and a straight line down her nose. I put a small amount of olive oil on my face, and rub it in like moisturizer.