Chapter One

Jacqueline Posner stood at the edge of her dining room and aimed a blow-dryer at the center of a pale peach rose. It just refused to open the way it should, and she was running so late she hadn’t even checked the place cards Ponce had set out that afternoon.

“Are you still fooling with those flowers?” Ponce asked impatiently as she made her way from round table to round table, seating charts in hand, checking the last-minute changes. “Honestly, Jacqueline, I’ve told you a hundred times, you don’t need them. You’ve got poinsettias everywhere and mistletoe and that enormous tree in the living room. No one is going to focus on the centerpieces. I hope you’ve paid as much attention to stocking the bar.”

Well, that comment made Jacqueline even more flustered, if such a thing was possible, and she thought for maybe the thousandth time that she should never have asked Ponce Morris to throw this party with her. Jacqueline opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say a word Ponce headed into the library to check on the bar. Jacqueline watched her go, relieved. She had known from the beginning that Ponce was no coddler. She had never been the sort to coo over shoes or diamonds or even men, and she had little tolerance for the dithering that so often passed for girl talk. She was a straight shooter, an option that had simply never occurred to most women in Manhattan—at least not the women Jacqueline knew.

She unplugged the dryer and sighed. Then again, there was absolutely no one better at throwing a party than Ponce, everyone knew that—like they knew the best plastic surgeon for the upper eyelids, as opposed to the best plastic surgeon for the lower eyelids—so Jacqueline really hadn’t had a choice. After a twelve-year marriage to one of the richest men in the country, as the tabloids all noted when trumpeting news of their impending divorce, Jacqueline was giving this dinner in her last weeks at her Park Avenue duplex to show a brave face to the world, the world she had worked so hard to make for herself. And had.

There. The last stubborn petal fell into just the right pose of ripeness—maybe it was too much, would they even last the night, these silly roses?—when Jacqueline glanced at her watch and saw that she had only twenty minutes before the guests would arrive at eight. She stowed the dryer hurriedly in a drawer full of antique Wedgwood—which would have been the perfect breakfast china for the Cotswolds cottage, but never mind—and started toward the first table.

She nervously studied the cheat sheet Ponce had made for her so she could remember who some of these guests were. Why couldn’t she just have the people she knew, she’d implored Ponce at the very beginning, but Ponce wouldn’t hear of it.

“The entire point of this exercise is to make a statement that you’re strong, your design business is strong, you’re still social, and you’re not disappearing,” Ponce had instructed. “Moving to a maisonette on Gracie Square is not exactly going into exile.” She spoke in her courtroom voice, strong and centered and sweetened not at all by her Southern accent. “When this is done, your good friends can eat off trays with you in front of the television and watch you cry your eyes out, but this event is official. It’s meant to be written about in the gossip columns and talked about the next day and the day after that, and when you go to Sir’s to have lunch, everyone will look at you and say, ‘Honestly, that Jacqueline was a damn good wife to Mike Posner. Whatever was he thinking?’”

Well, Jacqueline had liked the sound of that, so she went along with Ponce’s list, even though a good third of them were people she had never had in her home before. Wishing now that she had not let herself be bullied, she looked pleadingly at Ponce as she swept back in.

“That is an exceptionally well stocked bar, though there’s no ice in sight,” Ponce said, stopping her flight to the kitchen only when she caught sight of the paper fluttering in Jacqueline’s unsteady hand.

“Need some help?” Ponce strained to keep her tone light and forced herself to ease up on the triage and remember how difficult this was for Jacqueline. For a dozen years Jacqueline had been at the top of social New York—a fluid mishmash of the rich, famous, and notorious—and had been envied her sumptuous lifestyle. The Posners owned twelve homes around the world—one for each year of their marriage. Every February, on their wedding anniversary, Mike would give his wife an envelope with a key inside and, once aboard their private jet, hand her a “destination folder,” and off they would fly to see their latest plot of paradise—the mansion in Lyford Cay, the flat in Paris, the killer condo in Aspen. The problem with each of the properties, Jacqueline had told Ponce, was that Mike only liked buying them. Living in them didn’t seem to interest him. Or at least living in them with her.

“No, I’m just fine,” Jacqueline said bravely. She knew that no matter what happened—fainting dead away in the front hallway as she greeted her guests, or succumbing to a paralyzing sick headache midappetizer—with Ponce in charge the party would still go off without a hitch. She just didn’t want her friend to know what distinct possibilities those scenarios were.

Ponce smiled encouragingly and pushed through the doors into the kitchen, leaving Jacqueline to squint at her list in the dim overhead light. The candles would not be lit until right before the guests were seated.

She read the name Mary Elizabeth Shaw and sighed. Shawsie, as she was known, was Ponce’s best friend, had been for twenty years. To Jacqueline’s way of thinking, Shawsie was a dreary-looking girl with her rust-colored hair and wardrobe of khakis and kilts. That Shawsie managed to still look like a member of the field hockey team from Greenwich High, despite years of exposure to Ponce’s style and flair, was a mystery to her. But that sexless quality seemed to make people trust Shawsie and like her. In her capacity as the celebrity wrangler for Boothby’s Review, that appeal worked magic, because who could be threatened by Shawsie? If she promised a movie star or a rock star that she would stay in the room every minute once a photographer showed up, Shawsie was right on time, stalwart and true, like the house mother in a girls’ dormitory. No matter what tantrums or crises arose—hair extensions the wrong shade of red!—she could always fix them.

Jacqueline scanned the list for Robin’s name. Yes, of course he was there. Shawsie had married Robin Brody a few years ago. They had eloped to the Bahamas, to Shawsie’s grandmother’s home, where the rich old woman pulled some strings and the happy couple stood barefoot on the beach whispering their vows. Shawsie’s mother stayed holed up in Greenwich and, in a moment as rare for its insight as it was for her sobriety, assured her friends at the club that the entire endeavor could end only in heartbreak. Robin had written a novel in the late eighties about greed and power on Wall Street that had become a huge bestseller. He hadn’t written a word since, though he continued to frequent the hot spots of the greedy and powerful and, his marriage aside, maintained a reputation as quite the ladies’ man.

Gus Fisher. Jacqueline was glad to see that Ponce had seated herself next to him and far away from her. It wasn’t that Jacqueline had anything against Gus Fisher, really. It’s just that he was such a wunderkind news producer, creating that television magazine show Real Time that everyone thought was the greatest thing since, what, Current Events. Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Current Events, a television classic since the late 1960s, had been created by Walter Gluckman, and Walter’s wife, Annabelle, was an old friend of Jacqueline’s. Walter was eighty; he had been a pioneer in broadcast news, and the show, incredibly, was still a hit now, in 2003. He ran it with the same iron hand he’d always wielded, in blatant disregard of whichever “kid” at the network challenged him, and it was an open secret that the top brass were collectively sick of him. Although they had been slow to push him out—the publicity would be atrocious—they would one day, soon, probably, and everyone wrote that it was Gus Fisher who would no doubt succeed him.

Jacqueline sighed. She knew that Annabelle would not be happy at this turn of events, but Jacqueline had been powerless to stop it. She also was none too cheered by the prospect of seeing Rachel Lerner, Gus’s new second wife, a contributor to Boothby’s Review who had written a first novel about the magazine world that had become a marginal bestseller. (The boys at the Literati bookstore assured Jacqueline that the phrase “national bestseller,” which ran in the ads for Rachel’s book, resembled “New York Times bestseller” not at all.) Rachel was one tough customer, with her black clothes and flip remarks and trained eye for even the tiniest misstep—whether someone didn’t remember a fact or tried faking that she actually knew where something like the weapons of mass destruction were hidden. You could practically see Rachel’s pupils dilate as she filed that mistaken moment away in the cold metal cabinet of her heart. Or at least that’s how Jacqueline felt the one time she had, oh so foolishly, gotten involved with Gus in a silly discussion about politics. Well, she would not make that same blunder tonight.

She peered again at her list. Red Evans’s name was crossed out. That was a shame. She’d always liked Red, named for the same rusty head of hair that his niece Shawsie had. He had run Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign and for years had written a popular political column at The Washington Post. After Shawsie’s father was killed in a boating accident when she was only thirteen, Red managed to be there in times of crisis for her and her brother, a long-distance daddy who always made time to fly up to New York on a weekend and sit for hours at the Yale Club listening to tearful—or angry—renditions of “Mother doesn’t understand” as he drank an afternoon’s worth of gin martinis, straight up, three olives. As “Mother” was his older sister, he knew exactly what his niece and nephew meant.

“Jacqueline, I think you need to put that away now.”

Ponce stood before her in the candlelight, and as Jacqueline crumpled the paper in her hand she couldn’t help but be stunned at how magnificent Ponce looked. Her friend’s blond hair fell lush around her shoulders, her wide blue eyes dominated her perfectly heart-shaped face, and her skin was the poreless movie-star variety that doesn’t exist in nature except when it does, marking its owner for eternal damnation by the bitter acne-scarred multitudes. Ponce wore a silver charmeuse top with skinny rhinestone pants, and the effect was simple and formal and absolutely devastating. How old was Ponce, forty-two? Certainly, as fabulous as she was now, it was nothing compared to how she’d looked twenty-four years earlier when she was new to New York, one of the last Aryans signed up by Eileen Ford before popular taste went ethnic. No wonder Lee Morris had lost his mind over her. In those days you could see Ponce’s face on billboards all across the city.

“Oh,” Jacqueline began worshipfully, but Ponce waved her off. “Never mind that. Let me take a look at you.”

Jacqueline stepped away from the table and stood uneasily at attention, hands by her sides—a familiar posture from childhood, when her mother would measure her against the kitchen door. Ponce nodded slowly, examining Jacqueline from head to toe. Truth be told, she couldn’t find a thing wrong. Jacqueline’s puffy black hair framed her long pale face and made it seem less like a schoolteacher’s. Her peach-colored dress was divine—Oscar, probably—and her long, thin arms were as perfectly toned as anyone’s over thirty, not to mention forty, could be. She looked like a preacher’s wife on a hot date, her prim face and tense manner softened by swirls of chiffon and years of assiduous applications of body cream. Ponce considered her own somewhat crusty elbows and nodded approvingly.

“You are fabulous,” she proclaimed, and Jacqueline nearly melted with gratitude. But Ponce had already moved on.

“Okay,” she said, leaning over one table to adjust a place setting. “This all looks wonderful. I’ll go into the bar and double-check the ice. And you might stop into the kitchen and tell the very cute waiter who is on his cell phone with his girlfriend that he needs to put on his jacket, comb his hair, and pick up a tray.”

As Jacqueline turned dutifully toward the kitchen, Ponce leaned over the nearest table and slipped a rose petal into her bag. Jacqueline had overdone it, as Ponce knew she would, and already they were falling.

         

The bar had been set up on the far side of the library between a Picasso and a Rothko, and as Jacqueline dallied in the kitchen Ponce sent the bartender back for still more ice. She put coasters on some of the tables—she didn’t know much about antiques, that had been Lee’s expertise—but a water ring on any of them could be a disaster worth thousands. And who knew if Jacqueline was even keeping these things? Granted, with twelve homes, there was an awful lot of plunder to plunder, but in Ponce’s years as a lawyer she had handled her share of divorces and understood that a couple was never uglier than when they fought to the death over a lamp they each detested, just so the other couldn’t have it.

“The kitchen is under control,” Jacqueline announced as she came back in, stopping at a mirror to wipe a dot only she could see from her face.

“Well, I think we’re ready.” Ponce smiled and wished she still smoked.

The waiters went into the hallway, armed with their silver trays, and Jacqueline joined them, flushing self-consciously, before giving them their instructions. The bartender returned and Ponce said, “I’ll have a white wine, please.”

As he opened a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet she said, “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, that is just wasted on me. Don’t you have anything else?”

He shook his head, gesturing to a case of it stowed in a small glass-fronted refrigerator behind him, and Ponce realized that Jacqueline was doing a little housecleaning of the wine cellar for good measure on her way out the door.

Ponce instructed the bartender to fill her glass with ice first to dilute the strong taste—her usual was a bargain-bin Pinot Grigio she liked just fine—and started to sip. Then she went to the mirror and wiped an invisible dot of her own from her face. She glanced toward the living room, anchored by its spectacular ceiling-high tree, then down the length of the grand hallway, which glowed pink and gold in its candlelight, and felt pleased. No, Jacqueline Posner was not a close friend, but she and Ponce had come up together in the early, heady days of their marriages to rich older men, and Jacqueline had proved herself a pal. Ponce would never forget the charity ball at the Waldorf on the eve of her divorce from Lee when he’d skipped town at the last minute, forcing her to host their table alone. No matter where she turned she found herself face-to-face with that smarmy tabloid reporter hounding her with innuendo about her missing husband. Jacqueline saw what was happening, left her own guests to their cocktails, and swept her friend into a nearby elevator.

“I have the most fabulous client in the Waldorf Towers,” she told Ponce, as lightheartedly as if she had just run into her at lunch. “He lives most of the year in Saudi Arabia and is just thrilled whenever I stop in to make sure everything is just so.” Within minutes the two women were on a top floor, shoeless, ensconced in a cream-and-gold boudoir, refreshing their makeup. As they made short work of a bottle of Dom Pérignon, Jacqueline called the front desk on the house phone and had someone instruct security to get rid of that reporter, pronto. By the time they glided back downstairs just in time for dinner, order was restored.

Now it was Ponce’s turn to help Jacqueline. And Ponce knew all too well the precipice of doubt and dread on which Jacqueline balanced now.

Would the friends who came here tonight still be her friends by next Christmas? A few, probably. The rest would call once or twice, ask her out for a casual dinner or to come with them on a night when they had theater tickets. But that would stop soon enough. No one wanted an extra woman at a dinner party. Like apartments on Park Avenue and houses in the Hamptons, husbands and children were valuable real estate in New York. You would no sooner seat your husband next to a single woman with big eyes who laughed at all of his jokes than you would a diamond thief next to a duchess. It could only end badly.

If Jacqueline had had children instead of homes, she could have hung on more tightly. A man is unlikely to take away the twelve roofs over his heirs’ heads, and being a mother would have meant that Jacqueline’s rights to those roofs were safe. But that line of work held no interest for her.

Ponce didn’t know many details about Jacqueline’s childhood, but she knew she was one of six children who had grown up poor in a small town in Rhode Island, where her father was a lobsterman who also did maintenance work for the Newport Mansions. It was clear that Jacqueline had never located the romance in being the last one to bathe when the hot water was gone, and that sharing a bedroom with two sisters was a deafening hell of its own. So when she earned a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, she had walked out the front door and kept on going. Her greatest childhood joy, she told Ponce, had been visiting the Mansions with her father, who would turn her loose while the crew worked. Yes, the sconces and chandeliers had stunned and delighted her. But it was the silence, the vast roomfuls of polished, carpeted silence that promised new worlds ahead.

After she graduated Jacqueline went to New York and was snapped up as an assistant by Millicent Wilson, the society interior designer. Within two years, so many clients had found Jacqueline so charming—a beguilingly modest young woman who combined a sophisticated take on the traditional with a keen eye for the quirky and new—that she became an associate. When she married Mike she could afford to establish her own business and Madame Wilson was dismayed to discover more than a few defections. And as Jacqueline finished each of the houses Mike bought annually, it was photographed and featured in the top magazines. She was in demand both here and abroad.

Ponce slipped more ice into her drink and watched Jacqueline out in the hallway, flirting tentatively with the cute waiter. She would do just fine, Ponce thought. At least four of the homes were in Jacqueline’s name already, or so Ponce had heard. She sipped her wine and absently rubbed away the lipstick print on the thin rim of the crystal with her thumb. Jacqueline had loved Mike, really and truly. She’d tried everything, poor girl. The sex wasn’t the problem, Jacqueline had confided that afternoon—he’d never cheated, she was sure of it. Or at least that’s what she’d told Ponce. The problem was the conversation—or, more specifically, its absence. It had gotten so bad that Jacqueline had hired a financial adviser to explain the market just so she’d have something to say at dinner. Ponce peered at her wineglass and rubbed it again. It was too awful to think about. But Jacqueline was a good egg, always had been, and if she made it through this ordeal and decided she wanted another man instead of another armoire, Ponce was sure she would find one.

The bell rang, the waiters stood at attention, and Jacqueline turned, searching for Ponce, who walked over and slipped her arm around Jacqueline’s waist for a final, heartening squeeze. “Here we go,” she said as the door opened, giving Jacqueline a gentle nudge forward then retreating into the library, where she could offer a second round of greetings as the guests drifted toward the bar.

The party was on.

         

“Robin, how are you?” Ponce asked the first guest to come her way. The dapperly dressed man kissed both her cheeks as deftly as if he had been born in Milan rather than Staten Island.

“Great, Ponce. You look great, too.”

“Thank you. Where’s your lovely wife?”

Robin raked his hand through his hair, which set the moussed mound slightly askew. Through the years, Ponce had noticed that this was a gesture women found endearing, designed as it was to make the listener feel he was considering a question’s many ramifications, though it never did a thing for Ponce. As a lawyer, she appreciated a straight answer.

“Shawsie? Stuck at the office, I guess,” he said vaguely, as Ponce watched him make not-so-subtle eye contact with a tall young woman, talking to Jacqueline out in the hallway, whom Ponce had never seen before.

“And who is that?” she asked, trying to keep her tone breezy. Honestly, she didn’t know how Shawsie put up with it. Robin was genuinely smart and genuinely talented, so in her own exasperated moments she could still justify her best friend’s attraction to him. That he was genuinely lazy queered the package for Ponce. Well, maybe not lazy, if she was going to be fair. It was a lifetime of cheap charm that had gotten him this far; his mother had died of cancer when he was only eight, and because his father drank, Robin moved in with two doting maiden aunts, whom he had quickly learned to play like craps.

Ponce didn’t know many of the specifics when it came to Robin’s night crawling. Shawsie did, certainly, but Ponce figured that wanting a child was important enough to Shawsie to help her look the other way. But there were times when she couldn’t; a few months back she’d let drop to Ponce that she’d found a purple bra in the backseat of her car. After that it was a crystal chandelier earring, snugly deposited in a suit jacket pocket that Robin had left for the cleaner.

The young woman in the hallway saw that Robin was talking to Ponce Morris, and her smile brightened instantly.

“That’s Babette Steele,” he told Ponce casually, turning toward the bar. “Scotch, rocks,” he ordered, knocking it back.

“And she is?”

“Right here, actually.” He reached behind Ponce and took Babette’s hand, pulling her forward. “Ponce Morris, Babette Steele. Babette works at Boothby’s, with Shawsie. Jeez, Ponce, I’d think you’d know your own guest list.”

Ponce greeted the younger woman warmly. “Hello, Babette, it’s so nice to meet you. And do forgive me. Between Jacqueline’s list and mine, we’re both meeting new people tonight. Of course I know you work at Boothby’s. And that you’re a great friend of Annabelle Gluckman’s.”

Actually, when she and Jacqueline had been making the guest list, Jacqueline called Annabelle in desperation, searching for attractive women under thirty to amuse Montrose Merriweather, the Southern billionaire who had bought her apartment. Jacqueline said that as a top marketing executive at Solange Cosmetics, Annabelle knew them all. “She’s a registry, like at Bloomingdale’s,” she told Ponce. “She meets these girls on shoots for the ad campaigns, then uses them as window dressing for her glitzy PR events. But she’s careful to shut them out of the hard-core social ones like this so they don’t ruin anyone’s marriage. Especially hers. I mean, only in this crowd could twenty-five be considered jailbait.” At that point, she and Ponce mustered weak smiles. They remembered when they were the young ones.

“Yeah, Annabelle, what a trip! I mean she’s great,” Babette answered. “I’m just really excited to meet you, is all.” The girl flushed, tossing her glossy blond hair over her shoulders.

“Me?” Ponce’s engagingly self-deprecating laugh was tinged with a shade of skepticism.

“When I was growing up,” Babette said, “I saw you all the time, like in Women’s Wear Daily, and Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country. There were your fashion spreads, and then when you married Lee Morris you went to all those parties and openings. But what I thought was so great was that you never hogged the shot like those other women who couldn’t wait to show off. You were always so cool about it, like you didn’t care if they took your picture or not.” She flushed again. “At least that’s what I thought.”

“Oh, trust me, you were right,” Ponce said, laughing. “Once I wasn’t making a living at it anymore, it would have suited me fine to never have my picture taken again.” She held out her wineglass in the general direction of the bartender, who automatically leaned over to refill it. “But never mind that. A child reading Women’s Wear! Do you cover fashion at Boothby’s?”

Babette laughed, tugging self-consciously at the clinging skirt of her red jersey dress. Ponce saw that a few of the red beads that paved its plunging neckline had pulled free, leaving little shoots of naked thread in their wake. That was too bad, she thought. The girl’s bosom was simply not large enough to prevent one from noticing.

“Me?” Babette said. “No, definitely not. My mom’s a librarian and I read all that stuff there, waiting for her after school. Actually, I’m a writer. Or at least I’m going to be. I’ve been an editorial assistant at Boothby’s for the last five months.”

“Hiya, Ponce.” Two arms grabbed her around the waist from behind.

Ponce turned. “Oh, hello, Walter,” she said, skillfully shifting her cheek just out of his slobbering reach. Honestly, he was simply too old to be this vile still, she thought. In his younger years, Walter Gluckman was such a lech he made Robin Brody look like a eunuch.

“Ponce, you look marvelous!”

Of course, where there was Walter, the clinging Annabelle was never far behind, her grating voice gilded not at all by its stagy British accent. When she had first met Ponce, Annabelle called her “Ponth,” much to the Southern woman’s amusement. “Oh, I’m not Spanish,” she’d said, laughing. “It’s just like it’s spelled. Plain old Ponce.” Now the two women moved their faces toward each other dutifully as if to kiss. Ponce glanced at Annabelle’s deep V neckline and was horrified to see that the pancake makeup she had applied to her décolletage had, in the overheated New York apartment, melted into the furrows of her ample cleavage. Ponce forced herself not to stare at the sticky mess, trying in vain to spot Shawsie, who would have a delectable appreciation of a sight as heinous as this.

But Annabelle had already pressed past her. “Hello, dear,” she said to Babette, who leaned over and kissed her cheek. Annabelle then went for the second cheek, the Continental double kiss which Babette hadn’t expected. She stranded the older woman, who extended her neck back and forth in midair like a pigeon.

“Oh, sorry, right,” Babette said, stepping forward too late.

“Hiya, kid.” Walter slid his arm around her waist and turned her toward the bar. “Whattaya drinking?”

Ponce moved away to avoid being overheard by Babette and said to Annabelle, “I understand that girl is a friend of yours.”

Annabelle sighed and, looking for escape, scanned the sparse crowd. The last thing she wanted was to get stuck having girl talk with Ponce Morris. Ponce had once given the most glamorous parties in New York, but then she’d just quit after her divorce, refusing to entertain again, so why should Annabelle bother? Now all Ponce did was that dismal legal work, for the city or some downtrodden agency—Home Again, wasn’t it—placing poor children in foster homes. She had stepped up tonight to help Jacqueline, but that didn’t really count, did it?

“Not exactly a friend,” Annabelle said crisply, silently berating herself for arriving too early, even though she had been dressed and ready at six-thirty. Everyone knew this was the invitation of the holiday season, a front-row seat to watch Jacqueline Posner try to keep a stiff upper lip amid her nearest and dearest. Annabelle also knew that practically every guest tonight had been savvy enough to call Mike Posner’s cigar broker personally to send along the financier’s favorite vintage Cubans as a holiday token. And many of them had devised dinner parties of their own just to be able to invite him. Those were scheduled for mid-January, after the skiing and after Jacqueline had safely relocated to the estate in Bedford while her new place in the city was being renovated. His was by far the more important list to stay on.

Ponce was waiting for an answer, Annabelle realized. “Babette was an assistant in the beauty department at Self about a year ago,” she said, “so I met her through shoots with Solange. She went around for a while with that handsome chef, the one downtown with the motorcycle who got all those raves for inventing that dish—what was it—the braised fetal arugula, I think. I can’t quite remember, but it was very hot.” She fanned herself with an antique linen cocktail napkin. “As it is in here. Can’t you do something about that?” Her tone had slid up the scale from bored to imperious.

“Right away,” Ponce said, grateful for the getaway. She knew just where Annabelle’s napkin was headed, and she couldn’t bear to watch that painstakingly preserved piece of fabric from a bride’s trousseau in late nineteenth-century London meet its end with Solange’s Tawny Continuous Coverage, SPF 15.

She turned back toward the bar and saw Sari Grossman, waiting patiently for a mineral water. Ponce practically hugged her.

“Sari, how are you, I haven’t seen you forever,” she said, pulling Sari away from Annabelle, who had already injected herself between her husband and the tall young girl in the red dress. Annabelle’s tight smile was a sure sign that the evening was rapidly falling short of her expectations.

“Ponce, I know you got us invited here, thank you,” Sari said kindly. As she always did, Sari Grossman made Ponce feel like a bum. Her husband was a doctor, she had three small children, and she ran one of the most successful pediatric public health clinics in the city, in Brooklyn. In her own pro bono legal work for foster children, Ponce had dealt with her and always found her so, well, earnest.

“Hello, Ponce.”

She turned toward the familiar voice and smiled. It was Sari’s husband, Neil, a fixture of late on all the television talk shows, having had terrific success as a fertility doctor impregnating “lost cause” women in their late thirties and early forties. He leaned toward her cheek, a move she neatly dodged by turning him toward the bar.

“Still Dewar’s and soda?” she asked as Neil Grossman spoke over her to the bartender: “Vodka neat.”

Ponce raised her eyebrows. “My mistake,” she murmured, turning to engage Sari in what she knew would be a tedious conversation about flu shots and the city’s budget woes. Neil, meanwhile, was shaking hands with Gus Fisher, who, not a moment too soon, had come up behind Ponce, laying his hand in the small of her back.

“Hello, darling,” he said, kissing the immediate airspace above his old friend’s cheek. He knew full well how she had been drilled as a model to consider her makeup as much a part of her outfit as her clothes.

“Dewar’s and soda,” Gus said to the bartender, and Ponce laughed. “Oh, that’s your drink,” she said. “I should have remembered. I am sorry, Dr. Grossman. As you can see, my hostessing skills are simply pitiful since Mr. Morris’s demise.” She sipped her wine. “And thank God he isn’t here to catch me. Divorce or not, if I didn’t remember something like a man’s drink, he would be furious.”

“What’s this? Another allusion to your former life as a Sutton Place stewardess?” Rachel Lerner leaned toward Ponce and skipped the air kiss, squeezing her arm instead. “How great do you look?” she said, her tone a democratic mix of admiration and envy.

Sari Grossman looked confused. “I didn’t know you were a stewardess, Ponce. I thought you were a model.”

Ponce laughed as Rachel said, “She wasn’t a stewardess. She only played one in her marriage. Hi, Sari, how’ve you been?” Rachel shook Sari Grossman’s hand and thanked God that at least one woman here looked drabber than she did. Rachel always meant to go shopping, really she did. She must have worn this black dress with the matching jacket fifty times since she bought it on sale at Bergdorf’s, the day she interviewed the fancy hairdresser who once worked there. She looked at Ponce. Not even in my next lifetime, she thought, and that meant the outfit, the face, and those hips in those pants.

Sari still looked confused.

“Oh hell, Sari, you didn’t start coming around until it was almost over,” Ponce said, again holding out her glass to the bartender. She raised an eyebrow, and this time he did not forget the ice.

Rachel opened her mouth to comment further, and Ponce saw Gus dig a cautionary finger into his wife’s hip. “Oh, Gus, you are unfailingly polite and Lee always loved you,” Ponce said, smiling conspiratorially, “but the truth was that when we gave those famous dinner parties, he made me go to the public library before each one and look up every guest in Who’s Who—and I want to tell you, almost all the men at least were in there—and I had to memorize their biographies and ask them questions that were attuned to their interests.”

Sari gasped as Rachel shook her head. “That you did it is the incredible part,” Rachel said as the bell rang for dinner.

Ponce took Gus by one arm and Rachel by the other. “My dears, I had no choice. Or at least I thought I didn’t,” she said mildly as they headed toward the dining room. A red-faced man in his early eighties staggered down a side hallway, zipping his fly.

“Fred Engel is here?” Gus asked, amused. “I didn’t know he could stand up anymore.”

“Jacqueline insisted on inviting him,” Ponce said, disgusted. “He’s the only famous writer she knows. Which reminds me.” She stopped walking, and Gus and Rachel stopped on either side. “Do you know someone named Babette Steele from Boothby’s?”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Yes. Why?”

“She’s here because she’s friends with Annabelle Gluckman. And she seems perfectly pleasant, so why are you making that face?”

“Well, she hasn’t been at the magazine terribly long, but she’s very helpful, if you know what I mean,” Rachel said. “She’s always offering to sort the mail or answer the phone or run something down to the messenger room.”

“Sounds downright sinister,” Ponce said, shaking her head.

“I guess the point is, she says she wants to be a writer, but she’s never writing,” Rachel went on. “She’s too busy hosting the office. And when she does write, I’ve seen a few small things she’s done, it’s completely generic. No voice at all. She’s like the Stepford assistant.”

Gus moved over to Rachel and put his arm around her. “That’s my wife,” he said affectionately. “Always a kind word.”

“She’s probably just hungry,” Ponce said teasingly, and Gus laughed. Although reasonably slim, Rachel usually ate for six. “Take her in to dinner, Gus, so she’ll behave herself.”

Ponce turned and walked down the grand hallway, where a number of guests lingered with their drinks, murmuring over the string of Tissots that reached from the dining room entrance to the duplex’s main stairway. It looked like an opening night at the Met. She moved from group to group, mentioning that dinner was served. Most people nodded and smiled and didn’t budge, though a former senator, a man Ponce found unbearably pompous, caught her eye eagerly.

No wonder, Ponce thought. Beside him was the wife of a high-powered lawyer Ponce had known forever. It was this woman’s habit, on the day of a dinner party, to sit down with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times, read them front to back, and then spend the evening unloading her worldly knowledge onto the distinguished men in her midst—who had not only read the same papers but had created some of the news themselves. She was a terrible seat, Ponce often complained to Shawsie, because, her statistics on world hunger aside, she had never learned the most important thing about men: They didn’t want to be told. They wanted to tell.

As the dinner bells sounded again, the crowd finally started to move. Ponce went to the entrance of the dining room and watched the waiters guide guests to their seats.

“Where is Jacqueline?”

It was Annabelle, in an advancing stage of outrage.

Ponce tried to hold her temper. “I don’t know, Annabelle. What’s the problem?”

“I want to know why Gus Fisher was invited to this dinner and why I, of all people, am seated next to him. I mean, really!”

Ponce’s gaze was even. “Gus Fisher was invited because he is one of my oldest and dearest friends.” She smiled sweetly. “And I think this is a marvelous chance for you to get to know him better. Think about it. You just might do your husband some good.” A warning note sounded in that last sentence, and Annabelle heard it. She turned and left without a word.

“Ponce, there’s trouble.” Shawsie appeared, her eyebrows drawn together in a deep quotation mark of anxiety. Her gray satin pants, so early in the evening, were creased across the crotch in a sideways echo.

Ponce nodded, her eye on one of Jacqueline’s friends, a slightly older woman whose strapless evening dress exposed spindly arms hung with loose, crepey flesh. “I see it,” she said. “Why spend all that money doing her face if she insists on showing those arms?”

“No, Poncie, not that!” Shawsie steered her toward the stairs. “Our hostess is sobbing in the master bathroom because she found Fred Engel peeing into her bidet.”

“Sounds to me like she’s selling the place in the nick of time.” Ponce grabbed a fresh glass of white wine from a waiter’s tray and sent Shawsie in to dinner before climbing the stairs and pushing open the bathroom door. Jacqueline was sniffling on her makeup stool.

“Short of a death in your family, there is no reason for you to be in here,” Ponce scolded. “Fix your face, Jacqueline, and let’s go.” As she started to protest, Ponce held up her hand. “Your left eye is fine, just redraw the liner on the right bottom and do a light powder over your nose.” Jacqueline, seemingly dazed, turned toward the mirror and followed instructions. When she was finished, Ponce took her by the wrists and stood her up. Her tone was unexpectedly tender. “I know that this is your home, that you love it and you’re losing it,” she said, her voice low. “I know that to find someone doing something so awful is more than you can bear.” Jacqueline’s eyes filled again. Ponce tightened her grip. “But that is for later,” she said firmly. “Right now, there are sixty people in your dining room waiting to start their dinners. So before Fred Engel pees into those roses, we had better head back there.”

That got a wavy smile from Jacqueline, who started down the stairs as Ponce stayed close and murmured encouragement. In the hallway, through the entrance to the dining room, Ponce could see Babette Steele throw back her head and laugh at something a gray-haired man seated next to her had said.

“That must be the great Montrose Merriweather,” Ponce said.

Jacqueline reached for her friend’s hand. “Two weeks from Monday,” she said weepily, “he’ll own this apartment.”

“Let’s get through tonight first,” Ponce said, holding on tight. “I’m praying this Babette is up to keeping him entertained.”

Jacqueline nodded. “So is Annabelle. As a matter of fact, I’m sure she’s counting on it.”

Ponce looked at Jacqueline sideways, surprised to hear a hardness in her voice. Jacqueline was never tough or bitchy: In the viperous crew that composed social New York on any given week—a tit-for-tat bunch whose acceptance had meant everything to Lee—Jacqueline’s decency was one of the things Ponce liked best about her. It was why she was here tonight; realistically, the chances that the two of them would see each other—in the short term, at least—were slim. A few shrewdly timed guest appearances aside, Jacqueline would essentially leave New York for a year or two, making sure to find work as far away as possible. After that, anything could happen.

But for the last, what, decade or more, the two women had been each other’s dependable allies, both subject to the whims of older, powerful husbands who had come from nothing and designated their young, beautiful wives their personal emissaries to the big time. And make no mistake, those endless parties had constituted work as crucial as any corporate board meeting. The dresses and the jewelry and the flowers aside, you could stand in a Park Avenue apartment and see the values of social power rise and fall above each coiffed head as clearly as if you were looking at the board at the Stock Exchange. The rich always mattered most, and the well known—an ever-changing group of the hot then the not, who were the evening’s equivalent of the entertainment—always mattered less.

Which is why you would rarely find one of the rich women behaving like Annabelle—for the most part, they wouldn’t need to. But Annabelle’s desperation was justified. Some of the well known were still invited if their fortunes changed because, well, people actually liked them. Annabelle, who had never been above phoning a hostess to cry and cajole her way into a dinner from which she and Walter had been excluded, didn’t have much in the bank when it came to goodwill. And she was canny enough to know that the minute he was deposed at the network, the two of them would find themselves convening nightly at the menu drawer, debating the relative merits of orange beef and moo shu pork.

So Ponce and Jacqueline, having learned together to navigate a world as treacherous—and absurd—as this one, had come to appreciate the simple reward of a kind word from a kind person, even if the two were never meant to be bosom buddies.

In the familiar grand hallway Ponce felt an unexpected pang, and Jacqueline caught her eye. They squeezed each other’s hands, united in a wistful nod to their passing youth, its shining triumphs and terrible errors. Ponce wanted to pull her aside then, to say what—something like thank you, something like goodbye—but before she could say a word they had arrived at the entrance to the dining room and Robin Brody stood, holding his drink aloft.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please! A toast to our glamorous hostess and her spectacular home!”

Glasses were raised and cries of “Hear, hear!” rang out. Jacqueline blushed, and Ponce smiled appreciatively at Robin. Never had one of his showboating gestures translated into actually meaning something as much as that particular moment. It was a much smarter alternative to her and Jacqueline getting soggy in full view.

Flashing an all-clear expression to Shawsie, Ponce set down her wineglass at her seat next to Gus Fisher, who was manfully handling what Ponce could hear was a screed against the network delivered by Annabelle in defense of her husband’s countless achievements, and made her way straight to Montrose Merriweather.

“I just wanted to introduce myself and welcome you to your new home,” Ponce drawled in pure cornpone, which, she knew from long experience, worked potent magic against the forbidding elegance of her appearance.

“Mrs. Morris.” Merriweather rose to a very full height. “I understand that you have been of incomparable help to our poor Jacqueline.” In his pronunciation that last syllable rhymed with “clean,” and Ponce was surprised to hear some cornpone of his own.

“Our?” she asked airily. Her smile dazzled.

“Well, after she spent so much time helping us with our home outside Atlanta, we started to feel she was one of the family.”

This rang a faint bell with Ponce, who remembered something about the restoration of a former plantation so elaborate that even her relatives in South Carolina had heard about it. Jacqueline, of course, had never said much. When it came to her clients, she was always discreet.

“Is your wife here?” Ponce asked, looking around the table.

“No, Mrs. Merriweather and I have had a parting of the ways,” he said smoothly. “But allow me to introduce my delightful dinner partner this evening, Miss Babette Steele.”

Babette leapt from her chair as she and Ponce said together, “We’ve met.” Babette, on her way to standing, banged the table hard enough so that the water sloshed in the glasses. She grabbed at her own to prevent it from spilling.

“Babette and I have just realized something of a connection,” Merriweather said to Ponce, looking amused. “Before she ran off and married a Yankee from New York City, Babette’s mother was the prettiest girl one town over from where I grew up in Georgia, and I had the honor of dancing with her once.”

“What a small world.”

Ponce was surprised to see how awkward Babette was—like a kid, really. She was pretty enough, but she was so much of a type—blond hair, blue eyes, long legs. Ponce stopped when she realized she was describing herself.

“I meant to tell you before, I just love Shawsie,” Babette blurted, trying to seize the moment. “I know you guys are friends and she’s just the nicest person at Boothby’s. You should come visit us there sometime.”

Ponce smiled. “Of course I will,” she said, placing a hand on the backs of both their chairs. “But I’m afraid I’ve interrupted your dinner, so please sit down. Mr. Merriweather, it was lovely to meet you.”

“Likewise, but do call me ‘M,’” he said, taking his seat. “Everyone does.”

Babette remained standing. “Uh, do you know where the ladies’ room is?” she asked Ponce, who led her to the guest bathroom, right off the dining room in the front hallway, which anyone but Fred Engel would realize was the right place to go.

On the other side of Babette’s empty chair, Walter Gluckman leaned over to M. “She’s something, isn’t she?” he said as Babette and Ponce exited the room.

“Which one?” M asked dryly, lighting a mentholated Benson & Hedges 100 and sliding a small silver footed ashtray nearer to his wineglass.

“Ponce, for chrissakes,” Walter answered. “The other one’s a kid.”

M looked amused. “Perhaps,” he said. “Though I suspect she’s a tad older than the last Mrs. Merriweather.”

Walter laughed knowingly. “Well, if I could do it again, I would have gone after Ponce.” He glanced awkwardly over his shoulder, trying to remember where his wife was seated. “She’s a knockout now, but then? You wouldn’t have believed it.” He spotted Annabelle, safely out of earshot, lecturing Gus Fisher two tables away.

“Yes?” M inhaled, pushing his caviar pie off to the side. Yankee pretense, nothing more. “So where is Mr. Morris?”

“Dead,” Walter said importantly. The newsman in him rose to the occasion of delivering a scoop. In this tired group he and Annabelle traveled in—a world that meant more to her than anything except maybe his life-insurance policy—they all might as well have been fucking each other forever. You didn’t just go home bored with your wife after one of these shindigs, you went home bored with every broad in the room. As the years went by, the collective tits drooped ever lower (except for the spooky rejiggered racks that now bounced), and the conversations remained the same, with their forced frissons of excitement (“I loved this week’s show! How did you ever find that story?”). The result was that these dinners were depressingly like fucking your own wife—only they happened more frequently, and everyone’s makeup was still on. And there was no chance of television for hours.

“Actually, Lee died a few years after the divorce,” Walter told M. “He’d started to turn on Ponce when she became a lawyer and he treated her like crap, so she left. But I’ll say this for her. When he got sick, she came back and took care of him. Stayed in the apartment, dealt with the nurses and all his kids, not to mention the first three Mrs. Morrises. And I guess he appreciated it, since he apparently left her a fortune. Though the women all say she earned every dime.”

“That’s what the women always say,” M said pleasantly, and Walter laughed.

Ponce had reentered the room, and M watched as she made her way to her table. Rail-thin, with a big-city aura of money and confidence. An exquisitely balanced face that was pointed and kittenish at once. She stopped and whispered something to Robin, who threw back his head and laughed. M was surprised to see that ease between them. After Robin’s third scotch, he had said a few things about Ponce that M had found somewhat curious.

“Yeah, she is a great help to Jacqueline,” Robin had said. “She’s a great help to everybody, really. That’s her specialty.”

“Sounds like you don’t mean that too kindly.”

Robin shrugged. “Look, she’s my wife’s best friend. Everyone loves Ponce.” His tone was sour. “She’s the only woman in New York who has threesies in the living room.”

M raised his eyebrows but said nothing, hoping not to interrupt the stream of bile—and information—bubbling so close to the surface.

“Not real ones, my friend. That lady is no tramp. Unfortunately.” Robin laughed.

M smiled. And waited.

“Ponce hates sex,” Robin said in an exaggeratedly dramatic tone. “That’s her whole gig, since Lee. I mean, she had some major affair after she left him, but since then she claims she’s finished with it. So her big thing now is being best buddies with all these couples. Like me and Shawsie. Though I can tell you, she’s always liked Shawsie a hell of a lot better than she’s liked me.” He laughed a little too loudly.

“She’s a professional friend, is what I’m saying,” he went on. “Shawsie needs some girl-talk manicure session? Ponce is there. I get some dumb-ass magazine assignment on something like premium vodkas—I’m between books at the moment—and even though Shawsie’s dead asleep, we’ve been trying to have a baby, let’s not even go there, Ponce is sitting with me in some Russian dive in the West Fifties, pounding pomegranate vodkas at two a.m.”

“Sounds like a good sport,” M crooned.

“Maybe,” Robin countered. “She’s also an old friend of Gus Fisher’s, and she can listen to him spout Nielsen numbers and political polls forever. Lives for it. While Rachel, Gus’s new wife, couldn’t give a shit about all that. She’s a cook. Spends hours on a meal. And you can see that Ponce is no eater. But she eats that food like she hasn’t eaten in days. Which, by the way, she hasn’t.”

M smiled. “She sounds like a very good person to have on your side,” he said.

Robin shrugged. “I guess so,” he said, accepting a fresh scotch from a waiter who took his empty glass. “But all that bullshit with the wives aside, I think Ponce is really an imaginary friend for the middle-aged man. I mean, yes, with the women she goes shopping and gives parties and all that. But she watches football with Stan Crandall, while Bitsy reads magazines in bed and thanks God she doesn’t have to; she plays golf with George Stein, because Carol only likes tennis; and not only does she go to Knicks games with Larry DeLynn but she lets him eat as many hot dogs as he wants and never tells Lila, who forbids him to have nitrates. But what’s in it for her, exactly? Doesn’t it make sense—for someone who invests that much time and effort—to actually get laid?”

M laughed as Robin went on, raking his hand through his already tilted hair. “I’ll give her this, though,” he mused. “The one thing she never does is get close enough to fight. She gets all the perks of being married before she disappears in the nick of time, leaving the rest of us to slug it out on our own.”

Babette returned from the ladies’ room, and M rose, pulling out her chair. She sat down and pulled it forward, banging the table again.

“Whoa, sugar, you’re hard on the china,” he said.

The appetizers had been cleared and replaced with dinner plates; a waiter quickly approached Babette, offering a tray of fried chicken. Another waiter followed, bearing a bowl of mashed potatoes. Once she had helped herself—she was the last guest served—someone hit the side of a water goblet with a spoon and Jacqueline stood, looking much more relaxed than she had a half hour ago. Ponce had apparently seen to it that Jacqueline’s wineglass stayed full.

“I want to welcome you all to my home,” Jacqueline said when the room quieted down. “And I want to give you all a chance to meet the man who will be the next resident of this apartment where I have spent so many happy years. He is Montrose Merriweather, the financier from Atlanta”—a rumbling went around the room; among rich people Montrose Merriweather was richer—“whose beautiful home, Twin Springs, I had the great privilege of helping to restore. And now that M wants to spend more time in New York, well, I can’t think of anyone who would take better care of the place that has meant so much to me. So please make sure you all introduce yourselves tonight, he’s right over there”—heads swiveled as M smiled genially and Babette turned the color of her dress—“and just by the way, in case you were wondering what in the world is going on in my kitchen, this dinner tonight is part New York, the caviar pie, giving way to Georgia, the main course you have now. So eat, drink, and be merry!”

The din in the room rose immediately, and there was much fevered speculation about Mr. Merriweather and the very young woman by his side, both new faces for this crowd, an unusual occurrence indeed. Needless to say, the young woman was the topic of much derision among her elders: What a cheap dye job! She looks just like the Wolfes’ newest au pair, that girl whose every outfit shows her navel—how has Patricia stood it all these months? Jacqueline has apparently lost her mind seating such a nobody—what, a secretary—next to a man like Montrose Merriweather! He’ll think all of New York to be simpleminded fools. Perhaps Jacqueline Posner isn’t leaving town a moment too soon.

As the waiters went round to say that coffee would be served in the living room, people rose eagerly, though most made a beeline out the door. The time was exactly 10:50 p.m., and as the eleven o’clock news loomed, it was the undisputed witching hour for a New York dinner party. The shelf life for good sportsmanship never exceeded two hours, fifty minutes. A dismissal bell might just as well have rung, as it once had in grade school.

In the hallway, Ponce noticed Shawsie talking to Neil Grossman. She could see from the look on her friend’s face that the news was not good. In the last year Shawsie had attempted three in vitro fertilizations, and it was now clear that the latest hadn’t worked, either. Normally, of course, she would have gone to the office to speak to Grossman, but she was a tortured woman and he wouldn’t be mean enough to know and not tell.

Seeing Sari give her husband the high sign that it was time to leave, Ponce walked over to say goodbye. “School night,” Sari said apologetically, and Ponce kissed her on the cheek as Shawsie offered the couple a ride in the Boothby’s car she had waiting downstairs.

“I’m going back to the office, actually,” Neil said. “I promised to speak on a conference call to Sydney at eleven-thirty, and I was nervous about making it to Brooklyn in time.” He turned to Shawsie and gave her a quick hug. “If you have more questions tomorrow, give me a buzz in the afternoon and I’ll be glad to go through it with you.”

She thanked him and collected Robin and they all got into the elevator together. Within minutes, the party was down to a handful. Ponce bid Gus and Rachel goodbye.

“Feeling better now?” Ponce asked Rachel, who had her arms wrapped around her new husband.

“Caviar, mashed potatoes, and Gus,” Rachel sighed. “Remember never to speak to me on an empty stomach. I think Babette Steele is the loveliest editorial assistant I’ve ever known.” She leaned over to kiss Ponce’s cheek and was amused to see that even at this late hour she was still pulling away.

Ponce climbed the stairs and heard Jacqueline back in the master bathroom. When she pushed the door open this time, though, it hit the cute waiter full in the back. He didn’t seem to notice, as he was busily bent over the hostess in a passionate embrace.

“Excuse me,” Ponce said, but neither of them straightened up. “I guess we’ll talk tomorrow,” she called, shutting the door behind her.

Down in the lobby, the doorman signaled for a cab and once inside, Ponce gave the driver the address. Ten blocks away, he pulled up to an elegant brownstone and waited until she turned her key in the lock. She felt quite pleased, actually, about how the evening had turned out, its bumpy start aside. Even the dread Annabelle had made it a point to bid her a fond farewell, although Ponce knew that Annabelle was just hedging her bets in case she decided to throw a white-tie ball anytime soon.

She closed the front door firmly and double-locked it, then started down the darkened hallway. She had gone only a few steps when she was grabbed from behind.

She gasped as he pulled at her shirt and clutched her breasts—she wore no bra—pushing her against the wall. He yanked at her rhinestone pants, and a few small stones made a tinkling sound as they hit the tiled floor.

She turned, but before she could open her mouth he covered it with his, and when he entered her she groaned. She grabbed at his hair and pulled at his shirt collar and still he kept on, oblivious as one of her shoes flew off and she wrapped her legs around him hard and held on. She barely felt the smack of the wall against her back as she finally broke her mouth free of his and cried out as she came, just before he did.

They stood a moment in place, his arms making one circle around her, her legs making another around him. Slowly he eased her down, and once she was standing he bent over and kissed her gently on her forehead.

“Jesus, did you have to ruin my pants?” Ponce said, pulling them back on.

“What took you so long?” Dr. Neil Grossman panted. “You know I have to get home.”

“Part of the thrill,” she said wryly. She walked over to a wooden cabinet on the far side of his office and opened it. She poured him a vodka—the only liquor in the cabinet—neat. He took a sip, then held out the glass, offering it to her. She shook her head and pulled on her blouse. As he continued to drink, still standing in the hallway, she blew him a kiss and left.