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probably, my Jewishness was to Dart.
    The sitting room of the town house looked out on a little garden with a fountain, atop which a smallish statue of Eros stood shivering in the cold. The light was wintry, but within the room it was warm. I missed Dart. Our physical connection was such that I felt cut off if he was out of the room for a moment. When we were together we were always holding hands, touching hipbones, stroking each other. When we touched each other we seemed to go into a primal place where nothing mattered but our touching. It was the most powerful feeling I had ever known, and it obliterated all discrimination, all judgment, all sense of time.
    Dart’s mother appeared.
    Although Dart had told me she was obese, I was not quite prepared for the sight of her. She was a broad-shouldered woman who weighed perhaps three hundred pounds, and her small, pallid, little girl’s face was lost in chins. She wore her fine silvery-blond hair as she must have when she was seven—held back on each side of her face by a tortoiseshell barrette—and there was about her the unmistakable look of a child who has got into the cookie jar. She wore a shapeless black crepe dress with a row of jets at the U-shaped neck, and on her feet she wore white sheepskin baby booties. When she sat down on the couch—which she promptly did—she was too fat either to cross her legs or to bring them together, so she sat with her knees wide apart, enabling me to see her old-fashioned bloomers and part of her fleshy thighs.
    “Well, hello!” she said, in her dulcet, fat-choked voice. At sixty, she seemed more childlike than my own six-year-old daughters—as if something in her had been arrested and the body had aged while the mind blithely, indeed obstinately, remained in infancy. “I will not grow up,” her blue eyes seemed to say. I immediately saw the resemblance between her and her son, the determination to cram oneself with goodies—to the point of nausea if necessary—simply to prove one could do as one pleased.
    “Well, where is my drink?” Mrs. Donegal asked petulantly. “And where are my hors d’oeuvres?”
    She looked at me. I felt I ought to apologize.
    “Oh, Ven! Ven!” she called on a mellifluous ascending scale. “Oh, Ven!”—that being Dart’s father’s nickname. (Mrs. Donegal was called Muffie—for Martha—and Dart was, to his family, Trick, owing to some baby-talk etymology I hadn’t quite got straight. Jewish families didn’t have these problems of nomenclature. At the time, I found all this terrifically quaint. “Ven,” “Muffie,” “Trick”: these were not names one often came across in Washington Heights.)
    Mr. Donegal arrived with the hors d’oeuvres, which were arrayed on little aluminum tins apparently left over from TV dinners, and these in turn were set out on a very grand English silver tray in the rococo style. There were hot tidbits of various descriptions and also caviar, pâté de foie gras, and smoked salmon. The spread would easily have fed a dozen people.
    Mrs. Donegal presided over the hors d’oeuvres. One was clearly not at liberty to help oneself.
    “Would you like some caviar, dear?” Mrs. Donegal asked. And without waiting for a reply, she prepared me some, with the following commentary: “I’ve been eating caviar since I was three, which was when Mummy first gave it to me. Finished a whole pot of Beluga with a baby spoon. You can imagine how cross my nanny was. But Mummy said, ‘Don’t punish her, Nurse Frith’—she was my first nanny. ‘It’s never too soon for a girl to learn to love Beluga.’ ”
    I laughed with some strain. The story seemed so manifestly canned—as if it had been told many times in these circumstances for the same reason. It was a sort of code, and I had cracked it early. “I was born rich, eccentric, and spoiled,” it said, “and I hope you find this charming, for it’s my only gambit. I ate caviar as a baby, and I still eat caviar and am