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Kandel, the lesbian galleryist, tipped her glass in salute when I came in, and I drifted in her direction. Stout and handsome in her evening dress, eyes drowsy with congenital irony, Naomi bore the promise of deadpan commiseration here. Though we’d all chosen to accept this invitation, we had to make ourselves feel better about the decision by imagining ourselves enslaved. Naomi stood with another woman, a curvaceous, fortyish socialite in a sparkling ginger-threaded dress. Together they stood regarding a framed drawing, perhaps a new art acquisition of the Woodrows’, a crisp architectural-style rendering of a dark pit that plunged between two Manhattan office towers, viewed from above. Tiny figures were also represented, gazing into the pit’s depths from the sidewalk.
    “Do you know Sharon?” asked Naomi.
    “I haven’t had the pleasure.”
    “Sharon Spencer, Chase Insteadman.”
    “I’m a fan of your work,” said Sharon Spencer. She weighed my handshake for an extra instant. I wondered which work she meant. Was she a fan of Martyr & Pesty? Few bragged of this. And Sharon, attractive as she was, seemed a bit old for that sitcom’s heyday. She was being polite, I decided, or coy. I joined in gazing at the drawing.
    “Laird Noteless,” said Naomi, naming the artist. “It’s a study for Expunged Building.”
    “Are you his dealer?” I asked Naomi.
    She shrugged no . “There’s nothing to deal. Noteless doesn’t usually let go of his sketches. He likes to hoard or destroy the evidence, leave only the major works behind. I think Maud and Thatcher are helping him get Expunged Building past city council.”
    “It’s not built yet?” said Sharon Spencer, surprised.
    “Not yet.”
    She shook her head. “Preposterous, the hurdles they set up.”
    “Where’s your husband, anyway?” said Naomi dryly, not concealing her boredom, and maybe wishing to squash any flirtation.
    “Reggie’s coming late,” sighed Sharon Spencer. “He’s stuck at work. It’s all dreadful down there now.”
    Reggie, I understood, was one of those who shifted the money around, trying to make it get bigger. They all deserved our pity, clearly enough. The money men, effortful and exhausted, slumping through the gray fog. Compared to their wives they were peons.
    Maud Woodrow found me next, and broke me away from Naomi and Sharon Spencer to meet Harriet Welk, an editor at Knopf. Maud and Harriet had met when a photographer needed permission to reproduce some of Maud’s collection for a coffee-table book on nineteenth-century folk jewelry. Harriet, though she might have been the youngest player on this intimidating stage, was commanding and keen, and easy to want to charm. It was Harriet who’d brought Richard Abneg along. He was still across the room, getting buttonholed by Thatcher Woodrow. No male arriving in the Wood-rows’ circle was ever spared preemptive marking with Thatcher’s scent. When spirited off to another duty, Harriet retailed a few facts about Richard, who she called her “secular date.”
    “You mean ‘platonic,’ I think.”
    “Platonic, secular, old friends. Anything between us is unimaginable.” She pointed Abneg out, a short, stolid fellow who appeared, in this company, like a cartoon Communist in his wide-legged charcoal suit, untucked flannel shirt, and a black beard encroaching on his sullen cheeks and fierce eyes. He stood nose to nose with Thatcher, gripping a martini’s neck like the handle of an ax he’d use to hack his way free if Thatcher didn’t quit bragging.
    “Clear enough,” I said. “You’re a pair of solo operators here. Lone wolves.”
    She explained that they were high-school friends, went all theway back to the corridors and water fountains and sexual embarrassments of Horace Mann. “You know when you’ve known somebody so long, you’re familiar with all their self-reinventions?”
    “At least he’s bothered with self-reinventions.”
    Richard Abneg had begun as a