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blue and gold, plus massive silverplate spoons and forks, delicate long red plastic chopsticks, real cloth napkins cunningly folded into the shape of dunce caps, and name cards in the form of tiny parasols—were spaced around the exterior of the U, leaving the center empty.
    It would be impossible for the casual observer to guess what common bond had brought these sixteen people together in this room. Young and old, male and female, black and white, straight and gay, they were as disparate as a Gallup Poll cross-section, seeming to share nothing but a general interest in lunch. And yet, throughout the meal they chatted together across lines of class, age, race, and sex with cheerful familiarity.
    At the end of the meal, with the ice cream balls and fortune cookies distributed, everybody was smiling and relaxed except for one young woman, Bobbi Harwood, who was pissed off . She was pissed off at her husband, Chuck “Professor Charles S.” Harwood, who was sitting next to her on her right and blandly assuring her he didn’t mind that she’d cuckolded him with yet another black man, by having slept with Oscar Russell Green. “I have not slept with Oscar,” Bobbi said, through gritted teeth. “I’m telling you for the last time, Harwood.” (She never called him by his last name unless they were fighting.)
    â€œBut I don’t mind , sweetheart,” Chuck assured her. (He never used terms of endearment unless they were fighting.)
    â€œYou stupid, egotistical son of a bitch, you have a mind like a drive-in theater.”
    â€œNow, darling,” Chuck said. He had an absolutely maddening way of getting calmer and calmer and calmer the more hysterical the people around him became. It was this phlegmatism that had given him, in Bobbi’s opinion, his totally inappropriate reputation for intelligence.
    Chuck Harwood, a tall angular stooped Lincolnesque figure of thirty-three, was an anthropologist, originally from Chicago and now an assistant professor at Columbia. He had lived all his life either in major cities with adequate mass transit or in utterly backward corners of the world—seven months in Guatemala, fifteen months in Chad—with no transportation at all, and so was one of the few adult white male Americans of the twentieth century who didn’t know how to drive a car. Had no interest, in fact, in driving cars.
    Which infuriated Bobbi almost as much as his allegedly sophisticated attitude toward her alleged miscegenations. (Chuck never believed she was cuckolding him with white men.) The point wasn’t even whether or not she was sleeping with all those black men, the point was whether or not Chuck’s avowed nonpossessiveness was hypocritical. That was the point, the only point, and it drove Bobbi crimson with rage that he wouldn’t admit it.
    As for Bobbi, who had begun life as Barbara Ann Callfield in Oak Crest, Maryland, and who was perfectly capable of supporting herself as an independent woman (she was first harpist with the New York City Symphony Orchestra), she had never been either northern enough to feel guilty toward blacks nor southern enough to feel hostile, neither big-city enough to fear them nor rural enough to be bewildered by them. The result was, her unweighted treatment of black men as normal human beings occasionally created misunderstandings. “I like you as a friend , Jojo,” she would say, one restraining hand on his rippling dark brown arm. While across the room Chuck would suck on his pipe and smile with false indulgence.
    As he was doing now, calmly, soberly, judiciously nodding, saying, “You have your own life to live, darling, I’ve always told you that, and I mean it.”
    A flower arrangement in a heavy milk glass bowl was within arm’s reach. Bobbi reached for it, but before she could complete her intention (whatever that might have been), she and Chuck and everyone else at the table were distracted