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Lupe in a uniform before. We were a little shy, at first, as we assumed they were having a party we hadn’t been invited to, but that wasn’t exactly the case.
    Max was arriving. (Let me say that until this moment, neither Lisa nor I had ever heard of Max.) Max Hayes. Max was the reason Honey had left Atlanta. Max was the reason Honey had come to L.A. He was also the reason for a lot of other things, but we wouldn’t know that until later.
    Lisa and I pitched right in, as was our wont in those days, with whatever was going on at the moment—furniture moving, silverware polishing, table setting, onion chopping, mimosas, wardrobe decisions, which generally involved discarding the first five or six choices on the bed or the floor. And when Max called from the airport in Atlanta and told Honey he was bringing two friends, it was decided that Lisa and I should come back for dinner.
    When we arrived for dinner, there was a sedate black Cadillac Town Car parked in front of the house with a driver who looked a bit like one of the Queen’s Guards who’d taken a job moonlighting as a chauffeur. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and the big fluffy guard’s helmet had been replaced by a chauffeur’s cap, but the jowls, the bushy mustache, the eyebrows that curled up slightly on the ends, and the ruddy cheeks were intact, along with a British accent that to my ear seemed to hearken from Bristol rather than London. And he was standing at attention by the Town Car just in case anyone decided on a whim to hit the town.
    It was one of those L.A. nights. There was a warm wind blowing, and the stars in the sky were almost as bright as the city lights visible from the picture window in the living room at “No Name Street.” The Cristal was flowing freely and the Wedgwood bowls were full.
    Max was sitting on the sofa in the living room. He was diminutive and, as I would learn later, always perfectly dressed, with Brooks Brothers loafers and cashmere jackets if the weather was below 85˚. He had short, almost buzzed hair, a sort of Hollywood power cut before it was in fashion. He was a commodities trader, or at least that’s what I think he was, or a banker or something like that, and from the way his eyes followed Honey every time she crossed the room, it was clear, despite his cool demeanor, that he was madly in love with her.
    As we’d heard that afternoon, over silver polish, gravlax, and mimosas, they were so in love, they’d been unable to keep their affair “private.” So Plan B: Honey had moved to L.A. while Max stayed in Atlanta to try to sort out his affairs. It was one of those complicated stories about how his wife’s father owned the company he ran with the dubious subtext that his wife “wasn’t well”—a euphemism for mentally unstable, fragile in some way that meant the divorce would utterly destroy her—which gave a gothic edge to the whole affair and the suspicion by some of us that it was a total fabrication. But Max was as mysterious as Honey, so none of us were sure.
    Max had arrived with an enormous amount of luggage. The driver, Felix, apparently doubled as valet and had unpacked it all and moved him in.
    “Do you think he’s planning to stay?” I asked Shannon when we were alone in the kitchen.
    “No,” she said matter-of-factly, “if he was planning to stay he wouldn’t have brought her that diamond necklace and he wouldn’t have brought two friends.”
    The diamond necklace was amazing. On a thin white gold chain, a big tear-drop diamond, I’m guessing 5 or 6 carats, surrounded by a white gold filigree diamond-shaped frame on which were six other smaller diamonds just for show. The friends were a little bit mysterious. I couldn’t tell what either of them did but one of them had just bought a Rosenquist so, in addition to what else he did, I assumed he collected art. Dinner didn’t start till ten. At 2 A.M. , we were still in the living room drinking champagne and eating caviar and there