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imagination.
    Myron and Ali parked in a lot off the West Side Highway. They passed a twenty-four-hour porn shop called King David’s Slut Palace. The windows were soaped up. There was a big sign on the door that read now under new management.
    “Whew.” Myron pointed to the sign. “It’s about time, don’t you think?”
    Ali nodded. “The place had been so mismanaged before.”
    When they ducked inside Leather and Lust, Ali walked around as though she were at the Louvre, squinting at the photos on the wall, checking out the devices, the costumes, the bondage material. She shook her head. “I am hopelessly naïve.”
    “Not hopelessly,” Myron said.
    Ali pointed at something black and long that resembled human intestines.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “Dang if I know.”
    “Are you, uh, into . . . ?”
    “Oh no.”
    “Too bad,” Ali said. Then: “Kidding. So very much kidding.”
    Their romance was progressing, but the reality of dating someone with young kids had set in. They hadn’t spent another full night together since that first. Myron had only offered up brief hellos to Erin and Jack since that party. They weren’t sure how fast or slow theyshould go in their own relationship, but Ali was pretty adamant that they should go slow where it concerned the kids.
    Ali had to leave early. Jack had a school project she’d promised to help him with. Myron walked her out, deciding to stay in the city for the night.
    “How long will you be in Miami?” Ali asked.
    “Just a night or two.”
    “Would it make you retch violently if I say I’ll miss you?”
    “Not violently, no.”
    She kissed him gently. Myron watched her drive off, his heart soaring, and then he headed back to the party.
    Since he planned on sleeping in anyway, Myron started drinking. He was not what one would call a great drinker—he held his liquor about as well as a fourteen-year-old girl—but tonight, at this wonderful albeit bizarre celebration, he felt in the mood to imbibe. So did Win, though it took far more to get him buzzed. Cognac was mother’s milk to Win. He rarely showed the effects, at least on the outside.
    Tonight it didn’t matter. Win’s stretch limo was already waiting. It would take them back uptown.
    Win’s apartment in the Dakota was worth about a billion dollars and had a décor that reminded one of Versailles. When they arrived, Win carefully poured himself an obscenely priced vintage port, Quinta do Noval Nacional 1963. The bottle had been decanted several hours ago because, as Win explained, you must give vintage port time to breathe before consumption. Myron normally drank a chocolate Yoo-hoo, but his stomach was not in the mood. Plus the chocolate wouldn’t have time to breathe.
    Win snapped on the TV, and they watched Antiques Roadshow . A snooty woman with a lazy drawl had brought in a hideous bronze bust. She started telling the appraiser a story about how Dean Martin in 1950 offered her father ten thousand dollars for this wretched hunk of metal, but her daddy, she said with an insistent finger-point and matching smirk, was too wily for that. He knew that it must be worth a fortune. The appraiser nodded patiently, waited for the woman to finish, and then he lowered the boom:
    “It’s worth about twenty dollars.”
    Myron and Win shared a quiet high five.
    “Enjoying other people’s misery,” Win said.
    “We are pitiful,” Myron said.
    “It’s not us.”
    “No?”
    “It’s this show,” Win said. “It illuminates so much that is wrong with our society.”
    “How so?”
    “People aren’t satisfied just to have their trinket be worth a fortune. No, it is better, far better, if they bought it on the cheap from some unsuspecting rube. No one considers the feelings of the unsuspecting yard salesman who was cheated, who lost out.”
    “Good point.”
    “Ah, but there’s more.”
    Myron smiled, sat back, waited.
    “Forget greed for the moment,” Win went on. “What really upsets us