She stopped. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her friend how she had really felt back then … How noble she had imagined herself! How enlightened! How big in spirit! How romantic! Miss Martha Starling had reached down and found a beautiful diamond in the rough, Charlie Croker, and she had lifted him up to her level, and she didn’t care what Richmond, Virginia, thought, which wasn’t much. If he said Ah caint for I can’t and latbubs for the things you put in lamps to create light, she would be Pygmalion and change all that! Which she had! She was the princess in the story who brushes aside all base snobberies to find beauty in the commoner and give him a new life and happiness ever after. She had—had—had—well—created!—the Charlie Croker the world had come to know—and now, after three decades, he had the audacity—the audacity!—to shuck her, cast her off like any old piece of worn-out baggage, as if she had been merely lucky enough to come along for the great ride, as if he had introduced her to all the wonders of the Buckhead life rather than the other way around!

  That was the fact of the matter, but how could you get the point across without sounding completely vain and foolish?

  So instead she said, “I really worked with Charlie. When we put up our first building—it was a twelve-story office building on Peachtree Road—Charlie found the location and figured out how to assemble the parcels, but he was totally disorganized. To this day I bet I can tell you more about the steps you have to take to develop a commercial building than Charlie can. I can also tell you about the schemes and the tricks, as far as that goes. If it ever got out, the way Charlie assembled the property for this Croker Concourse of his—I mean, the way Charlie—”

  She stopped again. She realized her voice was becoming much too heated. But how could she help it? There was more to the whole thing than just her career as a business partner, co-developer, and indispensable counselor of the man now known as that rugged individualist Charlie Croker. There was so much more! But she couldn’t very well tell Joyce about that, either. There was love—but how could she possibly find the words to describe it? Success, euphoria, ecstasy, love! She and Charlie had been a pair of young, beautiful, bright, strong creatures! The night after Charlie had closed the deal with Harris, Bledsoe & Phee to come into the Peachtree building as anchor tenants—which meant that the project would become a reality, the building would at last be built—and it was she, Martha, personally, who had introduced Charlie to the law firm’s general partner, Harry Bledsoe—she and Amanda Bledsoe, his daughter, had gone to Sweet Briar together—that night, in the little house they had in Virginia Highlands, just the two of them, Charlie and herself—they opened a bottle of iced champagne, Dom Pérignon—somehow Dom Pérignon became the national drink of real estate developers—they were in that long, low, dreadful 1950s-style living room, and Charlie reached inside her little linen jacket and put his arms around her waist, and then he slipped the jacket off her shoulders and unzipped her little dress in the back—and just sitting here in the Bread Basket, thinking about it, she could feel that moment all over again—they had dissolved into one another, utterly, and Charlie’s pride and happiness flowed into her until she experienced it as hers, and it became something far beyond anything that could go by the name of ambition—it was love absolute!—and for a time there were no two happier people on the face of the earth.

  But how could she tell this to anybody?—to Joyce?

  She lowered her voice and said disconsolately, “I don’t mean to go on about it. It’s just that it wasn’t an ordinary relationship.” Relationship. Why had she let herself use that word? She hated relationship almost as much as supportive. “We were so close, Joyce, in every way you can possibly imagine.”

  Joyce was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Did you ever consider going back into medicine?”

  “Oh, I went over to Emory last year and talked to them about reentering medical school!”

  “And?”

  “They were very nice, but these days medical training takes eight to ten years, depending on your field, and there’s no way they’re going to let somebody my age come back and start over.”

  “Well, what about just moving back to Richmond? You must have a lot of friends there.”

  “I do, or I did. A lot more than here. But frankly, I just can’t go trudging back as Charlie Croker’s cast-off wife. I just can’t … People have very long memories in Richmond, and you know what they’ll say? They’ll say, ‘You marry common as pig tracks, you get treated common as pig tracks.’ That’s the way they think, and maybe they’re—”

  Suddenly she stopped and grasped Joyce’s forearm. “Don’t look up yet, but there’s a couple headed our way.”

  Here came a woman in her fifties with a carapace of lemon-blond hair. Beside her was a dignified-looking man in his sixties.

  After a tactful interval Joyce gave them a glance and then turned to Martha. “Who are they?”

  “She’s Ellen Armholster. You’ve heard of Inman Armholster.” Joyce nodded. “And he’s John Fogg of Fogg Nackers Rendering & Lean. Now watch this. I’m gonna look straight at her.” Martha sat up straight and did so.

  The woman, Ellen Armholster, headed toward them, seemingly deep in conversation with Lawyer Fogg—and swept right on by without giving Martha so much as a flicker of recognition.

  “Did you see that?” said Martha with a loopy smile. “I’m invisible! She looked right through me! I still take up space, but I don’t exist!”

  “Well, she looked pretty preoccupied with Mr.—what’s his name again?”

  “John Fogg. I’ve only met him on about thirty different occasions, but him cutting me I don’t count. He’s the sort who doesn’t know who wives are even when they’re with the husbands he’s busy fawning over. But Ellen Armholster! I mean, dear God in heaven! We were—close friends! Or at least I thought so. Her daughter was going out with some hoody character, some drummer with some group called Overdose, and she called me every day for two weeks, sobbing, asking for advice. I was her … therapist, for God’s sake. She was telling me things about her daughter that you just don’t tell to a casual acquaintance. But you saw that! She breezed right on by me, with me looking her square in the face!”

  Joyce said, “She was pretty wrapped up in your Mr. Fogg.”

  “John Fogg—I mean, please,” said Martha. “John Fogg may be the most boring man in Atlanta. No, it’s precisely what I was telling you. Without Charlie I’m incorporeal, I’m the superfluous woman, the invisible ex-wife.”

  Joyce put her elbows on the tabletop. She opened her big mascara’d eyes wide and looked into Martha’s and gave her a broad, flat smile of sympathy. “Do you mind if I make a suggestion?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Softly, significantly: “Let it go.”

  “Let what go?”

  “Let ‘Me’n’Charlie’ go. I thought you were over all that.”

  Sheepishly: “I am. I was. Something hit me during class just now. Why should I let Charlie off the hook? Why shouldn’t I resent what he’s done?”

  “Because you haven’t got time,” said Joyce. “You haven’t got the energy, either, not to waste on ‘Me’n’Charlie.’ You’re not telling me about anything I haven’t experienced myself. But I’m not gonna waste any more of myself on Mr. Donald Newman. You said your whole ‘context’ is gone. Well, you just gotta create a new one! And you can do it. You’ve got the wherewithal.”

  “How?”

  “Do something! Start living again! Me, I give dinners. I organize evenings. I get involved in things, and I don’t even have the money. You gotta create a—a—a current and draw people in. You can’t just sit there in—what did you call it?—your aquarium?—and resent Charlie.” She gave Martha the sort of smile you use to try to jolly up a pouting child.

  “Well, but—”

  “You said context. But why don’t you use a grander word.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as destiny. Why don’t you think big? Why don’t you treat yourself to a new destiny? You’ve got the resources.”

  “It’s a nice word …”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Martha, give me that magazine.” She picked up the Atlanta magazine and shook it in front of Martha until the pages rustled. “We’re not gonna look at ‘The Prams What Am’ anymore. Okay? We’re not gonna look at Serena Croker. We’re not gonna worry about Charlie Croker’s family outings. We’re gonna create our own outings. We’re gonna stop moping. We’re gonna get out of the house and start doing things and get involved with new people.”

  She started rummaging through the back pages of the magazine, where performances and coming events were listed.

  “What are you looking for?” asked Martha.

  “Something for you to do.” She rummaged some more, now moving toward the front of the magazine. “Ahhh … how about this? Did you see this? I bet you didn’t even look at it, you were so fixated on ‘The Prams What Am.’”

  She spread the magazine open in front of Martha, just the way Martha had spread it open in front of her. On the left-hand page a splashy title in big thick letters with vertical prison-uniform stripes running through them said: GENIUS ESCAPES FROM SOLITARY. On the right-hand page was a painting of a group of young men in a prison dormitory, some fully clothed in striped uniforms, some half-clothed, some naked, some naked and lying down on cots. The atmosphere was charged with sexuality. The arrangement of the bodies was powerful and striking, but also circumspect, in that no genitalia were visible to the viewer.

  Puzzled, Martha looked up at Joyce.

  “Have you ever heard of an artist named Wilson Lapeth?” asked Joyce.

  “I’ve heard of him. He was from Atlanta, right? He was gay or something?”

  “Right.”

  “And there was a big article about him in the Sunday paper? I only glanced at it.”

  “That’s the one,” said Joyce. It seemed that Lapeth was a painter from the early 1900s who had always been regarded as a laudable but minor figure, one of those early Modernists who served as signposts pointing to the later, greater achievements of others. In Atlanta, which was a bit short on big names in art, he had always been a major figure, however; and over the past six months he had become one of the most-talked-about names in art circles nationally. Some nine hundred paintings, watercolors, and drawings of his had been found inside a bricked-over cold-storage chamber of his mother’s house in Avondale, a neighborhood near Agnes Scott College, in Decatur, where he had spent the last few years of his life before dying of complications of diabetes in 1935. Practically all of them were on homosexual themes, many of them depicting prison life, some of them highly explicit. So far, a select few critics, including Hudson Braun of The New York Times, had been allowed to view these buried treasures, and they had all been swept away. Now, Joyce explained, the High Museum was mounting an exhibition, with a grand opening, showing the Lapeth trove to the public for the first time. That was what the piece in Atlanta and the one in the Journal-Constitution on Sunday were all about.

  Martha chuckled. “The High Museum? Atlanta, Georgia? Homosexual art?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” said Joyce. “They had a roaring fight on the board, but finally they had to have the show. We had the Olympics and everything, and so we’re supposed to be this big, sophisticated international city and Lapeth is our only claim to fame in art. All the board has to do is veto this show, and then the Museum of Modern Art or the Whitney puts it on in New York, and the whole town will look like a bunch of Baptist yokels. And that’s what everybody in Atlanta dreads, being thought of as a hick. So they didn’t have any choice.”

  Martha stared at Joyce as if to say, “And therefore?”

  “That opening’s gonna be the biggest event in Atlanta since … since … since I don’t know what.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. Of that you can be sure. Take a look at this article. And you’re going.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes,” said Joyce, “and you’re gonna take an entire table and invite a whole bunch of people.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “And how do I take an entire table?”

  “You pay for it. You buy it.”

  “And how much does that cost?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  “Martha,” said Joyce, fixing her earnestly with her eyes, “you’ve been moaning about your ‘context.’ This dinner, this opening, is gonna be so big … The world will be there. If you have an entire table at the Lapeth opening—well, I can tell you one thing that’ll happen right away. The High—all these museums, they have people on the staff whose only job is to keep big donors happy and get them involved in social events that have to do with the museum. You’ll start meeting people.”

  “But twenty thousand dollars!”

  “You can afford it! It’s an investment in your future. We’re gonna get you out into the world.”

  “Isn’t that an awful lot of money to pay for a new context?”

  “Forget context, Martha. Think destiny. Think of it as an initiation fee. For a new destiny it’s not a bad price.”

  The two women stared at each other. Martha was conscious of the shining young waitress chirping away over two customers at the next table. Looking into the mirror she could see a whole tableau of white faces across the way, eating, drinking, smiling, burbling, beneath a riot of mother-in-law’s tongues, all so happy to be a part of the scene—Young Atlanta!—at the Bread Basket. She was also aware of the face in the mirror that stared right back at her, a fifty-three-year-old face with a U that dropped down between two big parentheses and a corona of still thicklooking, still blond-looking hair.

  “Look at me, Martha,” said Joyce. Martha did so. “You’re going to that dinner, even if I have to drag you there myself. Think destiny.”

  That night Charlie sat in the dressing room clad in a voluminous nightshirt and a bathrobe with his book, The Paper Millionaire, on his lap and a pair of half-glasses riding low on his nose. He stared at the words … “I tried desperately hard to live with the system. I made it, lost it, made it again, lost it, made it, and stopped. It is the rising damp creeping unseen in your own house which is a danger to the environment …”

  Rising damp, all right. He was awash in debt, and it had begun to take soaking, spattering, humiliating, everyday forms. There was no end to them. A delegation of dark blue suits arrives from his anchor tenant in the tower at Croker Concourse, Consolidated Surety, and announces to him they want a 30 percent reduction in rent, from $32 a square foot to $21.80, and some thirty-year-old blue-suit lawyer informs him, with maximum impudence: “You have no choice”—meaning, “We can afford to vacate, walk out on a five-year lease, but you, in your precarious position, can’t afford to have us leave, which would make your disaster of a tower look worse than ever.”

  Charlie attempted to concentrate on the book in his lap again. “I tried desperately hard to live with the system. I made it, lost it, made it again, lost it …” Christalmighty, his eyes were skimming over the very same words he was just looking at. Panic … and he knew it. Out of the corner of his eye—something moving. He looked up with a start. It was Serena. He hadn’t even heard her come into the room.

  “Jesus Christ, I didn’t know you were in here. You must be part Indian.” He didn’t say it with a smile, however, and she could have taken it as a complaint or as just something to say. He didn’t know which it was himself.

  “She is coming, my own, my sweet,” said Serena. “Were it ever so airy a tread, my heart would hear her and beat, were it earth in an earthy bed; my dust would hear her and beat.”

  “My dust would hear her, hunh?” What was she suddenly being so cute and sweet about? “What’s that from?”

  “Tennyson,” said Serena.

  “Tennyson?” The name rang only a far-off bell for Charlie. What was he, a writer or a cavalry officer? If he had to guess, he would have guessed cavalry officer.

  “It’s from ‘Maud.’ ‘Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown; come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.’ At St. Maud’s we had to memorize whole sections of it. I bet we were the only school in the country that still studied Tennyson.”

  Literary references, which he never got, annoyed Charlie, and he gave his wife a wary once-over. She was wearing her little salmon-colored silk robe and not much else, judging by how much of her he could see. For a moment he was afraid she had come in to coax him into bed to have a go at it—something that had not occurred over the past several weeks.

  He was afraid. That was the word. Since he believed that his performance as a developer, as an entrepreneur, as a plunger, as a creative person, was bound up with his sexual vitality, then he also believed that if he ever lost that, he would lose his … power … in business and everything else. And now he was afraid that the pressure had rendered him exactly that: impotent. He could sense it; he could feel it; somehow he knew it. But he didn’t want to have to take the test and find out for sure. Not tonight.

  Serena took a seat in the easy chair near his, and he got an eyeful of the inside of her thigh as she crossed her legs. The slow, voluptuous way she had of crossing her legs and letting a half-slipper dangle on her toes had been enough to set him off all by itself … once upon a time. Now he stared and waited for the tingle, which never came.

  Godalmighty … That was one of the ways he had worked it out in his mind that he was right to break up with Martha and marry Serena. He had had to. It had been necessary, in order to maintain his vitality. He had been fifty-five when he first started fooling around with Serena, and she had made him feel like twenty-five. She had him doing things you should get out of your system by age thirty at the latest. Serena loved sex mixed with danger. She loved it on the edge of exposure. She pulled him right into this crazy stuff of hers. It was breathtaking! He lost his senses. One night in Piedmont Park, under a full moon—now, that had been truly insane. The founder, president, and chairman of the Croker Global Corporation! The fabled Sixty-Minute Man! Mr. Charles E. Croker of Valley Drive, Buckhead! The police were always patrolling Piedmont Park at night, not to mention malefactors of various sorts. One afternoon they were driving by that sleazy motel on the Buford Highway, The Swallows—“The Swallows!” she started shrieking, as if it were the funniest name in the world—and she insisted that they stop then and there and take a room, on the spot, and they did, and once they got in the room, she produced that little cup from her handbag, and they did that thing with the cup, something he had never heard of in all his life—my God, suppose anybody had seen him, Charlie Croker, master builder—Croker Concourse!—checking into a motel on the Buford Highway with a twenty-three-year-old girl—but he had lost his mind to her demented form of lust. Danger! Imminent exposure! That thing with the cup!