On top of that, she had just downed a glass of champagne. So she inched closer to the tall, stooped figure and exclaimed: “Arthur!”

  Arthur Lomprey turned and looked at her, and his smile spread so far she could have counted his teeth. But his eyes were pure panic. They contracted into little frozen balls. “May Day!” they said. “Code Blue! I’ve met this woman somewhere before, but who in the name of God is she?”

  “Heyyyyy!” he exclaimed. “Howya doin’!”—all the while grinning foolishly as his eyes began a frantic search for a clue. They bounced all over her hairdo, her tinctured locks, her made-up face, the necklace, the dress, the glistening shoulders, and whatever else he could see of her rigorously exercised body.

  “How’re the children!” he exclaimed finally, taking a desperate chance. How’re the children? This was the deepest wound of all. The man had just scanned the best she could possibly present to the world after spending $8,925 plus untold hours of cardiovascular agony at the hands of a Turkish martinet—and that fully analogue, non-digital, chemically activated computer, his brain, had arrived in milliseconds at the answer: matronly. So … How’re the children?

  Martha wanted to scream, but in her stunned condition the best she could do was say lamely and mechanically, “Fine.”

  “That’s terrific!” exclaimed Arthur Lomprey, who probably hadn’t even heard her. “That’s terrific!”

  He kept bobbing his head to show just how terrific it was and looking straight through her, trying to devise some way to remove himself from her presence before he was compelled to introduce her to the people he was with. Who was this superfluous woman? Who was this invisible exwife? Who was this social ghost (without a husband at her side to give her an identity)? She didn’t wait for the situation to become any more painful. She pivoted and turned back to Joyce, Joyce’s Glenn, and Herbert Longleaf.

  At last, in that roaring sea, Peepgass spotted another of those lads with the mint-green bow ties and the trays of champagne. This one looked like a blond prep school boy on the precipice of his first plunge into debauchery. But that was merely a mental blip, the fleetest of passing thoughts. The main thing was to get to him and lay hands on another glass of champagne.

  All the grinning faces shrieked to be heard. The noise choked the air. The crowd was packed so close together in this part of the atrium, he would have to wriggle like a fish to get through. The path to the champagne lay between a man and a woman who had their backs to each other. The woman had on a black dress with an extravagant flounce of material, a gigantic bow, just below the waist, surmounting her buttocks. The man was a real porker with a bottom so big it forced apart the vent in the back of his dinner jacket. Peepgass took a deep breath. He tried to flatten himself. He made his move, turned sideways, tried to slip through. He got stuck. Both of them, the man and the woman, turned their heads and glowered at him.

  “Excuse me!” he exclaimed. “I’m very sorry!” A smile of social shame slithered across his face—but with a supreme, ungainly, much-resented effort he forced his way through. Thank God, the boy with the mint-green bow tie hadn’t been able to budge. Peepgass took a glass of champagne from the tray. A quick look about: he was hemmed in on all sides by people he didn’t know. A quick look above: on the balcony Wilson Lapeth’s pale and handsome young prisoners, très gay, reigned over Atlanta’s big money … All very odd … He lifted the champagne to his lips and took a sip. He loved it. He was torn between the desire to dawdle over the glass, so as to have something to do, some bit of party business to perform, even if it was only to drink a glass of champagne, so that he wouldn’t appear to be an utter social cipher—and an urge to … knock back another glass of champagne. The animal urge overcame the social insecurity. He downed the champagne in four rapid gulps, put the empty flute back on the tray, and grabbed another one. The boy with the bow tie gave him a startled, reproving look. Peepgass offered a smile of apology. A delicious warmth rose from his stomach and filled his head like a cloud. He had an overwhelming urge to find somebody to grin at and talk to. But whom did he know, other than Marsha? And so far, in this mob, he had been unable to find her. He had met Marsha four years ago when she was Marsha Bernstein and had opened a gallery of contemporary art called the Alma (for Alma Mahler, whom she thought she resembled) down on Ponce de Leon. Opening a gallery of contemporary art in Atlanta, Georgia, was not a sound business decision, and the venture began foundering immediately. Peepgass, eager to demonstrate his clout in the world of banking to this pretty and very likable young woman, had engineered a $100,000 loan from PlannersBanc. This would have inevitably earned him shithead status, except for the fact that it was in her role as proprietress of the Alma Gallery that Marsha had met Herbert Richman and married him, after which paying back a mere $100,000 loan was no problem. Marsha was not one to forget a friend; so she had invited Peepgass to join her table at the Wilson Lapeth opening.

  Peepgass stood on tiptoe to see if he could spot her … Marsha … He craned about … No Marsha … but there, almost directly behind him, a towering and yet oddly stooped-over man—no question about it! Lomprey, lord of the forty-ninth floor at PlannersBanc! Lomprey was grinning at a matronly woman with pineapple-blond hair and big bare shoulders that glistened as if they were oiled. Peepgass had seen her somewhere before, but who on earth was she? The woman suddenly turned away, and Lomprey was left standing there with a foolish grin on his face.

  Like many another man with sweet clouds of champagne in his head, Peepgass did not stop to think. He could only feel the tremendous relief of spotting someone he knew.

  He was no longer timid. He forced his way through the crowd without so much as a diffident wrinkling of the brow.

  “Arthur!”

  Lomprey turned, stared at him, then squinted, did a double-take, cocked his head, and smiled. It was a smile that did not in any way involve the eyes, however.

  “Well, well, well … Peepgass,” he said.

  The hesitation and the dead smile were bad enough, but it was the Peepgass that did it. At the bank Lomprey always called him Ray. But his instinctive reaction at this breathtaking social altitude, a $2,000-a-plate opening at the High Museum, was to call him by his last name, as if he were no more than a petty functionary in his employ. Peepgass felt the insult before he could sort it out logically. But he sorted it out fast enough. Lomprey, no doubt feeling like a great lion of finance, had bought an entire table—with the bank’s money, of course—and filled it with people appropriate to his eminence in the world. The unexpected and inappropriate presence of a mere underling, a mere staff officer from the bank, a mere cog, a mere loan monitor, a mere Peepgass, diminished the magnitude of his social triumph. And now Lomprey just stared at him with that dead smile, as if to say, “Okay, you got in here somehow—and what of it?” He made no attempt to introduce him to the two men and the woman in his little conversational knot.

  Suddenly feeling embarrassed and ransacking his brain for something to say, Peepgass shouted above the roar of the crowd, “I can’t remember, Arthur! Did we sell Lapeth futures?”

  Immediately he regretted the crack. He was alluding to a scheme Lomprey himself had dreamed up during the heady days of the late 1980s, back when art prices were skyrocketing. In connection with the Art Investment Seminars the bank had begun selling what were, in effect, futures on certain fashionable artists. The scheme had failed miserably. It may have been innovative, it may have been cosmopolitan, but it wasn’t about to fly in Atlanta, Georgia.

  “I don’t think so,” said Lomprey’s lips. But his eyes said, “Kindly disintegrate.”

  The moment stretched out, stretched out, stretched out—until Peepgass had no choice but to leave.

  “Well, Arthur,” he said, “happy landing!”

  Then he wheeled about and headed back into the shrieking sea of humanity.

  Happy landing? Why had he said that? How could he be so flippant? But that worry was soon replaced by a champagne surge of anger and resentment. Why, that stiff neck! That party whore! That petty snob! That great social-climbing hunchback! Wouldn’t even introduce me to the people he was talking to!

  Just ahead, no more than six feet away in a roaring swell of tuxedos and pouffed dresses, was another young man with a mint-green bow tie and a tray full of champagne. This time Peepgass was neither diffident nor even remotely subtle about it. He practically bowled over two women as he bulled his way to the tray and seized a lovely fluteful. Bottoms up!

  Charlie Croker steadied himself with both hands on the white pipe railing of the balcony and leaned over and surveyed the scene below. A confused cackling gabble swelled up from the atrium floor. The fools! Reminded him of a flock of turkeys.

  He leaned over a little farther and stared straight down at the tables, which were set for dinner. The tablecloths were white, and they gleamed with stemware and hotel silver, and in the center of each table was a dense cluster of reddish-orange flowers with black spots in their centers. Two thousand dollars a plate—and he had bought an entire table—$20,000—and oh, how he’d love to go home to Buckhead—right now …

  Charlie felt more depressed than ever by the thought of doing what he was now doing, going out among them, among friends, admirers, rivals, the world. He had the feeling that his big body and his square jaws and his bald head now gave off an aura and that this aura flashed BANKRUPT! BANKRUPT! FRAUD! FRAUD! FRAUD!

  So badly had he wanted to avoid the crowd that it was he, Charlie, who had suggested that Serena and he and Billy and Doris Bass walk up the ramp to the balcony and see the rest of the exhibition. So now he led them from the balcony into the labyrinth of exhibition panels here in the recesses of the second floor.

  Even before he saw anything different, he could sense the change. There were scores of people in tuxedos and party dresses up ahead of them, but all the sound now came from behind them, from the shrieking voices on the floor below. Up here things were oddly quiet. A large white exhibition panel faced them head-on. A cluster of partygoers stood before it, looking terribly pensive. Charlie moved closer. On the panel was a single painting, perhaps five feet high and six feet wide. Another chain gang … The point of view was from down inside a deep ditch. Far back in the ditch and in the middle ground you could see prisoners wielding picks and shovels. Above the ditch, in the background, you could see the torsos of two meaty sheriffs deputies wearing short-sleeve gray shirts and sun helmets and brandishing shotguns. Up above them was a sky filled with brutal sunlight. In the immediate foreground, down in the ditch, bathed in the cool colors of the ditch’s shadows, were two young white men, both prisoners. One was sitting back against the red clay wall of the ditch, naked from the waist down, his thighs akimbo, revealing a tumescent, although not erect, penis. The other one was standing over him, bent at the waist, lowering his pants over his buttocks. A caption on the panel said, Arrangement in Red Clay. 1923.

  Charlie was … shocked, speechless, stupefied. He averted his eyes … and they lit upon another exhibition panel just beyond. On this one, another huge painting … a dozen young white prisoners marching in a circle in a jail yard. Each wore a striped prison shirt and nothing else … Around and around they went, a circus of penises and bare bottoms … He averted his eyes once more … He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Everywhere, all the way into the deep recesses of the exhibition space, he could see white exhibition panels, clusters of silent onlookers, and images of prison garb, bare flesh, and an endless stand of penises.

  Like anyone who sees his most basic assumptions about propriety being flouted, he looked to the people around him for confirmation of the righteousness of his objections. He glanced at Serena. She didn’t glance back. She was studying the painting as if she had found something profound in the red clay ditch before them. Then he looked at Billy and Doris, who were at that moment looking at each other without saying a word. They were probably as shocked as he was, but it remained silent as a church up here. Just beyond Billy and Doris he noticed the stately, portly presence of Abner Lockhart and his beanpole of a wife, Katie. Abner was not only a partner in one of Atlanta’s oldest law firms, Wringer Fleasom & Tick, but he was also a deacon of the Tabernacle Baptist Church. He was cradling his chin with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, studying the painting as devoutly as Serena. A Baptist deacon! True, Tabernacle Baptist was an In-Town Baptist church, a bit sophisticated, at least, as compared to a good old Footwashing Baptist church out in the countryside, but Godalmighty, nevertheless—he was a Baptist deacon!—and he was looking at these pictures of … of … of … prison-pent faggots … as if they were Madonnas with halos … What made it still more unbelievable was the setting. This part of the museum was what was ordinarily the Decorative Arts section, which mainly meant furniture. That had always been the High Museum’s strong suit, antique furniture. For decades the true passion of the matrons who ran the establishment had been interior decoration, and the High was heavy with furniture from the nineteenth century, immense pieces, many of them, startling contrivances of carved and inlaid wood, beds, sideboards, armoires, breakfronts, the sort of stupendous hulks that cow you into silence the moment you enter a room. The smaller pieces had been moved out for the Lapeth show. But some of the major pieces, the real monsters, were too big or too precious to be moved about, such as the famous Herter Bed, which was … right over there … a fabulous creation in ebonized cherry inlaid with light woods, rosewood, brass, and Japanese marquetry, a veritable monument to Victorian dignity, solidity, respectability, and grandeur—the Herter Bed had now been overrun by this … this … this homosexual orgy—

  A sudden stab of doubt … Was it he, Charlie, who was out of step? Had his eyes been closed when some irresistible shift took place on the moral terrain? Or were all these people, even Abner Lockhart, just plain intimidated, afraid to let it be known that they weren’t sophisticated enough to be cosmopolites of the new Atlanta, the international city?

  Whichever, Charlie experienced his first surge of spirit of the entire evening. He was damned if he was just going to stand here piously like the rest of them. He brushed past Abner Lockhart and went up close to the panel and looked at the caption: Arrangement in Red Clay. 1923. Pretending to read, he said in a full voice, “Two cocksuckers down in a ditch. 1923.”

  Billy Bass let out a loud guffaw, but Doris didn’t seem to know what to do, and Serena said with an exterminating hiss:

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  Charlie was aware of people cutting glances at him from all sides, except for Abner and Katie Lockhart, who acted as if they hadn’t heard a thing. Gradually all the faces turned away, and the solemn perusal of the treasures of Wilson Lapeth continued. The great Charlie Croker was being treated like a child who has done something infantile in church.

  At dinner the crowd, drunk on champagne and the thought of being at the place in Atlanta where things are happening this evening, shrieked and cackled until their bawling seemed to bounce off the walls and the ceiling fifty feet above and roll back over them in waves. Martha’s table was out in the middle of that sea of round white tables on the atrium floor. At the center of each table was a startling cachepot of fully opened poppies, made all the more startling by the implacable whiteness of the atrium itself.

  At Joyce’s urging, Martha had seated herself between the two best-looking and most eligible bachelors in their entourage—finding such men was Joyce’s specialty, her mission, at this stage of her life—Oskar von Eyrik, who had been born in Germany but had only a trace of an accent now and was vice president of ProCor, an HMO with headquarters in Atlanta, and Sonny Beamer, who had his own public relations firm, called HiBeam. Both were in their late forties, a bit fleshy, but handsome, hearty, gregarious, and great talkers. Oskar von Eyrik, leaning toward his hostess in order to make himself heard, was off on a long discourse about the security precautions that various major business executives were taking. Martha kept a smile fixed on her face while she racked her brain for something she might possibly contribute to the subject. Suddenly it came to her, that much-sought-after social resource—a nugget!—a conversational nugget! The architect Charlie had chosen for Croker Concourse, Peter Prance, had once told her how Jimmy Good, the young Silicon Valley microchip billionaire, had instructed him to build a secret room in his 30,000-square-foot house in Los Altos, a room that not even his wife and children would know about. The idea was that when predators broke into his house in the night—he was quite paranoid on that score—he could slip into the secret room and no one, not even his own flesh and blood with guns at their temples, would be able to divulge his whereabouts. As soon as Oskar von Eyrik’s lips stopped moving, she attempted to drop this nugget into the conversation in a brief, condensed form—since, being a veteran of dinners like this, thanks to her twenty-nine years with Charlie, she knew that a woman can ask questions, introduce topics, interject the occasional bon mot, even deliver a punch line now and again, but she is not to launch into anecdotes or in any other fashion actually tell long stories herself.

  But no sooner had she enunciated the phrase “Jimmy Good’s house” than Oskar von Eyrik broke in and exclaimed, “Jimmy Good’s house! Oh my God!”—whereupon he was off on a long anecdote about the time he was actually in Jimmy Good’s house, and Jimmy—he referred to him as Jimmy, as if they were pals of long standing—Jimmy had taken up skateboarding at the age of thirty-three and had built an enormous half-pipe on his back lawn, and—