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booked for lunch until Thanksgiving.”
    “Leave yourselves a little time to practice. Carnegie Hall on Saturday, remember.”
    I’d be lucky if circulation returned to my fingers by Christmas! “Yes, Mother.”
    Took a bath, thinking about Barnard, whom I had last seen eight years ago. Camp Maxine had just opened for business and the
     Queen was intent on exterminating the weaklings in the bunch. She’d almost succeeded with me: I was the drinkin’, smokin’
     musician, unused to sleep-outs and twenty-mile hikes before breakfast. Barnard thrived on such abuse. She was also off-the-charts
     smart, a fatal attribute in a beautiful female—but the perfect requisites for Maxine, who had managed to find seven of us
     with that peculiar nimiety. Barnard could play Texas bimbo, Swedish hippie, frigid WASP, to perfection. I wondered which persona
     she had used last. Whatever the pose, Barnard could enslave a man in fifteen seconds. Ordinary women hated her. Sad that she
     and I had not become closer as our sisters fell. Not smart, but sad just the same. After Wellesley turned up—in two pieces—in
     Johannesburg, Barnard had called me. “Looks like you and I are holding the fort, Smithy. Care to place your bets?”
    “Fifty thousand bucks.”
    “Son of a bitch! On you or me?”
    “I bury you, babe.”
    “I’ll use it for violin lessons,” Barnard had snorted.
    “I’ll spend it on push-up bras.” Now I was fifty thousand, plus interest, richer: Smith’s survival bonus. Maybe I’d donate
     it to Maxine.
    At precisely ten the next morning, Duncan Zadinsky knocked. My accompanist liked to breakfast with me after a concert to discuss
     all the mistakes we had made the previous evening. Sometimes I think he enjoyed the postmortem more than he did the performance.
     Today, however, music was not uppermost in his mind. “You missed the party of the century,” he crowed, seating himself at
     the trolley a steward had just wheeled in. “I was dancing till dawn.”
    “Four-fifteen, dear. I heard you come in with a few elephants.”
    Duncan constructed a meticulous still life of granola and prunes before submerging it in tomato juice. He had read somewhere
     that this alleviated baldness. “Paula’s one hell of a dancer. She’s got hips like butter. Feet like feathers.”
    Brain like Iago. Bobby was just her Moor. “I’m sure you swept her away.”
    Duncan tucked half a muffin into his mouth. “After our dance, she left. Why settle for second best?”
    “Sorry to disappoint you, but she had a staff meeting. Whom did you ravish next?”
    “Justine Cortot. A very attractive woman, believe me.”
    No kidding: White House press secretary. She and Bobby had graduated from the same high school in backwater Kentucky. Both
     had gone to the same Ivy League law school, but only Justine had won the Rhodes Scholarship. While she was in England, Bobby
     had married Paula. “I hear she shot Marvel a long time ago. Missed his balls by inches. He was gentleman enough to call it
     a hunting accident.”
    “That’s absurd! Where’d you hear that?”
    Maxine had sent an unexpurgated bio of Bobby Marvel along with my ticket to the White House. Great bedtime reading, if you
     were a satyr. “Don’t remember.”
    Done with the prunes, Duncan attacked a mound of beignets. Maybe they cured impotence. “I’m surprised you believe rumors,”
     he chomped. “Of all people.”
    A dank wind, heavy with ghosts, blew by. “So what did you think of the concert?”
    He launched into a note-by-note recap of our horror show: twangy piano, poor lighting, cold audience, mushy acoustics, jet
     lag, insufficient rehearsal … obviously my accompanist was a saint. Never in our years together had we performed under humane
     conditions. “We’ve got to work our asses off before New York,” Duncan concluded. “We’ve been out of action for months. Playing
     live upsets me now.”
    It upset me, too; I just didn’t let anyone know how