"You are enjoying yourself," she said.
"I'm at a ball."
"You are a cat at a fish market, is what you are."
"I am a man holding champagne in a room full of portraits." He lifted his glass an inch. "To George, for the invitation."
"To George," she said. "Who knows exactly what he's done."
They stood a moment with their glasses in the lee of a portrait — a Pemberton in yachting whites, circa 1911, gazing past them at a painted sea with an expression of permanent mild grievance — and Naomi looked up at the dead man's face and then down the living room, at the heads bent together in the arrangements of power, and said, almost to herself, "It's a museum that serves dinner."
"It's a business that serves dinner," Isaiah said. "The museum is the packaging."
"And the business?"
"Losing money in four countries, last I read." He said it without heat, the way a man reads weather off a barometer he happens to own a share of the factory for. "But the packaging is first-rate. You could sell tickets to the packaging."
"We did buy tickets," Naomi said. "George just sent ours free."
George Ainsworth found them by the library door, where the jazz had retreated before the advance of conversation, and embraced Naomi with the genuine pleasure of a man who had known her since she was thirty and unimpressed by him.
"You came," he said. "I told Eleanor you would. She said, 'George, nobody declines the autumn ball,' and I said, 'Eleanor, the Colemans decline things professionally. It's practically their line of work.'"
"And yet here we are," Naomi said. "Brought low by curiosity."
"Brought low by my cooking the books of friendship." George turned to Isaiah and shook his hand with both of his, the retired banker's grip, warm and final. "Isaiah."
"George."
"You look well. Understated as a rumor." His eyes moved over the room and came back. "Reginald's by the terrace doors holding court. Eleanor's wherever the evening is actually being run from — the two places are never the same. Chad is—" he searched, and located, with the resignation of a man finding weather — "Chad is at the bar, being found amusing. Bianca is filming the ice sculpture. When she's done filming the ice sculpture she'll film the responses to the ice sculpture. There's a whole economy."
"We'll circulate," Isaiah said. "Pay our respects."
"Yes." George held his gaze a moment longer than the pleasantry required. "Do that. Take the temperature of the house, why don't you. I'd value the reading." He squeezed Naomi's hand and was reclaimed by a party of people who wanted to talk about a marina.
"He's enjoying himself too," Naomi said.
"George has been looking forward to this evening the way other men look forward to a firework. He lit the fuse weeks ago and he's standing well back."
"And if it blows the roof off?"
"Then George will be standing in the garden saying he always admired the skyline."
They circulated. It was Naomi's gift and Isaiah's discipline: they could work a room the way they had once worked trade shows in convention halls in Dayton and Tulsa, learning who was who by who leaned in. Here, the leaning had its own grammar. People were gracious in the first degree — delighted, how do you know George, how do you know the family — and then, encountering no purchase, no school, no club, no summer place in common, their graciousness took on the faintest glaze, like a pond in the first hour of frost. A woman named Constance — a widow, emeralds, a laugh like a dinner bell — held Naomi's hand and said, "But what does your husband do, dear?" and at "manufacturing," nodded with the bright finality of a woman closing a book she had decided not to read. "How nice," she said. "Everything's made somewhere, isn't it?"
"It is," Naomi said. "That's rather the secret of it."
They arrived, by the room's slow tides, at the terrace doors, where Reginald Pemberton stood in a knot of men, holding a glass of whiskey he did not appear to be drinking — holding it the way a flag holds a pole. He was seventy-four and looked like the portrait of himself that hung at the turn of the stairs: silver hair in a perfect crest, a face built out of good bone and better certainty, dressed in white tie because the autumn ball had always been white tie and the autumn ball had always been whatever Reginald Pemberton said it was. He saw George's name surface in the introductions — a neighbor performed them, "Reginald, may I — Isaiah and Naomi Coleman, friends of George Ainsworth" — and Reginald turned the full apparatus of his courtesy upon them, and it was considerable. This was a man who had been charming prime ministers. The handshake was exact. The eye contact was exact. The warmth had been engineered to tolerances.