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“Well, to tell you the truth, Harry and I exploded—disintegrated. So I’m throwing a party to forget it.”
    “I see,” said Rickie, in his serious baritone, searching for a comforting phrase, but before he found any, Philip was gone. Harry? Maybe Rickie had met him, but he couldn’t attach a face to that name.
    “Lulu!” said a young man Rickie knew as Stefan. “You’re going to do some tricks tonight?”
    “If you don’t press her too hard,” Rickie said with deliberate fussiness. “She’s had a busy week.”
    “Meaning you too?”
    Rickie savored his drink. “Busy enough. Who’s that dealing out the favors tonight?” He nodded toward a corner of the living room, where a young man in a white shirt and black waistcoat was chopping out a few lines of cocaine. Two fellows watched him intently.
    “His name’s Alex. More I don’t know!” Stefan laughed as if he had made a bon mot. “And don’t want to.”
    It was unheard of—drugs at Philip’s. Rickie watched the thin tubes of rolled paper being passed by Alex to a couple of rapt observers. Go ahead, through the nose, Alex’s gesture said. Then he lifted the dinner plate so that his neatly radiating rows could be more easily inhaled. Alex knelt with the lifted plate, like a figure in a religious painting of the Middle Ages. The cocaine accepters had merely to bend a little at the waist.
    Rickie looked over the restless, talkative crowd, meeting the glances of men whose eyes had been attracted by Rickie’s passing survey. One was rather handsome, with short brown hair, but absorbed in the man he was talking with, it seemed to Rickie. And how would Rickie look to this group, he wondered, whose average age was under thirty? He would look like a saggy-jowled, out-of-condition old fellow of at least forty, on the prowl for young flesh. Disgraceful, embarrassing! Dirty old man! Stay home with your dreams of the past!
    In the kitchen, Rickie made himself another drink, not too strong. When he returned to the living room, one fellow, maybe two, gave a sharp whistle, and suddenly “Gaieté Parisienne” was taken up by one after another of the guests, whistling, clapping.
    And Lulu barked and pranced.
    “Let ’er go . . . ! Take it off!”
    Lulu was free.
    “Here! Look, Lulu!” A young man held out an umbrella horizontally.
    Lulu cleared it, circled round and cleared it again, noiselessly, with ease and pleasure.
    Laughter! And some applause apart from the palm-smacking to the music’s beat. Two men stood and made a circle with their hands and arms.
    “ Lower! ” Rickie yelled. “She’ll hit the glasses back there!”
    Lulu leapt and barked once, circled again to repeat her act.
    Rickie always felt a thrill at this, because he had acquired Lulu when she was such a pup, he was sure she’d never been taught these tricks, they were just in her blood.
    “ Wheet! Wheet! ” The whole room seemed to be whistling, those who weren’t laughing.
    “That’s enough! Enough!” Rickie broke in, clapping once, standing tall with his arms upstretched. “Lulu needs a break! Come, Lulu, we’ll go on an ocean cruise to relax. All right?”
    Here Rickie pulled some dark glasses from a jacket pocket, and went in quest of his red muffler in his raincoat sleeve. He draped the scarf around Lulu’s head and secured it at her throat. Then he stuck the dark glasses on the bridge of her nose, and fixed the curves of the glasses under the red scarf.
    “Whoo-oops! Ha-ha!”
    More applause.
    “Beautiful, Lulu!”
    She had coiled herself in an armchair with head lifted, and her eyes might have been gazing at a distant horizon. Even Rickie grinned, though he’d seen Lulu so attired before. She did suggest a distinguished actress in a deck chair who might want to be incognito. Now the undisciplined musical background staggered into the waltz from the same Offenbach work.
    Rickie caught a glimpse of himself in a looking glass, a fleeting picture which cheered him: he