of them, a little weasel of a man with one side of his shirt collar collapsed upon his neck because it was designed to go with a necktie, was so gauche as to tap him on the shoulder. Sergei did a hopeless roll of his eyes for Magdalena’s benefit and said out loud, “To be continued—” and let his courtiers go ahead and swamp him. His eyes awarded themselves one last little hurried high-speed helping of her bosom.
Magdalena was alone again, but this time she didn’t care. It didn’t bother her at all. There was only one other person in all of Chez Toi, and now she knew he was interested…
By and by Norman returned from across the room. When she saw him, he did that tight-lipped, head-stuttering thing men do before they say, “I swear, honey, I did the best I could.”
“Listen, I’m sorry. I saw somebody I’d been trying to get hold of and I wasn’t sure I’d have another chance to talk to him, and I never thought—” His voice slowed down when he saw that Magdalena was giving him a pleasant, friendly smile.
“So you caught up with him?”
“Uhhh, yes.”
She just smiled at this little white gender lie. What earthly difference did it make? She said, “I’m so glad, darling.”
He looked at her in a funny way, as if his radar detected irony. The “darling” probably did it. Somehow Norman wasn’t the kind who drew pet names up from Magdalena’s heart. He studied her face. If he was a good student, he saw that she was genuinely happy. Under the circumstances, that might have confused him, too.
Presently, the maître d’ in the cream-colored tropical suit appeared in the library doorway and said in a loud and eminently cheery voice, “Dinner is served!”
Sergei was in the doorway, too, right next to him. He smiled at his flock and swung his chin up in a great arc that seemed to say, Follow me! That they did, and the buzz and the burble and the shrieks and hawhaws increased, if anything. They trooped across the foyer toward… the other room.
Norman was tremendously impressed. He leaned toward Magdalena and said, “You know what? He’s taken over this whole floor, and there are only two floors!”
“I think you’re right,” said Magdalena, who was too happy to think much of anything about anything anybody else had to say at this point.
She looked down at her own glorious bosom. And to think she had feared what the bustier was going to do to her place in Society and the world!
Now the flock squeezed through the doorway in an energized mass, eager for every drop of social anointment that awaited in the other room. She had never seen a dining room like this. In keeping with the Chez Toi motif, there was nothing grand about it. But it was spectacular… in its own casual way. The wall opposite the entrance wasn’t a wall at all. It was a counter almost the length of the room, and beyond the counter you found yourself looking straight into the fabled Chez Toi kitchen. It was huge. Twenty feet of gleaming—gleaming—brass… pots, pans, kitchen utensils of every sort, hung in a row from hooks in the kitchen but came down low enough to dazzle the diners. The cooks and the sous-cooks and the rest of an army in white with toques blanches on their heads marched about the kitchen taking care of this and inspecting that… and pushing buttons, Magdalena noticed. Pushing buttons? Oh, yes. Computers ran the roasting ovens, the baking ovens, the grills… even the open skillets, the refrigerators, the shelf rotation in the stock cabinets… Not very Old House–like, but everybody appeared willing to avert his eyes from this intrusion of twenty-first-century American digitalization into the old wood-burning analogical skillet stove top. The brass art show and the march of the toques blanches served as backdrop enough.
A table made of a solid, simple slab of chestnut wood dominated the room. No, it filled the room. It was about twenty feet long and four feet wide and ran all the way from here… to there. It was the kind of behemoth that was good to have on a farm during the threshing season when all the workmen came inside in their bib overalls hungry for all the pancakes with maple syrup they could eat and all the coffee and not-yet-fermented apple cider they could drink before they headed out again. The surface of this table didn’t recall