any scene like that. It was a stage for a company, a congeries, a prodigious, heavenly constellation of glass stemware great and small arranged in clusters, fairy platoons, clouds, sparkling see-through bubbles, before every place at the table, glasses so fine, so transparent, beaming and gleaming with reflections of light, swelling out with such sublime attainments of the glass-blowing arts that even to a twenty-four-year-old girl lately of Hialeah it seemed that if you tapped one with the tiniest tine of a fork, it would sing out “Crystal!” in a very high note, E-sharp above high C. Flanking each angelic array of glasses were parades of silverware, such stupendous regiments of utensils that Magdalena couldn’t imagine what they were all used for. At every place was a place card obviously done by hand by a professional calligrapher. Now ensued an interlude in which the guests hopped about and bent way down, still chirping away, in search of their appointed seats… much milling about… Sergei introducing as many people to one another as fast as he can… taking care to smile at Magdalena in a special way when he introduces her to people… all old people, or old in her eyes. The whole thing is bewildering… the names become nothing but syllables whistling in through one ear and out the other. When it was all over, Magdalena found herself placed four seats from Sergei, who was at the head of the table. To his immediate right was an Anglo woman, probably in her forties, who struck Magdalena as very pretty but affected. To Sergei’s left was—Oh, Dios mío!—a famous Cuban singer—famous among Cubans anyway—Carmen Carranza. She sat with a regal posture, but she was no longer young. Nor was she an apt model for the dress she had on. It plunged all the way down to the sternum, arousing not the satyrs but the health nuts. Where had all the collagen gone—the collagen in the inner curves of her barely there breasts? Why had she put body makeup on the bony terrain between the breasts—an early incursion of little age spots? Between the superannuated songbird and Magdalena sat a scarce-haired old man, Anglo, with cheeks and jowls that appeared inflated—perfectly. Scarcely a line in his face; and a pink perfect as rouge decorated it at cheekbone level. The old boy was wearing a suit and tie; and not just any suit, either. It was made of pink-striped seersucker—with a vest. Magdalena couldn’t remember seeing a man actually wearing one. And the tie—it looked like a sky full of fountainhead fireworks exploding in every direction, in every color imaginable. He intimidated her from the moment she laid eyes on him. He was so old and august and formal, and yet sooner or later she would have to talk to him… But he turned out to be nothing if not amistoso y amable. He didn’t look at her as if she were some wayward girl who had inexplicably wound up for dinner at Chez Toi.
In fact, the old man, Ulrich Strauss, turns out to be friendly, funny, very smart, and not at all condescending. The dinner begins with Sergei giving a toast of welcome and recognition of the guests of honor, the new director of the Korolyov Museum of Art, Otis Blakemore, from Stanford, sitting two seats to Sergei’s right, and Blakemore’s wife—Mickey they call her—who sits next to Sergei on his left. ::::::Dios mío, she’s the pretty woman with the upswept hair Norman was hitting on in the library just now… and she’s not an americana but a cubana.:::::: The waiters begin serving wine, and Magdalena, who is no drinker, is happy enough this time to have some to calm her nerves.
The table is so long—twenty-two people are seated—and comparatively narrow, and there is so much excited conversation, it’s close to impossible to hear what other people are saying from more than three or four seats away or across the table. Magdalena gets into an amusing conversation with Mr. Strauss about Art Basel. Mr. Strauss is a passionate collector of antique furniture and small-scale seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century representational sculpture, he says. He asks Magdalena how she happened to meet Sergei… as a side door entrance to find out who this sexy little girl wearing a corset is—i.e., what is her status? She says only that she met Sergei last week at Art Basel.
So you’re interested in contemporary art.
Not really, she was just there with “some people.”