Fatal Reaction

look younger but were slimming as well. Their wives wore hand-painted dresses and looked like they patronized the same hairdresser as Lou Remminger.
    We waited for our names to be checked off from the list and then passed into a tall, narrow room, which looked like the interior of a very large, white shoe box. In the center of it stood an enormous golden sphere about twelve feet in diameter. The wall plaque announced that the piece was titled, Monument to Language.
    I turned to Stephen. “I need a drink,” I said.
    I spotted my parents on the far side of the room, talking to the mayor, who I decided looked more like his father every day. Tribute having been paid, the mayor moved on. Most of the $46 million that it had cost to erect the new building had been donated by the people in this room. His honor had many more hands to shake before the night was through.
    Stephen reappeared at my side with two glasses of white wine and thus armed we made our way through the black-clad crowd toward my parents, who were having their picture taken by the photographer for the society page. The Sun-Times society columnist hovered malevolently in the background waiting for him to finish.
    As we made our way toward them we stopped every few feet to shake hands and say hello. I couldn’t help but marvel at Stephen. With his most trusted business advisor dead, control of his company threatening to weaken, and the deal of his lifetime looming ever closer on the horizon, he amiably worked the cocktail crowd, effortlessly remembering names and lightheartedly flirting with my mother’s friends and my partners’ wives. I’d long ago concluded, albeit enviously, that it was a masculine talent, this ability to compartmentalize, to focus completely on what was at hand.
    We finally reached my parents. Mother was radiant and in her element, stunning in a Halston gown of midnight blue. Even though she managed to convey the impression that somehow the party was being given in her honor, the truth is she wouldn’t have entertained in a woodshed most of the people who were gathered here. But as an icon of arts philanthropy in this city, she felt it necessary to make an appearance at the event. She wasn’t even staying for dinner. After cocktails she and my father were headed to the cystic fibrosis benefit at the Four Seasons. Catching sight of us, Mother greeted me with more warmth than I’d seen her muster of late, while Father, in his usual semiinebriated state, was as sweet, and vague, as ever.
    “That dress looks lovely on you,” she said, congratulating herself on her choice.
    “Thank you.”
    “Have you said hello to Skip and Bitsy yet?”
    “Yes, Mother,” I replied, wondering how it was that she always managed to make me feel like I was exactly nine years old. “It was the very first thing we did.”
    “Very good,” she said.
    “Well then, let’s have a look around this joint,” suggested my father, adding under his breath, “it’s not like we’re ever going to be coming back.”
    Stephen chuckled and my father flagged down a waiter to bring him a fresh drink. Once my father had enough gin and tonic in hand to safely make the trip, we made our way into the closest of the museum’s barrel-vaulted galleries.
    A sign beside the entry explained that the gallery housed a show whose intention was to demonstrate how the concept of rapture transforms lives and is expressed through modem art. After looking at the first couple of paintings I was secretly grateful they hadn’t chosen depression as a theme. Whoever thought that several large, black panels communicated anything about rapture was completely out of their mind.
    I went to say something to Stephen, but he was reading the explanatory text beside one of the installations with such great concentration that I stepped back to look at it myself.
    It was a large painting, eight feet by six feet, painted white and superimposed with a thinly lined grid of pale red squares. I didn’t bother reading the description. They were all so pretentious and absurd that they only reinforced my deep-seated belief that much of modem art is to our century what the new clothes were to the emperor— nothing but a very elaborate fraud.
    “What do you think?” demanded Stephen, appearing at my side. “Shall we buy it and hang it in our new living room?”
    “Thank god they’re not for sale,” I replied. I studied his face and was alarmed to find no trace of a smile.
    “It must have