Table 3, it turned out, was near the door, served last, and bumped mercilessly by every passing waiter. Three of Table 3's other occupants were perched on booster chairs and amused themselves by heaving conveniently-sized foodstuff across the table. Cooper's choice of entree, swordfish with turnip couscous was gone by the time he was served, and he had to make do with vegetable kabob, ordered, no doubt, by someone with sound intentions two months earlier. His particular kabob was threaded heavily with pieces of zucchini, his least favorite vegetable, each chunk being nearly impossible to remove from the bamboo skewers. He pushed the waxy squash back and forth across his plate, watching Marianne scarf down large pieces of bloody filet mignon.

With her plate empty, Marianne insisted on dancing, an activity he disliked and finally hated when she ground her hips into his on the first slow number. Cooper was not a prude, but it seemed extraordinary that two complete strangers could behave like this in public and suffer no consequences. If anything, such intimacy was encouraged by the elderly matrons smiling approvingly as he pushed Marianne back and forth across the floor, much as he had done with the uneaten zucchini on his dinner plate. After a few dances, they began to get very drunk. Only expensive bourbon would permit Cooper to make love with someone he found somewhat distasteful. And there would have to be sex. He couldn't bear to have Marianne report to Peter that she had been turned down. Having no siblings, he didn't know if sisters told brothers such things, but it seemed likely and he could imagine the conversation.

"Hey, Pete. Remember that guy you introduced me to at the wedding last night, Hooper . . . or was it Carter . . . something? He couldn't get it up so I had to go home horny! Can I pick losers or what!"

"You're kidding! He seemed like a regular guy!"

Peter's potentially shocked face haunted Cooper, and such a scenario, riddled as it was with imaginary exclamation marks, would certainly put an end to any friendship between the men. They had been discussing a film at the Gersch-Hoffman hors d'oeuvres table and Peter's comments about the public's misreading of At Dinner with the Sycophants were compelling. Although such an interpretation (a heady combination of the French New Wave, Post-Modernism and revisited American exceptionalism) had not occurred to Cooper, he agreed with it immediately.

Cooper was a great film lover. A good film was like a syringe full of heroin. It allowed him to relax in a way impossible anywhere else. Despite his inclination to dream in dark theaters, Cooper continued to choose arty films that people would admire him for seeing, rather than the mindless ones he could have followed in a semi-attentive state. Because of this, his discussion with Peter had been fraught with difficulty since he wasn't sure whether his intended critique (never put forward) was based on the actual film or the permutations it underwent in his head. Still, he had managed to read enough reviews of At Dinner with the Sycophants to appear intelligent and Peter Frier seemed more prone to talk than listen anyway. Cooper actually preferred listening and was very good at it. His long silences were looked on as proof of deep insight and a first-rate mind. The more other people talked, the brighter he became.

Cooper watched gloomily from across the dance floor as Peter attached himself to another young man at what was now the Gersh-Hoffman dessert table, a spot generating more romantic activity than a pre-HIV singles bar. It occurred to him that Peter could be gay. He wondered whether it would be possible to attract Peter's interest without having to sleep with him. The protocol for homosexual lovemaking remained fuzzy in his mind, and, if such activity began to come into sharper focus, he forced himself to think of other things.

Around midnight, he gave up his half-hearted resistance and followed Marianne up the stairs to her room. She showed him her assets, he bared his throat, and they made love. It didn't seem real at all. Marianne was merely a conceit, wasn't she?

Early the next morning, Marianne sped out of the parking lot in her beige Volvo, shouting something about church before he was half-dressed. Church! Cooper proceeded to the hotel dining room, where he ate poached eggs on wheat toast with milky coffee. Then he drove home at a sedate speed. At thirty-one, Cooper still lived with his mother, a situation he found less embarrassing than he should.

"Cooper, where have you been?" his mother asked, hovering by his bedroom door, minutes later. "Couldn't you have called?"

Despite the crotchety words, his mother was not a prig. Right now, she was engaged in an affair of her own with a man Cooper loathed. With the benefits of a health club employing an extremely strict aerobics instructor, cosmetic surgery at the hands of a splendid surgeon, and expertly applied makeup and hair dye, his mother looked ten years younger than her fifty-three. On a good day, (and she was not above spending twelve hours in the sack), she could appear younger than Cooper did. Even now, standing in his doorway, she was doing foot lifts while she waited for his answer. Every minute of the ladder of a day can be expanded horizontally, she liked to tell him.

This attention to her body made Cooper angry and he didn't bother to respond to her question. After sputtering for a second or two, his mother was likely to be distracted by almost anything. Often her question disappeared entirely as other thoughts, whirring through her head at breakneck speed, bombarded her attention arc.

Cooper sat down at his desk. It was the junior executive's desk of his childhood and the fit grew more difficult each year. Did he want to pursue a relationship with Marianne? She was one of those gushing, enthusiastic girls who had proved themselves tiresome in the past. They expected so much more than he was likely to give, and he was going to make her cry, even if he tried not to. It would end badly with Marianne being prozaced into passivity by some churlish GP. Cooper was very good looking in a Hugh Grant sort of way, an asset he found more enervating than useful with girls like Marianne.

What he did want was a friendship with Peter. Together, Peter and he could move in a sphere that was closed to him ordinarily. Frier's circle was bound to include the most attractive and interesting people one could imagine. Could he call Peter up and suggest an activity that would not bring anything sexual to mind? Or was he willing to have sex with Frier to make a friend of him? He had gone to some lengths to get various things he wanted in the past, although perhaps not so far as this. Could sex with Peter be any more dismal than sex with Marianne?

These thoughts and other related matters percolated in his head as he dialed and redialed Marianne's number. He found himself unable to leave a message. What if Peter came upon it first? His voice, somewhat squeaky and diffident on machines if not in life, would repulse any man who heard it. He could never count on the proper pitch when under duress.

Marianne answered her phone at seven o'clock. "Sure, come on over," she invited him. "I'm all alone."

The circuitous driveway to the Frier house was bracketed by a double row of pines and one of oaks, and driving down the macadam, Cooper had the preposterous notion he was journeying back into the womb. It was awfully dark and the canopied effect was stifling. The absurd idea that he would find his mother's clenched and sweaty thighs at the journey's end was put to rest when he came upon the Frier house quite unharmed. After the dark of the trees, the clearing where the house sat seemed bathed in an otherworldly light. He was just beginning to take in the house's dizzying magnitude when Marianne, looking preposterously modern, came running out the massive front door.

"I thought you'd never get here," she said when he'd rolled down the window of his Golf. She dragged him into the house before he had any chance to examine the exterior. "So what do you think?" she asked, waving her arm around. "Isn't it dreadful?"

He looked around. "Well, I don't know if I'd call it . . . "

"Oh, but it's all a fake," she interrupted. "It's a fucking mirage that was built two years ago."

He looked around the foyer and still believed it all: the wide staircase with a banister that looked hewn out of a single tree, the oriental rugs with sections worn thin by the footstep of centuries, the tarnished sconces lighting the hall with a glittering hue even in daytime, the mullioned windows, refracting the late afternoon sun, the heavy walnut armoire which gaped a collection of crystal, the gold leafed mirror -- more than large enough to step into.

But it was the completely contemporary Marianne who stood before him, wearing a tattered pair of jeans and a lime tee shirt reading Maurice's Seafood. A large red lobster stretched its claws across her sizeable chest. If she would just step out of the frame, he couldn't help but think, this would make a marvelous picture.

"Strictly Disneyworld," she continued. "I'm the only real thing in here. And not too real at that." She wriggled her nose and stretched, pushing the tee shirt to its very limits. "So what would you like to do? There's a tennis court in the back. A pool, of course. Or we could continue where we left off last night."

"Does Peter live here, too?"

"As much as anywhere. Peter moves around a lot."

"Sounds ominous."

"Not as sinister as it sounds. The little shit can't bear to pay rent when he has all his prep school buddies to live off. It's very 'done' nowadays."

"He just moves from apartment to apartment? How does he get mail?"

Marianne sighed. "I wish I could say you were the first guy more interested in my brother than me." She walked into the living room and he followed her. "You didn't seem gay last night. Or was I wrong?"

"Hardly. His lifestyle just interests me."

"Please! He's not that interesting, Cooper. Just your typical freeloading writer."

"Oh, he's a writer! A novelist?"

"Amusing articles in men's magazines: the twenties scene, the sporting scene, the upper crust scene," she told him tersely. "Now that's enough about him!"

Cooper responded well to ultimatums. The large sofa, and Cooper estimated it at eight feet, made a nice place to make love. Then some unseen hand fixed him a sandwich and they finished with a swim. The house was so large that his frequent trips inside did not yield any trace of Peter, Peter's things, or Peter's room. Sighing inwardly, Cooper told himself this was going to be a lengthy courtship. Conceit or not!

Marianne and he had the place to themselves. Her parents were somewhere in Europe and Peter was a rare commodity. The staff, more heard about than seen, seemed to be composed of eastern European and Latin American émigrés chosen for arcane abilities rather than for political or domestic concerns. One elderly man from Mexico had come to the Frier household to tend a species of bees that produced a honey with an almond aftertaste that Mr. Frier craved. A Russian woman, nearly blind, made the lace that draped the thirty-foot French windows in the foyer. The young woman who tended the vineyard and orchard had been a mezzo-soprano in a war-torn zone in eastern Europe. All of the staff discharged their services in the most discreet way, going largely unnoticed by the couple. Spill something on the carpet, it was gone minutes later, Find oneself hungry, a plate of tempting items appeared magically. When one of the staff was caught at their ministrations, they backed out of the room voicing whispered regrets.

Cooper found Peter's bedroom during his first overnight stay. It was on the opposite side of the house, looking out on the pond. There were many things to look out on from the Frier house: the pond, the pool, the courts, the cabana, the arbor, the patio, the barbecue pit, the stables, the gazebo, the basketball court (never once used according to Marianne), the grove, the orchard, the vineyard. It would be hard to stumble on a room without a view, and most rooms offered a choice. Even the views had views, Cooper realized, looking out on a field of poppies from the center of the gazebo.

Although Marianne's room had the feel of a girlish retreat, Peter's room, once located, was very grownup. There were no school mementos on the walls, no sports trophies, no rock regalia, no trinkets of boyhood. The only pictures were a poster advertising a Diego Rivera show at an art museum in Lisbon and a small, dark landscape which turned out to be a Constable. Most of the books were nondescript works: the sort of books a set decorator might choose for the digs of a Generation X MBA in a play.

The mattress on Peter's king-sized bed was firm enough to inflict bruises and high enough to make a fall lethal. The clothes in the walk-in closet, so dull as to seem chosen by a stranger, were larger than Cooper's size 38. There were two of almost everything, and many of the jackets and slacks still had tags on them. Whoever selected the wardrobe had good, if conservative, taste. The only hint that it was Peter's room was the pile of unopened mail on the desk. Cooper flipped through the mail, but it offered few clues. More than once over the next weeks, he fell asleep on Peter's bed, creeping back to Marianne's room only minutes before her alarm went off.

Although she resembled nothing so much as an aging debutante, Marianne did have a job. She was the choirmaster at an Episcopalian church and at the affiliated girl's school. His respect for her increased even if his ardor did not. Cooper's job (he answered email correspondence concerning service issues at the Philadelphia Inquirer) was a temporary one that he refused to treat seriously, and he found it necessary to expand its parameters for Marianne.

One night, long after Marianne was asleep, he wandered down to Peter's room to find things looking …well …touched. The bed was rumpled, a damp towel hung in the bathroom, the closet door was slightly ajar. The pile of mail had disappeared. He was immediately excited by the thought that Peter might finally be home, but, after hanging around in the hallway for more than an hour, he guessed that Peter had come and gone. After fretting a bit about missed opportunities, Cooper came up with the idea of leaving a memento of his visit. Some small thing Peter could stumble on. Who doesn't like a mystery? He went though his pockets, his wallet, but there was nothing that wasn't vulgar or childish. He looked around for inspiration and his eyes lit on the Rivera poster.

Cooper's single talent, one he didn't often cultivate, was an ability to replicate nearly anything he came upon. He could copy handwriting, artwork, voices or even a look or a style of dress. He took a piece of writing paper out of the well-stocked desk and sketched a field of lilies in a few brief strokes. Rummaging further in the drawer, he found a yellow marker and some White-out. He dabbed the sketch judiciously. Voila! It wasn't anything much, but he placed it on the pillow and crept back to Marianne's room.

A rose lay on Peter's pillow when next Cooper happened by. It was red, and had been there for some time, he thought, when he picked it up and several petals floated to the floor. His heart soared. The fact that it was crimson seemed to indicate… something. It was not a timid choice.

He had come prepared. Hours spent at antique stores yielded him a copy of Cahiers du Cinema from 1966, featuring an in-depth discussion of the French New Wave directors. It was in nearly pristine condition, and despite a momentary concern that it was either too obvious or too obscure a hint, he placed it in the same spot. Surely, Peter would remember their discussion at the Gersch-Hoffman wedding and know that it was he who had left it. It occurred to him briefly that in choosing the bed as a location, he'd promised something he hadn't yet decided to deliver. The thought excited him.

A single chocolate on a pristine linen napkin awaited him the following day.

More than a week had passed since his initial declaration. Surely it was time to exchange something more than symbolic gifts, but Cooper hated to be the one to propose a meeting. He was an interloper at the Frier household and he wasn't sure how Peter felt about his subterfuge in dating Marianne. Poor Marianne! She had no idea that he wasn't satisfied with their relationship, and, if he were capable of such a thing, if he were able to see her as more than a doppelganger, he'd feel badly about it.

Cooper's mother's boyfriend was a tax attorney who liked to give advice, especially to Cooper. Monica Boyd had been referred to him after an IRS audit went awry. Normally, Cooper listened to any counsel offered him, but Joe Nerone had an ingratiating manner that rubbed Cooper the wrong way. All of their meetings thus far had been tedious lectures -- given in a voice reserved for children and dolts -- on how to accrue money when you had little to invest. But since Cooper needed some distance from which to consider his options that night, he went home once Marianne fell asleep. She always conked out early after the senior choir practices. Exercising her lungs and those of the elderly choristers had a soporific effect.

"Coop!" Joe said, springing out of his chair when Cooper pulled his key out of the lock. Cooper noticed Joe's feet were bare and startlingly pink against the dark wood floor. "We haven't seen much of you lately. Have a little tussle with the girlfriend?" Joe was stuffing what looked like a pair of his mother's panties into his pocket. A slip of scarlet still peeked out. Cooper had the vague sensation that had he entered the house seconds earlier, he would have been outraged, so he ignored Joe's question, heading for the stairs.

He ran into his mother in the hallway upstairs and wondered if she was naked under her cotton skirt. Nodding, he brushed past her and entered his room. It felt odd being here at night nowadays. His old mattress sagged badly when he sat down on it and the furniture looked battered and cheap. The Frier's luxurious house had ruined home for him. He lay down anyway, cradling his head on his arms.

"I hope you weren't offended by what you saw downstairs." It was Joe sticking his head in the door. "Didn't expect you home tonight."

Cooper cleared his throat. "Next time I'll call first."

 Joe tried for a laugh without success. "Now, you don't have to do that, son! It's still your mother's house."

 His mother's house? Hadn't he lived here since birth? And the use of "son" was presumptuous. Even the word "still" had a nasty connotation.

"I though we might have a little talk as long as you've come home tonight, Coop. Your mother and I have been thinking about your future and I . . . "

Cooper got up and started for the door with the sole intention of leaving the room. He had not come home to listen to Joe Nerone dispense fatherly advice. Joe, leaning against the doorframe, interpreted Cooper's movements as threatening and took two steps back.

The Boyd house was small and two steps back had the effect of backing Joe up against the hall railing where he instantly lost his footing. Monica, listening on the stairway below, gave a scream that was stunning in its pitch. Cooper made a futile grab for Nerone, catching only the cloth of his pants as he half-tumbled over the rail. It was Monica who took the brunt of his fall. When the dust settled, no one was badly hurt but both Joe and Monica had, inexplicably, magnified Cooper's actions into an assault.

"Just get out of here," Monica snuffled from the sofa. She pressed a bag of ice to her bruised cheek. Beside her, Joe lay on the floor, the only comfortable position for his wrenched back. He was also administering ice to his own set of contusions. Only Cooper escaped injury.

"So you're both okay then? You realize it was an accident?" he asked from the door. "I put the phone right by your side, Mom." They both glared at him as he shut the door quietly.

The weather had changed outside and whirlpools of fog twisted menacingly around his tires. Not a nice night for driving. How much pity could he feel for those who had put him in this quandary? The only place he could think to go was back to Marianne's. He let himself in with the key Marianne gave him on their second date and pushed the necessary buttons on the alarm panel. He also switched on the trail of fairy lights the Friers used to light the way upstairs.

 He stood for a moment outside Marianne's room. Once inside, he would be expected to make love and he really wasn't up to it. Middle of the night sex was an obsession with her and he was never off the hook. Prior performances, even first rate ones, didn't gain him any ground. At any time, he might feel her beckoning hand on his prick.

The altercation at home had taken its toll so he made the two-minute walk to Peter's room. The door was closed. It had always been open in the past. Hesitating only a moment, Cooper pushed it open quietly.

The light from the hallway illuminated the room just enough for him to make out a figure on the bed. On it, but not in it, for the legs were discernible. Beyond that, he could make out very little. Of course, it must be Peter. He considered his next move. In light of their recent correspondence and the rounds of gift giving, he felt little hesitation. He tiptoed in and lay down beside him.

It was clear to Cooper now that his interest in Peter was sexual. So this is what I am, he thought to himself. This is my destiny. He wanted to take Peter into his arms and…well, do something. He usually operated under the maxim, "Don't do something, just stand there." But really where had such diffidence, such inactivity, gotten him in the past? Here it was, already months after the wedding reception, and he was still bumbling around. True, for most of that time his intentions toward Peter were ill-defined. He had no idea of his own proclivity until recently. But now, he was focused on his objective. Sort of.

He put out a hand and touched Peter's cheek. It was surprisingly smooth. Peter must hardly need to shave at all. He probed lower then and came up with a throat that could only be female. Who the hell could this be? He sat up, and as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he made out a female shape he had never seen before. The woman's eyes were open, he noticed, but she didn't speak, nor did she seem afraid. What sort of girl allowed strange men to enter their bed? He was fascinated.

"Who are you?" he finally whispered. He didn't like to break the mood, which was both sexy and sinister, but who was she? She didn't respond to his question, but instead pulled his head down in a way he couldn't refuse. One thing led to another in an unbroken chain of pleasure heightened by the mystery of who she was. It was nearly a cinematic experience; he was at once experiencing it and seeing it play out on a screen in front of him.

They were drifting or rather catapulting along this path when suddenly the door opened and a shaft of light illuminated the bed.

"Fuck," Marianne said. "Fuck, fuck." He raised his head in time to see her gather magnitude as a shadow on the wall. Then she pulled the door closed and set off down the hall.

Cooper sat up at once. His pants needing doing but since his shoes were still on, he dove for the door. "Who are you?" he asked again, looking back at the bed. He hated leaving her and wondered when they'd meet again.

He raced down the hallway, clutching his pants with one hand and was able to overtake Marianne before she reached her room. "Look, I'm sorry," he said, grabbing her arm. "I came back after a scuffle with my mother's boyfriend and didn't want to disturb you. I had no idea she was in that room. Who is she anyway?"

Marianne rolled her eyes. "Like you don't know! It's been going on for weeks, hasn't it?"

"I saw her for the first time ten minutes ago."

Marianne screamed with both a depth and intensity that confirmed her long years of vocal training. It was the second female scream Cooper had heard that day and he was at once impressed and badly frightened.

"How dare you pretend that you haven't been courting her for weeks. She showed me the little picture you drew and the French magazine. I didn't want to believe her." Marianne began to cry in a way that suggested professional help would soon be required. "If you didn't know her at all, how did you think to buy a French magazine for our French maid?"

"I've never seen that girl before now," Cooper said, putting a hand on Marianne's shoulder. The situation still seemed salvageable to him. She shrugged it away, entering her room. He paused fractionally and then followed her in.

"Then what were you doing in there?" Marianne's eyes glittered and he couldn't help thinking that it improved her appearance. She had always been so tepid in the past. Now that she brought more than girlish enthusiasm to the table, he was charmed.

"I've been going down there when I couldn't sleep. So as not to disturb you." This was true enough and Cooper was very pleased this response occurred to him. "No one was ever there before."

"And you didn't know Martine napped there? That whenever she keeps me company at night, she sleeps there."

"Martine?"

"Well really, Cooper, if you're going to pretend you don't even know her name, I don't know where that leaves us. She's always around the house and you must know it. She fixes you platefuls of food three times a week. She cleans up your constant mess." Marianne shuddered at her final thought, "Who were your gifts for then? Why a French periodical if you didn't know her?"

Cooper was flummoxed. It hardly seemed prudent to say it was Peter he'd been courting. Certainly, the truth would leave him no better off than this misconception. Yet, to allow her to think it was Martine seemed fatal, too. How long had Martine been in the household? He was filled with questions. Asking any of them would only provoke an acrimonious response. Finally, he shrugged and his non-response was the worse response of all.

Within minutes, Marianne was holding out her hand for his house key -- and then firmly barring the massive wooden door behind him. As he listened to the bolt shoot through, he shuddered involuntarily. Standing in the driveway for the last time, he watched as the lights faded in the west wing, then the east. The heavens had gone dark and the ensuing darkness was too cruel.

As he slid into the Golf, another car pulled up. It was a tiny sports car -- Cooper didn't recognize the make -- and Peter Frier gracefully emerged, laughing and saying something to his companion. The passenger door opened and another man climbed out. The two men linked arms, heading for the house. Their height and build was nearly identical, and at one point, they seemed to merge. The door opened magically before them and Cooper caught a glimpse of the trail of lights that lit the way to heaven. Peter's lover passed through the door with a familiarity Cooper could never match. Peter followed, a possessive hand on his lover's waist. In a minute, the house was alit, a party underway. Cooper could hear music and laughter where there had only been silence minutes earlier. Someone was playing the grand piano, someone threw open the windows, their laughter sailing out to him on the evening's breeze.

Cooper started up the car. Its muffler needed replacing and he worried that Peter would reemerge to laugh at the engine's tinny resonance. It was also giving up a plume of noxious smoke, signaling further problems. The driveway seemed longer than the quarter-mile he measured it at that first day and he drove it slowly, watching the house grow distant through his rear view mirror.

Midway down the drive, he stopped the car, getting out for one last look. Sitting on elevated ground amid the swirling fog, the house seemed to undulate before him, and he felt almost dizzy with desire. He could nearly make out Peter's beautiful face, kaleidoscoping through the refracted light of the mullioned windows. Could it really be just the second time he'd seen him? The music -- jazz, he believed -- dimmed to little more than murmur from this distance. Getting back inside, he drove on.

At the drive's end, he turned around again to catch a last glimpse. He couldn't see the house at all now; nor could he hear the music. A bank of fog blocked his view entirely and it seemed that there was nothing more than the curving blacktop and the misty night. Ahead, suburban traffic bisected the rolling landscape cruelly as he waited silently to merge.