“Well,” Antonio says.

“Well,” Lee answers.

“Want to go somewhere?”

Lee nods. Without another word he hails them a cab. As she gets in, Antonio says something to the driver that she cannot hear. They sit in the back and watch the city go by, the passing streetlamps casting rippling ribbons of light across their bodies.

Fifteen minutes later, they stop on a familiar side street. When Lee gets out she realizes where she is: he has taken her to Drosso’s. She should feel something, some guilt, she knows she should—at the very least she should be worried that some of Man’s friends will see her there—but she feels nothing. This time when Drosso opens the door and kisses her cheek she pushes her face against him to feel the pressure of his lips more strongly. She and Antonio go into separate rooms to change, and even the act of removing her clothing, of taking off the dress she now realizes she chose for him, feels somehow erotic, as if she is stripping for him even though he’s not there, and she rubs her hands along her body and between her legs before she puts on the robe, the silk cool against her skin. When they emerge into the hallway, both dressed in robes, Lee fills with a powerful giddiness, bubbling up in her throat so that she cannot help but laugh.

The sweet smell of smoke seeps out from under the bookshelves, and Lee hangs back while Antonio moves the lever on the bookcase to let them inside. Tonight, the secret room is crowded, a dozen people sharing the hookah on the bronze table in the middle of the room, all of them curled up on floor cushions and drowsing against one another. On a couch in the far corner, a group of mustachioed men are deep in conversation, their voices hushed but urgent. Someone somewhere is playing the piano, the same phrase over and over again. It takes Lee a moment to realize it’s actually the phonograph skipping. As soon as she notices, she can think of nothing else, but no one in the room seems to care. Lee goes over to it and sets the needle back in place at the start of the record. A pause, and then the room fills with a beautiful series of cascading classical notes. She takes a deep breath. Antonio watches her from across the room, and she gives him a little smile just to see the returned smile spread across his face.

He comes over to her and inclines his head toward the bar cart. “None of that for you tonight,” he says.

“I suppose not,” she says, but part of her wants the cold glass in her hand again, like last time, the oblivion that came after.

A man approaches them, dressed in a Chinese robe with a small fez on his head. He bows and points toward the hookah.

“Do you smoke?” Antonio asks Lee.

“No.”

“That’s a shame. Could be fun.”

The words hang in the air. Lee thinks of her mother. For many years Ellen tucked her Pravaz on a ledge on the underside of her bathroom sink, where she must have been certain no one would see it. Lee found it one afternoon when she was ill; she had gone into the bathroom to be sick and then lain down on the cold tile, liking the way the porcelain felt pressed against her cheek. And there it was, a small black leather case with her mother’s initials stamped on the outside in gold foil, and secured inside with loops of elastic were several slim blue vials and a surgical-looking needle. After she found it Lee would feel under the sink every time she was in the bathroom, just to see if it was still there. For many years it always was, the vials at varying levels of fullness. But after a while, her mother stopped being so sneaky, and the case instead stayed in the pocket of her dressing gown, pulling down the fine fabric with its weight. One day while her mother was napping, Lee went in to see her, and the noise of the bedroom door opening and closing disturbed her so that she turned and stretched a naked arm above her head, the delicate white skin dotted with scabbed marks. Lee stared and stared at that arm, until finally her mother stirred again and Lee snuck out so she wouldn’t be caught.

Now, at Drosso’s, Lee takes a breath. “How does it feel?”

Antonio shrugs. “Like you’re awake but not. Like happiness.”

The man in the fez tugs at her robe and gestures to an unused hookah tube.

“I’m happy enough,” Lee says. It costs her effort to say it, and part of her wonders if by saying no to this she is ruining everything with Antonio.

But Antonio just nods, waves off the man, and puts his hand at the small of her back, where she can feel the warmth of it like a brand through the thin silk. He moves her gently toward another door at the back of the room. They go down a short hallway. A pulsating beat of syncopated jazz vibrates the floorboards under her feet. Antonio opens a door at the end of the hall and they enter a large room, much bigger than the hookah room. Everything in it is a soft washed pink, pink flocked wallpaper and pink velvet banquettes, pink carpet and small pink tables at which people, dressed in blush-colored robes that seem, impossibly, to be coordinated with the surroundings, sit in small groups, talking loudly over the music. Who are these people? They lean in toward one another across the tables, put hands covered in diamonds up to their throats as they throw back their heads in open-mouthed laughter. The women’s robes expose high arched collarbones and deep-colored pendants that nestle in the hollows of their necks. The men have smooth chests, olive skin, hard, sharp shoulders that make their robes somehow masculine. They are impossibly chic. At the far end of the room, a bar is set up, with a female bartender behind it, wearing a silk dress no thicker than a slip. The wall behind the bar is covered with rose gold foil, and the bottles are displayed against it on glass shelves so that the entire bar seems lit from inside and glowing.

“Oh,” Lee says, “I will definitely have a drink in here.”

No one pays Antonio and Lee any attention. They move toward a table and before they sit down he says, “I helped Drosso paint this room. We finished it a couple of months ago.”

“It’s gorgeous,” she says, and means it. “Was it your idea?”

“Yes. I wanted it to feel like you were inside a mouth. I thought it should just be plain pink, but Drosso had the idea for the serpent, so I added it.”

Lee looks around again and sees that the wallpaper is actually a mural, painted in gold, of a giant snake that coils around the room, each of its scales the size of a dinner plate and embellished with smaller drawings of snakes and what she thinks must be the Garden of Eden.

She tells him, “I’m not very good at that—making things up. I could take a good picture of it, though.”

Antonio pulls out her chair for her and her knees buckle into it. He says, “It’s not what I want to be doing—none of it is, really, the sets and everything—but I’m good at it. I can take a box and make it look like a palace.”

Lee thinks of his set pieces for the ballet, the forest and ballroom, how real they seem. Imagines what it would be like to have an entire room as a canvas, to place viewers inside what they are viewing. “What do you want to be doing?”

“My own work. Not things I’m getting commissioned to create. But no one seems very interested in what I’m interested in.”

“Which is what?”

“Oh, lately it’s little paintings made out of oil and candle wax. ‘Depressingly murky,’ according to the one critic who’s ever written about my work.”

“I’d like to see them. I bet I’d like them.”

Antonio raises his eyebrows at her and gives her a half smile. “You know? You just might.”

The pink room reminds Lee of a costume party she went to in New York a few years ago, a night that got written up in the Times and talked about for months afterward. Guests were instructed to dress as either devils or angels and to make sure no one could tell who they were underneath. Once there, depending on what identity they had chosen, they were sent to a particular floor of the house. Lee was a devil, of course, with a red silk mask that covered most of her face and tendrils like flames that ran through her hair and curved around her neck. The room she was directed to was illuminated by red lights, had a huge fire roaring in the hearth. She begins to tell Antonio about it and then says, “Oh!”

“What?” He leans toward her, staring right into her eyes, and tension crackles between them like wood popping in a fire.

“It’s just… I took on this big job recently, and being here in this room and thinking about that party, it made me realize what I could do.”

Antonio waits for her to continue.

“It’s a white party. The Bal Blanc. Madame Pecci-Blunt does it every year. But what if we make it the black-and-white party? Everyone dressed in white, with words and images projected on their bodies as they go through the rooms. Like photographs. The guests themselves can be the paper and we can develop the pictures right onto them. Weird pictures, words and phrases—”

“That’s fantastic,” Antonio says emphatically. “Wish I had thought of it.” He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t take his eyes off her, and she knows the idea really is a good one.

A waitress comes over to them. Antonio orders quickly, and she returns with a tray laden with cut crystal. With great ceremony, she lays out a sugar bowl, two Pontarlier glasses, two slotted spoons, a small carafe of ice water, and a green bottle.

“Absinthe!” Lee says.

“Drosso,” Antonio says in explanation.

He fills the bottom bulbs of their glasses, the liquid gleaming like jade against the pink background. They each put their spoons, holding sugar cubes, across the lips of their glasses, and then he pours the water over her spoon in a slow trickle. Coming from him, the gesture is sensual, teasingly slow. In the bottom of the glass the green liquid grows cloudy. Lee takes the carafe from Antonio and does the same to his glass, conscious of his eyes on her. They use their spoons to stir, clink their glasses together, and tip them back at the same time. Lee’s mouth fills with peppermint and licorice; her nose tingles as she swallows.