That this Stan—apparently the man—, clasped with cash and connections, wielded such influence seemed to me entirely wrong. I forced a pleasant enough look as we exchanged greetings. He eyed me too as if I had preternaturally landed from some other planet. According to Martin, we both ‘worked’ in healthcare; more accurately, we were worlds apart.

Boucher interrupted the silence. “Kostakis has arrived,” he said. With that, he politely (and skillfully) escaped. And so two faces of Martin Boucher departed: one receding, another reflected among the enveloping, expanding mirrors all around. The man Stan, likewise doubly deftly vanished into the crowd, now nearly shoulder-to-shoulder awaiting the big event.

“I suppose we’ve got no time for drinks,” I said to Nina. Dressed in royal blue, she shunned donning the requisite red. The First Lady, in recognition of women’s heart disease, wore such a color: high society dutifully complying, such hues hung on as adjectives consigned to meaninglessness. (Isn’t that fashion after all?) “The red dresses remind me of the Soviet Union,” Nina once told me; товарищ had been the word. This independence—a refusal to conform—had, I realized, likely saved her life. For when Chernobyl exploded, she sensed, even more than Gorbachev and his morose apparatchiks had glibly advertised, the creepy enormity of the strontium-spiked danger. Nina told me that she had escaped to Yekaterinburg, leaving Kiev as she put it on ‘her own two feet’.

Nina was well aware that the Forum (and all such organizational charades) existed mostly to facilitate the money flows perpetuating this fraternity of smiling villains. With these pet charities, it was all just the display: ‘the thought that counts’ cynically refracted. An opera listing for example demonstrated wealth more effectively than the most resplendent of mansions, which only a few among the gated community—edged anyway with envy—could appreciate. Other than stampeding out before the final act, stumbling over the others to snag that prima donna primo taxicab, a donation to the opera painlessly re-rendered an otherwise nobody as a magnified somebody.