If one were to turn my life into a pie chart, the largest segment would be cocktail parties.

As a young woman I viewed them with excitement. Would Mr. Right be there? Would I see or hear something wonderful?

As I matured, cocktail parties became stages where one would display clothing, personalities, searching for the juicy bit of gossip while engaged in a continuous comparison; do I look younger than ___ is my husband making more money than ___ is my dress more expensive than ___ grading one’s evening on pluses and minuses.

As I sailed into middle age I experienced cocktail parties as battlegrounds in which one took the field as strong as able, and carefully watched the ‘enemies’ judging their dress, their jewelry, their conversation.

 As most debs,  I had married an older man. At twenty one the fact he was forty was not insurmountable. When I was a young forty five that he was sixty four was still tolerable. Now that I’m fifty five he is a feeble seventy four, so I attend these obligatory social events alone.

I know almost everyone, almost everyone knows me. I pretend to enjoy cocktail parties, just as I pretend to enjoy my wasted life. For it is wasted. Sometimes, as I am driven through New York I envy the working girls with their futures ahead of them. Many will ‘be’, not marry someone who “is”. Many will create an adventurous life where things change. It is not that I romanticize poverty or labour, it is that I have done nothing with my life except attend cocktail parties. I pose, posture perfect, as the manicure, the hair do, the gown, the jewelry, the remarks, and I see the Cat among the pigeons.

It is not every function to which the Cat arrives and he is not the same Cat today he was twenty years or twenty months ago, but he is the same Cat among Pigeons.

I know what he is here for.

He is here for a woman like me. An older rich woman who will pay dearly for a night of his lies and keep paying. He will find an older woman who will buy him enough to please his young girlfriend. An older woman who will keep buying until she learns of his young girlfriend.

She, who has jeopardised her marriage, her social standing, her existence for his fraudulent passion will become schizophrenic, forced to perform her social gestures as if her heart hadn’t become a lead weight sinking into her stomach.