The day starts, as these days often do, with a florist calling to say the peonies did not come in. By six the substitution has been made, forgiven, and forgotten, and the first guests are arriving at a gallery where the paint on one wall is still faintly tacky.
From there: a dinner for twenty-two, seated by a chart that had been rewritten four times that afternoon, and then the drive across town to a party that everyone agreed had already peaked and everyone attended anyway.
What is striking, spending a full day inside a social calendar, is how much of it is labor. The choreography that reads as effortlessness at nine o’clock was assembled at eleven that morning by three people with a spreadsheet.
By one in the morning the last guests are gone and the peonies, in the end, are the only thing anyone mentions.
