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Members of the Colfax family shared three traits: immense wealth, liberal(ish) politics, and a tendency to behave like stereotypes. Most of the Colfax men golfed, gambled, smoked cigars, and sailed. Most of the Colfax women served on charity boards, read popular novels, and flew to London for week–long shopping sprees at Harrods—the main exception being Stannie Colfax's mother Jean, who drank all day and lay in bed wearing wraparound sunglasses so dark that sometimes she forgot where she was, and whether it was day or night. Nobody paid Jean much attention except her "girl," Ida, and her twin sister Jacquie, who had entered a convent 30 years ago. Sometimes it got confusing, knowing what to call a sister who was, really, a sister. Sister Mary Sebastian lived in Pensacola and drove over to the Seaborough resort every Thursday during the winter and spring, but Jean rarely called her by any name at all, if she could avoid it.

Stannie had arrived at Seaborough this week, very pale from living up in Washington, and very snarly, too, but nobody knew exactly why. He had two younger sisters, Mary Beth and Linda Kate, both in their early twenties, and both eager to please him. In December, they'd made a trip to D.C. to celebrate his twenty–ninth birthday. They'd come away very, very impressed: impressed first of all with Stannie himself (so handsome and well–dressed, well–groomed, chatting up the three or four actual Hollywood celebrities who had come to his party just to listen to him say things like, "So, if Charlton Heston wins the Irving J. Thalberg award at the Oscars and he keeps talking and refuses to leave the stage, should we shoot him?"); and also impressed with Stannie's girlfriend, Rose, who hardly ever laughed at his jokes and yet seemed to tolerate him better than most people. Rose, they knew immediately, was their natural superior. She wore no makeup, she dressed in t–shirts and khaki pants, and yet she was lovely.

Stannie said one day in his typical way that Rose was the only smart woman he'd ever met, probaby as smart as he was, himself, and the comment made Mary Beth and Linda Kate so angry that they wanted to beat him to death right then—thrash him to a bloody pulp with the fireplace tools and hurl his body into the empty pool outside his Washington apartment. But Rose, putting film in her camera at the time, just said, "Girls, when your brother talks like that, the thing to do is ask for his college transcripts."

"Hah!" he laughed. "I wouldn't want to break their hearts."

Rose gave him a sly half–smile. "Put your grades where your mouth is, pal. Show us those transcripts." She turned to the sisters. "We'll never see them, you know. He's burned the evidence. He's covered the trail."

They nodded, and loved the fact that a woman of such obvious charm and substance could see right through their brother.

But now a few months had passed, and Rose wasn't at Seaborough, and the sisters felt afraid of Stannie, as usual, and couldn't keep themselves from trying to please him. On his third morning at the house, he woke up at ten, put on a baseball cap, and meandered out to have a cigar on the seaward side of the second floor balcony. He leaned over the rail for a good look at the tide, which was rough this morning. The sky was a light purple, the water a heavy, almost oppressive green under ridges of white.

Stannie felt oppressed, too, though he couldn't have said exactly why. Just being here, maybe. Being bored (he wasn't used to it). Being with people who did nothing useful, ever. He didn't understand what his father and uncles and male cousins saw in golf—driving around sterile grass fields at two and a half miles an hour with middle–aged rich guys (putters on knees, guts bulging over beltless slacks). Golf involved no physical exertion that he could see (maybe that's exactly what his father saw in it). Stannie missed his running club. Real exercise. He missed the Tops office in Washington: the celebrity put–downs and political arguments; the back–and–forth bullshit that went on all day every day—he being the quickest, wittiest bullshitter of them all.

"Hey Stannie," his editor, Tom McLeesh, would say, "what's your take on Gates this week?" Stannie had noticed that it never really matter what he said about Bill Gates or George W. Bush or the National Rifle Association or Erectile Dysfunction. People listened, they nodded, laughed. It didn't seem to matter whether you had a point of view or not: tone was everything.

About halfway through her brother's cigar, Linda Kate appeared from the French doors, smiling, with whole wheat bagels on a glass tray. Mary Beth followed her with the lowfat strawberry cream cheese and orange juice. Stannie looked up in sympathy. Poor things. What could be more boring than life on the Florida coast? Plenty of white beaches and rhododenrons and magnolias. But not a word of intelligent conversation.