In the far corner, a woman sits alone in an armchair, lazily spinning the standing globe with the toe of her sparkling shoe. That armchair straddles the carpet’s edge – and the locked hatch.
I back out of the room and sit in the hall. Eventually, they’ll return to the rotunda. No one will miss the pageant or the feast. The show is a brief absurd scene – usually a weak satire, with enough vulgar jokes to distract from the fact that, even on carnival night, no one wants to insult the wrong person. The theme is always a surprise. The year before I left, the pageant starred Aphrodite in an open scallop shell. Her name was Becca Zimmer. She was only a few years older than me, but she was friends with everyone a few years older than her. I knew her by her laugh and her perfect teeth and her gli
