No one was impressed. Every night was a complete and utter social stalemate.

Mrs. Keyes's best friend, Elizabeth Ethbridge Fulton Whelps, “Inky,” used to say there's only one “best” of anything. One night, Inky said, “When everyone can afford the best, the truth is, it does look a little—common.”

All the Old Society had gone missing. The more newly minted media barons showed up at any event, the fewer old-money railroad or ocean-liner crowd would.

Inky always said being absent is the new being present.

It's after some cocktail reception for victims of gun violence that the Keyeses walk out to the street. Packer and Evelyn are coming down the art-museum steps, and there's the usual long line of nobodies waiting in fur coats for the parking valets. This is right on the sidewalk, near a bus-stop bench. Sitting on the bench are a wino and a bag lady everyone's trying not to see.

Or smell.

These two, they're not young, dressed in clothes you might find in the trash. Bits of thread showing at every seam, the fabric stiff and blotchy with stains. The bag lady has on tennis shoes flopping open with no laces. Her hair shows through, matted and crushed inside the webbing of a wig, the fake plastic hair as rough and gray as steel wool.

The wino has a knitted brown stocking cap pulled down on his head. He's pawing the bag lady, shoving one hand down the front of her stretch-polyester pants and crawling his other hand up under her sweatshirt. The bag lady, she's twisting inside her clothes, moaning, her tongue rolling around her open lips.

The bag lady, where her sweatshirt is pulled up, her stomach looks flat and tight, her skin massaged pink.

The wino, his baggy sweatpants are tented in front with an erection. The peak of his tent shows a dark spot of wet leaked through.

Packer and Evelyn, they must be the only ones watching these two grope each other. The parking valets run between here and the parking garage down the block. The mob of new money looks at the sweep-second hand go around and around on their diamond watches.

The wino pulls the bag lady's face against the outline in his pants. The bag lady's lips, they crawl around on the dark stain growing there.

The bag lady's lips, Evelyn tells Packer, she knows those lips.

You hear a little sound, the kind of shrill ring that makes everyone waiting for a valet reach into a fur-coat pocket for their cell phone.

Oh my God, Mrs. Keyes says. She tells Packer, That bag lady getting pawed by the wino, that could almost be Inky. Elizabeth Ethbridge Fulton Whelps.

The shrill little ring sounds again, and the bag lady reaches down. She pulls up the bottom of one pant leg, unhemmed and unraveling beige polyester, to show her leg wrapped thick with a dirty elastic bandage. Her lips still on the wino's crotch, from between layers of bandages her fingers take a little black handful.

The shrill ring comes again.

The last Evelyn heard, Inky ran a magazine. Maybe Vogue magazine. She spent half of each year in France, deciding the hemline for next season. She sat ringside at the shows in Milan, and taped a fashion commentary that ran on some cable news network. She stood on red carpets and talked about who wore what to the Academy Awards.

This bag lady on the bus-stop bench, she holds the black object to the side of her gray plastic wig. She fingers it and says, “Hello?” She takes her mouth off the wet bulge in the wino's pants, and she says, “Are you writing this down?” She says, “Lime is the new pink.”

The bag lady's voice, Mrs. Keyes tells her husband, she knows that voice.

She says, “Inky?”

The bag lady slips the little phone back between the bandages around her leg.

“That stinky wino,” Packer says, “that's the president of Global Airlines.”

It's then the bag lady looks up and says, “Muffy? Packer?” The wino's hand still feeling around deep in the front of her stretch pants, she pats the bench beside her and says, “What a nice surprise.”

The bum pulls back his fingers, shiny wet in the streetlight, and he says, “Packer! Come say hello.”

And of course Packer is always right.

Poverty, Inky says, is the new wealth. Anonymity is the new fame.

“Social divers,” Inky says, “are the new social climbers.”

The Jet Set are the original homeless people, Inky says. We may have a dozen homes—each in a different city—but we still live out of a suitcase.

This makes sense, if only because Packer and Evelyn are never on the cutting edge of anything. This whole social season, they've been going to horse shows, gallery openings, and auctions, telling each other all the Old Guard socialites were in detox or having cosmetic surgery.

Inky says, “Whether you do it with a shopping cart or a Gulfstream G550, it's the same instinct. To always be on the move. To not be tied down.”

Anymore, she says, all you need is cash money, and you're sitting on the Opera Steering Committee. You make a hefty donation, and you get a place on the Museum Foundation Board.

You write a check, and that makes you a celebrity.

You get stabbed to death in a hit movie, and you're famous.

In other words: tied down.

Inky says, “Nobodies are the new celebrity.”

The Global Airlines wino, he has a bottle of wine, wrapped in a brown paper bag. The wine, he says, is mixed with equal parts of mouthwash, cough syrup, and Old Spice cologne, and after one drink the four of them go strolling through the dark, through the park, where you'd never go at night.

What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control of the game. It's the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow is a definite first step down some road.

Inky says, “Public is the new private.” She says, if you check into even the most boutique hotel—one of those white-robe places with orchids trembling next to the bidet in a white marble bathroom—even then, chances are a tiny camera is wired to watch you. She says the only place left to have sex is out in the open. The sidewalk. The subway. People only want to watch if they think they can't.

Besides, she says, the entire champagne-and-caviar lifestyle had lost its zap. Taking the Lear jet from here to Rome in six hours, it's made escaping too easy. The world feels so small and played out. Globe-trotting is just the chance to feel bored more places, faster. A boring breakfast in Bali. A predictable lunch in Paris. A tedious dinner in New York, and falling asleep, drunk, during just another blow job in L.A.

Too many peak experiences, too close together. “Like the Getty Museum,” Inky says.

“Lather, rinse, and repeat,” says the Global Airlines wino.

In the boring new world of everyone in the upper-middle class, Inky says nothing helps you enjoy your bidet like peeing in the street for a few hours. Give up bathing until you stink, and just a hot shower feels as good as a trip to Sonoma for a detoxifying mud enema.

“Think of it,” Inky says, “as a kind of poverty sorbet.”

A nice little window of misery that helps you enjoy your real life.

“Join us,” Inky says. The sticky green stain of cough syrup smeared around her mouth, strands of her plastic wig hair sticking to it, she says, “This next Friday night.”

Looking bad, she says, is the new looking good.

She says all the right people will be there. The Old Guard. The best parts of the Social Register. Ten in the evening, under the west-side ramps to the bridge.

They can't, Evelyn says. Packer and her, Wednesday night they're committed to attend the Waltz to End Hunger in Latin America. Thursday is the Aboriginals in Need Banquet. Friday is a silent auction for runaway teen sex workers. These events, with all the polished acrylic awards they hand out, it makes you long for the day when the number-one fear of Americans was public speaking.