“The Italian scenes?”

“Like Canaletto on speed,” Colin agreed calmly.

I had thought they were quite good. “Did she get Serena this job?” I asked, guessing.

“No.” Was it my imagination, or did Colin’s lip actually curl? “Her husband did. He also works in the art world.”

Yep, that was definitely a curled lip, like curdled milk in smile form.

No one warns you, in college, that when you date someone you run a good chance of dating his family as well. This was a new experience for me. Grant, the evil ex, had been one of those oddly rootless types one finds frequently in the Ivy league. Grant had left the Midwest for Princeton at eighteen and never looked back. I knew he had a largeish family back in Michigan, with multiple brothers and sisters and even a few nieces and nephews floating around, but in the whole two years we had dated, I hadn’t met a single one of them. He had spoken to his mother on the phone for half an hour once every month, regular as clockwork and about as intimate.

Colin, on the other hand, came not only with a full complement of interesting ancestors, but plenty of living ones, all of whom kept intruding on the scene in one way or another. I couldn’t decide whether to be entertained, or very, very afraid. My mother would probably opt for the latter. She has very strong feelings about certain of my father’s relatives.

What was the stepfather doing dredging up jobs for Serena, when, from what I could gather, Serena wasn’t on speaking terms with either him or her mother?

“What do you think of the show?”

Not wanting to set off any more red flags about his family — I had done enough of that the other night — I let it go. For the moment. I could always ask Serena later.

I squinted at a very large bronze that might be either Europa being seduced by a bull, a squashed globe, or an interpretive exposition on global poverty in a postmodern world (that last comes from the little plaque in front of the sculpture). Personally, I didn’t see it. But it could have been worse. Crosses in urine, toilets masquerading as installation art, rooms constructed entirely of balloons that popped when you stepped on them.

Compared to the exploding balloon exhibit, I could cope with Zeus as commentary on global poverty.

Leaning comfortably against Colin’s arm, I took the measure of the room. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

“It helps to have low expectations,” my boyfriend agreed, looking doubtfully at his pink champagne before taking a gingerly sip.

Across the room, I could see Serena, pink-cheeked with champagne, in an animated discussion with a man in a black cashmere turtleneck and something that wasn’t quite a beret but wanted to be. They seemed to be deeply enmeshed in agreeing over the merits of a statue that looked to me like a squashed hamburger without the bun.

“We’re philistines, aren’t we?” I said, looking up at Colin.

“Irredeemably,” he agreed cheerfully, taking a more confident swig of his champagne. Apparently, he had concluded that just because it looked pink didn’t mean it tasted pink.

My heart squeezed with a rather embarrassing rush of affection for him, which I covered by hastily babbling, “The posters aren’t bad, though. I rather like them.”

Someone, possibly Serena, had come up with the idea of hanging huge art posters in the empty spaces on the walls, as a pictorial representation of the history of love through art. They had played around with the colors, of course, framing the classic images in funky hot pink frames and coloring some of them with a neon wash in multiple variations, like those Andy Warhol prints, but it still made a nice effect. Among other favorites, I recognized Botticelli’s Venus, Fragonard’s Love Letter, and Francisco Hayez’s The Kiss .

There were darker images at play, too: Waterhouse’s Ophelia twining wildflowers in her hair; the Lady of Shallot floating down to many-towered Camelot as singing in her song she died; Dicksee’s Belle Dame Sans Merci tempting her knight at arms to his pale and loitering fate. The Belle Dame’s unbound locks were a bright, unmistakable red. Red, like my hair, or like that of Penelope Staines, nee Deveraux. All around me, in the bright posters hanging like feudal banners in the walls, red-haired women were coming to bad ends, and all for love. It was an unexpectedly sobering observation.

I looked at them all, trapped in their several fates, and thought about Penelope, trapped in her own spider’s web, like Rosamund in Queen Eleanor’s tower, or the Lady of Shallot in her doomed barge. A sad soul, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had called her, and as I read on, I was beginning to understand why.

It was, I thought, dangerously easy to get swept up in other people’s expectations, pulled into patterns based on the person you had been five, or even ten, years ago. Look at Serena. On her own turf, she seemed happy. Confident, even. She was still too thin, but in her blush pink cashmere dress, with a glass of champagne in one hand and a gloss in her hair, she looked elegant rather than sickly. With a deftness I would never have imagined of her, I watched her guiding potential patrons neatly in the direction of unsold pieces, sorting out some confusion about the canapés, and soothing the ruffled feathers of a man whose name had been left off the guest list. But put her within five feet of her brother, and she suddenly became an awkward adolescent again, all open wounds and raw emotions.

Not that I should talk. Over on the other side of the room, under the poster of Belle Dame Sans Merci , I spotted my friend Pammy, decked in a hot pink crocodile-skin sheath. We will ignore the fact that I am pretty sure there is no such animal as a hot pink crocodile. Pammy is a law unto herself, in more ways than one. And I was just as bad as Serena — or Penelope. Put me in a room with Pammy, and I was in sixth grade again, standing shyly at the sidelines of the middle school dances, while Pammy pulled boys over by their ties. No matter how old we got, to a certain extent our relationship would always be a replay of our respective roles from middle school. There were times when it was comforting, like a tattered old shoe, but other times when I found myself behaving in ways that I didn’t like and didn’t respect, all on the strength of those old patterns.

Speaking of people I neither liked nor respected . . . Standing not far from Pammy, I recognized Joan Plowden-Plugge, Colin’s next-door neighbor from Sussex, the one with the ungodly crush on Colin. She was wearing red, of course. It looked smashing with her faux blond hair.

Making a face, I pointed Joan out to Colin. “Where’s her broomstick?”

“I’m sure she left it in the cloakroom. Serena got her to agree to write up the show for Manderley .”

That was undoubtedly a coup for Serena. Manderley was a very respected arts journal and they seldom had much to do with anything more modern than William Morris. It was also a pain in the you-know-where. I didn’t want to have to be nice to Joan. It was Valentine’s Day. Fortunately, Joan appeared to be occupied for the moment with a large glass of pink champagne (which clashed beautifully with her dress) and a shaggy-haired man with trendy rectangular glasses, who I assumed had to be another arts journalist.

Next to them, Pammy had got her hot pink fingernails into Nick. She was doing her twinkly laugh at him, the one that goes with the hair flip and the eyelashes at half-mast. Nick was flirting happily back, and I wondered what had happened to the blonde I had seen with him at the movie theatre. Whoever she was, she didn’t seem to be in evidence.

Serena was conspicuously not looking at them, talking to black-beret man with an intensity that suggested she knew very well what was going on behind her and was making a concerted effort not to notice. I looked around for Martin, but if he was here, he wasn’t in evidence. Probably moping in the cloakroom, or drunk-dialing his ex.

Useless, I thought irritably, wondering whether we ought to wander over and intercede. Colin had found an old university friend, with whom he was having a grand old time bemoaning the depraved mentality that would take a decent bubbly and tint it pink.

“Nothing short of vandalism!” the friend was saying, holding up the glass to the light in illustration.

It seemed a shame to extricate him, just when he was having fun.

Fortunately, intercession appeared from another quarter. I watched with interest as a newcomer made his way from the cloakroom straight towards Serena. She had her back to him — and, incidentally, to Pammy and Nick. A potential love interest? Or simply a determined customer? It might be either.

The man was on the older side, but so was Serena’s most recent ex. Like her evil ex, this man was in his late thirties or early forties at a guess. But there the resemblance ended. Where the evil ex had been on the broader side, solidly built, this man was tall and willowy, with the sort of slender grace one associates with old movie stars premiering across from Grace Kelly. His clothes were as expensively casual as the evil ex’s had been deliberately formal; his cashmere sweater, black wool slacks, and sports coat all screamed Italian tailoring. His winter tan brought out the bright blue of his eyes. Definitely not the sort of man one would kick out of bed. If one went for the older type, that is. Which Serena quite definitely did.

On the other hand, the cost of his clothes suggested that if he wanted to place a three-foot-high squashed hamburger cast in distressed bronze in the center of his living room, he could very well afford to do so.