Free The Uncertain Hour by Jesse Browner

but this night was not one of them. On the outdoor dining couch, a broad and open sigma, none was higher than any other—all heads pointed toward the center, the axis, all congeniality focused, all sense of status erased. Decorum was Hermes, not Zeus. After a few drinks, they would all be children again, lying together on a communal bed, careless and conspiratorial on a mattress shaped like the new moon—the moon of the Saturnalia, All Fools’ Moon.
    Petronius could sense a great feeling of happiness, radiating like a low-burning fire. Privilege; satiety; gratified expectations of elegance, poetry, and justice; incuriosity rewarded—these were the components of what his peers called happiness. It was what they were feeling now—the weather and the sea and Mercury, the Cumaean god of commerce, were cooperative, equal participants in the evening’s pleasures, nothing more and nothing less than expected. This was Petronius’s knowledge of happiness, too. And if, for the merest moment, he allowed that it was lazy, or false, or impious to entertain the imposture, it was a self-correcting imbalance, like a water clock, that never allowed movement to overtake it. The thought was there, and it was gone; even when it lingered, as it lingered now, long enough to register, it registered only as a shadow of itself, as we note the bird flying above us by its shadow underfoot, and when we look up it has gone. Petronius’s guests were happy; more importantly, if asked, they would have identified themselves as happy; and therefore Petronius was happy.
    “Shall we?” With one arm lightly encircling the waist of Cornelia, the ranking matron, he led them down the stairs. At the bottom, Martialis was waiting in his borrowed tunic with a worried look on his face. He had evidently gone on ahead to fret and pace in the darkness. He hardly bothered to lower his voice as he waylaid the party.
    “When are you going to tell them? They have a right to know.”
    “Tell us what, Petronius?” Cornelia perked up.
    “The menu, my dear.” And to Martialis: “They already know, Marcus. Please don’t bring it up again. Now come with me.” Petronius hooked him with his free arm and led him, mute and unresisting, to the dining couch. There, the group dissolved, some moving to the left, others to the right as they flowed around the couch and sought their natural places. As each sat on the edge of the mattress, assigned slaves deftly removed and stowed his or her sandals. The guests draped themselves across the couch so that, in a moment, each reclined on his or her left elbow, facing the center, in positions that corresponded precisely to those they would have assumed in the dining room: Martialis and Melissa to the left, in the family places, with the third position left open for Petronius; Anicius, Cornelia, and Lucilius in the places of honor; then Fabius and Pollia on the right, in the places of lesser prestige, leaving the seventh position empty for the missing guest.
    Petronius muttered a rote invocation of the gods, and the dinner was officially under way.
    “Who is our absent ninth, Petronius?” Lucilius inquired, spitting an olive stone into his fist and dropping it onto the marble ledge of the water table. Petronius remained standing, like a chorus master, at the opposite side of the basin.
    “It was to have been Martialis’s bosom companion, Lucius Castricus, but the rumors sweeping through Baiae seem to have swept him right off the coast. He is not to be found. I believe he intends to leave us in the lurch.”
    “For shame.”
    “Poor form.”
    “What have you done, Petronius?” Martialis barked, glaring into his goblet. “Have you mixed perfectly good Surrentine with Vatican rotgut? You may have no respect for your guests, but surely so precious a vintage did not deserve to be slaughtered?”
    The remark drew a general chuckle that very nearly masked the discomfort of Martialis’s palpable anger and embarrassment over his