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advantage of the agency’s “family-friendly flex-time” policy and health insurance, working the system to get six months of paternity leave when the kids were born.
    Close to the entrance to the hall, Alex stopped on the red carpet and stood on his tippy toes, peering over the coiffed heads. He spotted the Tricks crew at the end of the press line, Katherine huddled with Melissa Rivers and Figgy giving a thumbs-up to a reporter for Slavic TV. He caught up with Figgy at the towering front doors of the auditorium and led her inside.
    Figgy leaned close. “Makeup check,” she whispered. “Am I smudged? That guy from Access Hollywood was practically licking me. Have I got monster face?”
    â€œNo monster face,” he said, looping a strand of her stiffly ironed hair over her ear. “You’re perfect. Breathe. And breathe again.”
    Figgy smiled, the two of them having recently decided that a yoga studio near their house was obviously attempting to one-up and out-do mere breathers with a big sign out front that commanded: “Breathe. And Breathe Again.”
    â€œYou know I love you, right?” she said.
    â€œRight back at you.”
    Alex planted a kiss on her cheek and reached over Figgy’s shoulder to flag down a tray of champagne. They downed their glasses in quick gulps and headed into the crowd, huddling close and submitting to the raw excitement of the spectacle. Alex was surprised at how pleasing it was, seeing so many heretofore fictional characters in person (Jon Stewart, futzing with his bow-tie! Rupert Murdoch at a urinal! Janeane Garofalo, smoking a Camel!). When they found their seats—center row, middle back, not far at all from the podium, a good sign—Alex was struck by a sweet, tingling, intoxicating feeling of… what was it?Hopefulness? Hubris? Maybe it was just the proximity to so many fawned-over, sought-after powerful people. He got a chemical jolt of adrenaline just being in their air space, seeing them shift in their seats and scratch their marvelous faces and tug at their tailored collars—they were just people, after all, people not all that different from him. All the success in the room, all the fame, all the confidence and recognition and ego—for this moment, anyway, Alex felt like just being here was to be assimilated, incorporated, sucked into their force fields.
    And the show itself—even that was more exciting than he’d thought possible for what was essentially a glorified TV taping, with an announcer breaking in during commercial breaks to remind everyone to keep smiling, keep clapping, keep up the energy . Ricky Gervais was a genius! And the interpretive dance tribute to the World War II miniseries: actually kind of moving! Alex felt irrationally happy for winners he deemed deserving, of whom there seemed to be a great many, more so than usual, which led to a faint hope that Figgy’s dark-horse oddity might pull an upset.
    Please, Alex thought, please let it happen. Just this once. Let her win.
    The best comedy award came midway through the show, just after a commercial break. Alex knew it was imminent when an ox-shaped guy with a camera on his shoulder came loping up the aisle, crouched down and aimed his lens directly at them. Oh God, he thought: the reaction shot. He squeezed Figgy’s arm. It suddenly occurred to him that his wife might actually flip off the camera when the award went to the lawyer show. “Don’t even sweat this, ’k?” he whispered in her ear. “Just keep smiling.”
    And then it happened. Chris Rock opened the envelope, shook his head, grinned, and announced the winner. It took a second for Alex to realize what he’d said; by the time he rose to his feet, Figgy and the whole Tricks cast and crew were stampeding forward, down the row of seats and into the aisle. After climbingthe steps to the stage, Figgy marched to the front of the crowd and exchanged a