Katey Kontent
Katey Kontent is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. She tells a tale that looks back upon life in bloom of her youthful exuberance from the perspective of middle age. Thus, she is a 40-something woman recollecting her life as a 20-something woman. After an initial introduction to the older Katey, the reader is tossed back to the waning years of the Great Depression.
This is not a bleak story of people surviving the Dust Bowl, however. Katey recalls New Year’s Eve 1937 in the exciting milieu of New York City society high life and jazz club lowlifes. It is a portrait of how the economic misery of the time threw people together who might not otherwise have ever crossed paths.
It is the fateful decision to enter a jazz club with her best friend and roommate Eve Ross that brings on the forces of random fate. One is hard-pressed to enjoy a jazz club for long without alcohol and for two people the countdown for funds running dry is even shorter. It is at this crucial point in the economics of New Year’s partying that fate drops a joker into the deck in the form of the newest patron entering the club. He is a handsome man a monogrammed gold lighter.
Eve Ross
Like Katie, Eve Ross finds herself in the Big Apple on the dawn of 1938 as a transplanted Midwesterner. Eve has a striking sort of beauty far more suited to the sophistication of the big city than the cornfed towns on the prairie.
The stranger with the lighter who changes everything is noticed by both Eve and Katey, but Eve is quick to place first dibs. Katey is content to let her because Eve can be a bit aggressive with her negative emotions when someone attempts to stifle her. A more upscale venue to celebrate New Year’s Eve would have been possible for her and Katey, for instance, had Eve not rejected financial assistance from her wealthy father.
Although Eve calls first dibs on the handsome new arrival, it soon becomes apparent that he has eyes for her friend. Katey is not wrong about Eve. She does have a prickly personality capable of turning very dark on a very thin dime. The whole idea of Eve and Katey forming an odd sort of threesome with the handsome stranger seems terribly misplaced from the beginning because of this element of instability. As the Russian proprietor of their favorite haunt warns Katey, two women sharing a close friendship with one man never works for long.
Tinker Grey
The fellow with the monogrammed gold lighter is claimed by Eve, but it quickly becomes obvious that there is chemistry crackling in the air between him and Katey. For a while, the three manage to stave off the warnings of the Russian, but he is not wrong. In fact, he will turn out to be very effective at peering into the future.
This fateful meeting in the jazz club which turns into a frolicking platonic threesome enjoying the high life fueled by the wealth which bought Tinker his fancy gold lighter. Mr. Grey’s wild ride that ends as close to tragically fatal as one would ever hope to get. There are no actual deaths, but Eve winds up so disfigured that she will require extensive reconstructive surgery. Alas, for poor Tinker Grey, there is no doctor in the world who can heal the scars of guilt that comes with accepting such horrible responsibility.
Tinker’s guilt has profound effects on the dynamic of the uneasy relationship among the threesome. It is because of the emotional consequences of the aftermath of the accident and not inherent emotions he has been experiencing that Tinker devotes himself to Eve. They eventually marry, but the happily-ever-after is not part of the deck that fate dealt on that New Year’s Eve. As for his attraction to Katey, that fire has never died, but attempts to rekindle depend upon secrets being kept. Not to mention men being kept.
Mrs. Anne Grandyn
Anne Grandyn initially introduces herself as Tinker Gray’s godmother. She has the grace of a ballerina past her prime, prefers Virginia Woolf to Charles Dickens, and wears expensive gaudy emerald earrings without ever checking to make sure they are still in firmly in her possession on her head. And so, she remains the godmother for most of the book.
It is not until about three-fourths of the way through that Anne is revealed as the true source of the wealth which not only bought Tinker’s gold lighter, but funded his wild ride which put both Katey and Eve on the road to devastation. The revelation that Tinker is a sexual plaything bought and paid for by Anne and that his entire history has been one constructed of deception shifts the foundation of Katey’s relationship with him for at least the third time, if not necessarily the last.
Anne’s interest in Tinker, however, is made clear to be purely sexual with no unpleasant collateral damage caused by actual emotional attachment. She also has enough temptation to entice him that she feels little threat from Katey, one way or the other. To be clear, however, it is not really the sexuality of Tinker that is the motiving force for Anne. She is a woman whose real sexual attraction is not to men or women, but the power of manipulating both men and women to do what she desires. As Katey will eventually come to learn herself.
