I became a clothes thief to look like my employers. This didn't take long since I was stealing their clothes. I was the cook in the mansion and spent my days in dress-whites. I'd go down to the basement where the racks of men's clothes were kept. There were English shirts, suits and ties. So many that I knew that whenever I helped myself to an outfit it wouldn't be noticed. When I wasn't working I'd parade around my room feeling strangely proud that I looked rich.

Michael, the very English butler, also had a clothes fetish. His was for uniforms, or rather, the men inside them. He'd sit by the stove in his white shirt and black tie, waiting for an upstairs bell to ring, nursing a cup of tea and reading the newspaper over his pince-nez. He was the picture of butler propriety until he'd wink devilishly and say something like, "All of a sudden I have the urge for serge." I was so slow that he had to explain to me that serge was the material used to make the uniforms for Her Majesty's Navy. "Maybe not anymore," he'd say, "but they were when I was growing up. The world has gone to pot, my boy."

In that mansion, being the chef came in somewhere between being someone who the lady of the house could live without, like the poolman, and someone on whom her life depended, like the hairdresser. To the man of the house I was just an extension of his wife's European mannerisms. "Has to have a chef just over from Paris," I once heard him mutter. It was true. I was just over from Paris and the only reason I'd taken a job as a private chef was to save enough money to get started in this country. In Paris I'd been living in an unheated room. Here, there was a Monet on the living room wall.

The wife was one of the world's most successful hostesses. At her table she'd had Hollywood, Washington and European royalty. Between parties the house was an empty stage set and they both were always on diets. She became a vegetarian. He wanted consommé that was "hard as a rock" and Jell-O for dessert. They'd eat in bed and I'd help Michael upstairs with the trays. The man of the house would grumble his thanks. The lady would hardly take her eyes off the giant TV screen in front of the bed. Her hair would invariably be in curlers. She looked a lot different than in her Town and Country cover portrait, which she'd enlarged and hung in the main hallway. Michael would hardly have closed the door when he'd roll his eyes and say, "If people only knew."

Michael needed those parties and dinners. They were his moment to shine. He had worked in many of the richest households in the city and people remembered him fondly from their childhoods. Men who had congenital problems in greeting strangers literally threw their arms over Michael. Nothing pleased him more. It was his little way of differentiating himself from the rest of the party staff: new arrivals, green-card seekers and Spanish speakers. Towards the end of the evening, when everything had gone well and the teams of maids were washing the glasses and the teams of brought-in waiters were serving coffee, Michael would pour a couple of glasses of whatever the guests had been drinking and talk.

There were whole genealogies of the children and the grandchildren of the guests to get through. There was his own past, which sometimes involved being a butler in an English Lord's house and other times being a dancer in London's West End. All the time, while he spoke, he'd be supervising the waiter traffic between the kitchen and the sitting room where the guests were now having coffee. When he saw that they were getting ready to leave he'd say, "Let me go and make sure one of the poor dears doesn't break a leg," and he'd go and supervise the procession of dowagers staggering towards their waiting cars.

I lasted one year at that job and by then I could afford to rent an apartment and buy a car and I got a job at a restaurant. I saw Michael one more time, at the AIDS ward of a hospital. I could hear him before I saw him. His voice was coming down the corridor, instructing a nurse on the right way to make tea. "You heat the pot first, dear." I steadied myself before I saw him. He had lost a lot of weight and had some KS on his face. I apologized for not bringing any candy or flowers but explained that the hospital store was closed. He waved me off and sat me down and held my hand. What was important to him was that I knew the world he wanted to talk about, the world of big parties. "One time I opened the door to this couple who I knew had never been invited before and I was in my tuxedo, of course, and the woman said to me, 'I'm so happy to meet you. I'm Mary so and so.' 'That's very good, Madam,' I said to her, 'I'm Michael the butler'." He smiled at this recollection and I smiled and nodded to please him.

At his funeral there were many old maids and cooks and housemen from all the biggest houses in town but there was not one employer, one society lady or gentleman. I felt a terrible anger, which I knew was based on snobbery, but only because I knew what having a member of society present at his funeral would have meant to Michael. Afterwards, we took up a few tables at a nearby coffee shop and we spoke about Michael and someone said his favorite line, "You yelled, Madam?" and we all cracked up. As I walked away I took off my stolen English tie and I thought of throwing it away but instead I left it tied around a parking meter for someone else.