Against every precaution to the contrary, Thorny makes good

Probably as some Olympian act of vengeance, to which satire is so chronically vulnerable, fate has inundated poor Thornhill in gazillions for a harmless little app he improvised for Betty Commilfaux's annual Prime Number costume ball, March 3, for the benefit of one of her charities, the Hospice for Extra Men in Bedford. Dressed in the terraced clavicle app, the riparian bicep app, commercial waistband app, and indeed every giddy app commonly associated with the pec-pad culture of our time, Thorny threw together the iSee app for those who don't care to be where they are. 

Essentially a features-correcting app for everyone subject to society-page voyeurs, it sustains an Hommes Vogue smile by screening Lubitsch within the vision field of a wide range of eyewear, contact lenses included. Responding to the incongruous news of entrepreneurial glory, Thorny pledged the whole polysaturated pile to Betty's foundation, along with his latest Barnett Newman acquisition, Your Arteries on Fox, Your Arteries on Fact. Realising, at the same time, the implicit hostility Betty would detect in any gesture upstaging her at her own gala, he made over a life estate in the income from his endowment to himself, avoiding any taint of self-interest thereby. 

With the announcement that absolutely everyone in the Euro zone had already placed orders for the iSee app, Thorny promised an update permitting screenings of one's own works, with an override for online file sharing beneath the radar of copyright. Denying that this would deal an obliterating blow to Facebook, Thorny pointed to their priceless reserves in blackmail and espionage, and averred that in any case it would only be highly discourteous and preposterously paranoiac toward any occasion at Betty Commilfaux's, to infer the slightest effectuality from its consequences. With this, he returned to Betty's table, in time for the consommé.

The remainder of iSee's début evening unfolded with almost storybook delight, such was everyone's rapture to find Betty and Thorny so reconciled to their respective realities behind their own lenses. Colliding waiters, terrines of foie gras in revived flight, captured the innocence of Nicky Hoult on a stray cube of ice, with Betty's sommelier only properly wistful at the last pour of the Mouton '45. Who, then, would guess, as Garbo reminisced to Douglas about the fate of her Polish lancer in Ninotchka, that Thorny might be scanning the scene as Betty offered her cheek for a peck?