The 24-Karat Party

So it's a cancer story and a gold story and a money story and an economy story and most of all, it's a party story. Rhodes is running around, greeting her guests, who are all carrying little zipper bags or old shopping bags filled with tiny boxes. There is absolutely no shame here, among well-off friends. You don't want it anymore? Sell it. It's not real gold? Have another glass of champagne.

One man (he didn't want to be named) waits patiently while Thomas weighs his old wedding rings (plural) and an old pocket watch given to him by one of his ex-wives, a watch that had been handed down in her family. "It doesn't mean anything to me, really, so why not?" he says. His longtime girlfriend is watching all this, with screaming delight. He gets a check for $1,218.29 -- mostly for the watch. Then he seems a little bit sad.

"I told you," he says to the girlfriend. "She never gave cheap things."

* * *

How much of our history is built around the often tragic quest for gold? Eventually we got some, and not all of it was treasure. At a gold party it might seem like we got too much of it, or too much of the wrong kind -- little pieces of it, or things that are gold plated, or less-than-charming charms.

That the price of gold is where it is right now should be telling us something. Some people are hoarding it, waiting for economic apocalypse. You have to say this for gold: It can sit at the bottom of the sea for centuries and come up looking great. It just doesn't go with fashion right now.

"Is this the worst thing you've ever seen?" says Brian K. Childs, who came to the party with his wife, Loree, and is slapping an atrocious, crusted-nuggety gold watch on his wrist. It was a gift, in 1991, from the late dictator of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko. Childs worked for a lobbying group. All the junior staffers on that trip got a watch from Mobutu, in a tacky-looking maroon case. The room screams with laughter. Childs takes a long sip of his martini. "I found it going through some boxes. I can't believe I still have it."

"Can I scrape it?" Thomas asks, picking up a small file.

Childs rolls his eyes. Of course you can scrape it.

The screen on the meter never lies: NOT GOLD.

"Oooooh! Noooh!" moans the entire room, in raucous faux-letdown.

* * *

It takes January Thomas three full hours to assay everyone's gold. She never gets up for a potty break, and she never finishes her first glass of wine until everyone has gone home. Tonight she's written 21 checks for a grand total of $10,352.89 -- about 75 percent of what it is valued on the day's gold market close. Of the remaining 25 percent, 15 percent goes to Paige Rhodes's cancer walk. The rest goes home with Thomas. She's back on a plane to Michigan the next morning, and the two Ziploc freezer bags full of gold, more than a kilo, head to her via FedEx, overnight, insured.

Back home, Thomas will separate the gold from cheap gems, teeth, plated-steel chains and the innards of watches. She will feed each and every piece of it into a bubbling urn. When there's enough of it, and when it cools, Thomas gets the gold bars to a bank, pronto, to keep up with the price she paid per ounce. Gold could go way down or gold could go up and up. That is how things have always worked, in the most elemental economy around.