A room with a phew!

I KEEP a handful of gold-tipped mauve cigarettes on my coffee table. They fan out from a fluted glass like exotic reeds. There's an ashtray too, and a box of matches. I don't offer the cigarettes to anyone; but the display itself tells visitors that they are welcome to indulge.

Not long ago my husband and I gave a party for about 90 people. There was a buffet in the dining room. Pony-tailed helpers twirled with trays of canapes. A pianist played jazz in the living room. A bartender dispensed hard drinks and soft ones in the sunroom.

Beyond this sunroom is a little office with a table and three chairs. I had moved the cigarettes and their works there, out of concern for guests who might be bothered by other people's exhalations. As my smoking friends arrived - they number eight women and two men - I advised each in turn that the weeds were in the office.

This had two unexpected results. One: A few guests objected to the advertised presence of the Smoking Room. These were people who, however offended, would have held their tongues if I'd hired a belly dancer to supplement the pianist; they would have managed to overlook target practice in the backyard. Yet they were outspokenly horrified at my small courtesy.

Two: the Smoking Room - unventilated, awkward to reach - was inordinately popular. The grateful smokers used it from time to time, often accompanied by the nonsmoker they were talking to when they felt the familiar yearning. Other guests ventured in unescorted, and stayed.

One man, a nonsmoker, spent most of the party in one of the chairs, the conversation swirling around him. I made sure that the ponytails kept him supplied with wine. Whenever I poked my head into the Smoking Room I noted that the guests there were animated, just as they were in the rest of the house; that laughter joyously rose, though no more ringingly than elsewhere; and that the air was aromatic, if cloudy.

In the Smoking Rooms of great 19th-century houses, men in velvet jackets talked about politics and horses and women. By the middle of the 20th century, though, "Smoking Room" referred to the section of a public facility where smoking was expressly allowed. In a library it was the vaulted reading room. In train stations it was the waiting area. In hotels it was the lobby: Beside every chair stood a metal ashtray whose thick stem rose from a weighted bulb.

My cramped Smoking Room is what those grand halls have come down to. And at other parties, smokers usually have to step outside. My friends have become familiar with back stoops and driveways. They are mostly light users. One smokes five cigarettes a week. Another smokes four a day (the late pope, it was rumored, smoked only three). They know the danger of tobacco, which can cause cancer; they know as well the sweet usefulness of the nicotine residing in the tobacco: a habit-forming alkaloid that clarifies, soothes, and heightens, all at the same time.

Smokers are the first to say that smoking in excess is not good for you. Anything in excess is not good for you, righteous indignation included.

Every one of us can figure out what the smokers in my Smoking Room were getting, though we might describe it diversely - they were getting a chance to enjoy their recreation, gratify their habit, surrender to their addiction, indulge their vice, and practice their perversion. But what were the nonsmokers getting, to make them linger in that blue haze? Perhaps, in a passive way, they too found clarity and elevation. Or perhaps they were sniffing a particular blend of wariness and tolerance: wariness that raises an eyebrow at conventional wisdom, tolerance that gives people with unpopular pleasures a little room.

Edith Pearlman is a short story writer who lives in Brookline.