“We’d love to hear about them,” Marco said with his quick, raffish friendliness. The two had some jokey back-and-forth about the absurd ingredients of some of the drinks and Marco talked me into getting an artisanal gin decoction with pickle brine and smashed strawberries. He ordered two bottles of wine, to be opened right away, whipping out a pair of reading glasses to examine the menu and tucking them back in an inside pocket the instant he was done.
He was evidently his old self again. The Brexit vote had happened while he was in London, and he described how he’d taken advantage of the collapsing pound to go on a spree at Selfridges where he’d picked up some new outfits, including the dandyish rust-colored cashmere jacket he was wearing. (I don’t mean to portray him as an opportunist, just to convey the unguarded tone we relaxed into when it was only the two of us.)
“Look . . .” He opened the jacket to show me a silk lining patterned with bright fishing lures.
“Very nice.”
Just then the waitress came back with our cocktails.
“Is that a Ted Baker?” she asked.
“Good guess!”
“I love Ted Baker.” She ran her thumb over the fabric with quick, easy familiarity. “It’s gorgeous.”
We ordered our food and got straight into the details of his London trip. I’m always interested in the minutiae of such stories and I pushed Marco to remember everything he could. He seemed to enjoy being pushed, even when the details didn’t reflect well on him. Most people use self-deprecation as a clever way to look good, but the stories Marco told against himself seemed genuinely intended to make him look bad, and I had some respect for that.
The idea that had come to him that night in our guest room arose from our conversation earlier in the day. It had to do with Julia’s university boyfriend—the apparent cause of her change of heart in Marco’s bedroom.
“His name came back to me,” Marco said. “Gerald Woolley.”
“I know that name. Isn’t he an architectural critic?”
“He may be now. Yes, I think that was his subject. Don’t tell me he’s become famous . . .”
“He’s fairly well-known, in that world.”
“Your dad knew him?”
“Yeah, but he was banned from our house after praising someone he shouldn’t have. Some postmodernist, no doubt . . .”
Marco laughed—the embattled lives of the men and women of our parents’ generation, with their lofty principles constantly requiring indignant defense, was a source of amusement to us both.
“Well, I suddenly remembered he’d written to me.”
“A letter?”
“Yes an actual letter! Remember those? I’d totally forgotten about it till that night at your house. I was lying in bed scrabbling through the past for the zillionth time in search of any scrap of evidence that might help prove my version of the events—”