“I’d been thinking you might try to track down that cameraman.”

“Oh, I did. He’s dead. He must have been in his forties when I worked with him, so—a drag but not totally surprising. Anyway, the boyfriend’s name popped into my head and for some reason I seemed to be seeing it handwritten in ink on cartridge paper, and I remembered this letter he’d written me. Julia had told him about our affair, and he wanted to meet.”

“You?”

“Yes, me.”

“To fight a duel?”

Marco chuckled, filling our glasses.

“To discuss the situation, see what sort of person I was, what my intentions were.”

“That must have been quite a meeting!”

“It didn’t happen. I don’t think I even answered him. I imagine I dismissed him in my mind as a chump who didn’t merit the effort of a reply from someone as busy and grand and generally superior as myself. No doubt I was further puffed up by the fact that I was shagging his girlfriend. That’s the way I was in those days—very arrogant, very contemptuous. I also took it for granted I was going to be massively famous one day and that biographers were going to be beating a path to my door, so I kept every scrap that had anything to do with my life or career. Every press cutting, every contract—everything short of bus tickets, basically, and probably some of those, too. And certainly every letter. I stopped after I moved here, but I’d packed it all up in my parents’ attic when I left London, and no one’s touched it since.”

“Nice!” I said.

A busboy cleared our appetizers and the waitress appeared with our main courses: mine was a pasta dish with chorizo and clams in a bright orange sea urchin sauce.

“How were your appetizers, gentlemen?”

“They were extremely rich,” Marco said.

She looked upset.

“But we like rich,” he told her.

“Oh, good. Me too.”

“Then we’ll consider allowing you to join our club.”

She gave a laugh with a flirty ripple to it that seemed genuine enough, even allowing for the transactional aspect of these exchanges. Marco gazed after her for a moment as she left; not leering, but with an impassive reflexiveness, as if he were unaware of it. There was nothing of the aging roué about him, except, in some lights, a slight antique coloration in his teeth, which were also crowded and uneven, like mine: little crooked monuments to 1970s English dentistry.

“So the letter,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You found it?”

“Yes. Here, you can read it.”

He brought up a picture of the letter on his phone. It was written in a neat, legible hand on unlined writing paper, with the date in small roman numerals at the top. I scrolled through it.