The footage in question, of a young Catholic woman being tarred and feathered, had no direct connection with the private scene that occurred, or didn’t occur, in Marco’s hotel room a few hours after he filmed it, but a certain affinity exists between the two (or does in my mind), and I found myself thinking of both, as I listened to the tweed-clad woman at the lectern speaking about rape and memory, imitation and repetition, while Marco sat nodding, frowning, jabbing at ragged chicken bones on his plate, tilting his face this way and that in his usual unguarded fashion; every word seemingly triggering some reflex of warm approval or restless annoyance.

2

2

HIS “ORDEAL” (as he’d taken to calling it) began with, of all things, a private message on Twitter. He’d never used Twitter for private communication. For that matter, he’d never tweeted. The only reason he had a Twitter account at all was to search for tweets about himself (he told me this with an only mildly embarrassed grin).

“@Marcorosedale,” the message read, “desperately need to get hold of you. Can you contact me asap?”

The sender, a Mel Sauer, included his email address, the server for which was a British national newspaper. I’ll call it the Messenger.

It depressed Marco a little to think he’d dropped so far off the map that a major newspaper couldn’t track down his phone number. But the message itself seemed to him to bode well. He wondered whether it might have something to do with his current project, a pilot for a series combining travelogue and crime reportage, provisionally titled A Crime and a Place. The idea—by his own admission more gimmicky than anything he’d tried before—was to attend trials at county courthouses across the United States, and look at the crimes through the lens of local cultural issues. “I’m thinking Artisanal murder for the tagline,” he’d joked, “or else Marco Rosedale sells out for one last gig . . .” Somewhat to his surprise, early reaction to a rough cut of a domestic violence trial in Maine had been positive, and he was already in talks with cable companies and independent financiers. Was it possible, he wondered, that the Messenger had got wind of the project and wanted to run a puff piece of some kind? Marco didn’t like to think he cared about such things any longer, but he admitted feeling a minor stir of excitement. It was years since he’d had any serious attention from the press.

He made himself wait a couple of days, and then sent a laconic note with his number in Brooklyn.

The phone rang almost immediately.

“Marco? Mel Sauer here. So good of you to get back to me. We’re running an excerpt from a memoir by one of your old girlfriends, and I wanted to have a quick word with you about the contents. Take your temperature, as it were.”