ON THE DAY I roared down the 880 to meet Anita, Isaac Snider, marvelous distraction though he’d been, was relegated to the back of my mind. As I swung through the bosomy yellow hills on the San Francisco Peninsula, I kept remembering the intensity of adolescence, how everything Anita had said or left unsaid could send pin prickles along my flesh.

I parked my Honda in a venture capitalist office lot with a view: yellow headlands, highway curve. Buildings down here were invariably beige or brown or other neutral or neutered colors, earthlike tones that blended into the landscape, as though to normalize Silicon Valley wealth, as though to pretend there was something natural about such vertiginous valuations, such sums passing through term sheets every day.

Anita had asked me to meet her at a restaurant in a posh hotel called the Sonora. She stayed alone in an apartment in the terrible suburban purgatory that was the peninsula; she’d moved there when she was working at Galadriel, she said, which was headquartered on moneyed Sand Hill Road, and she hadn’t yet bothered to relocate. “Sit at the far end of the bar,” she’d said. “Beneath the TVs. It’s quieter.” The lobby was all smooth tile floors, high stone ceilings. An austere chandelier with iron limbs dripped from its apex. Above the bar hung bare bulbs, Californian minimalism. The walls looked to be made of redwood. The bartender wore a blue corduroy vest over a navy plaid button-down. Above him, in a half-hearted gesture at proper bar culture, two screens showed the Giants playing. I sat.

Around me: older women, several surgically enhanced, wearing cashmere sleeveless sweaters and tight suede skirts and leather pants that hugged their lifted asses; men in T-shirts beneath tossed-on sport coats, flat sneakers, dark jeans—conspicuously casual. A pruny-skinned man in a Cardinal red Stanford hat threw an arm around a younger woman in a corner booth. “You know a little guy,” he said into the woman’s cocked ear, loud enough that I could hear him, “named Mark Zuckerberg?” She sipped her wine, tolerated him. “I knew him when!”

“Neil!”

Anita stood in front of me for a dreadfully long moment. She wore a rose-red silky blouse with a ruffle interrupting her breasts, black pleated dress pants, and silver earrings.

“You look exactly the same,” she said. There was her unblinking gaze. And there, too, was some reverberation of my old desire—to make those eyes look at nothing but me.

“You don’t.”