“Yes, of course,” our hostess said. She looked up from the Livingstons to the rest of the room, in search of a writer for the young girl. She saw Mick coming. He moved like a slow but dedicated drone, propellers turning, thwup, thwup, thwup, as he locked on to his target. Madelaine reacted—in her ignorance—as if the situation was completely real. Horndog husband headed for a girl—to make it far worse, one of an inappropriate age—in front of a whole room. She took Allison by the arm and steered her in an arc that took her away from Mick’s straight-ahead trajectory. I tagged along, a dutiful uncle, with the odd chore of keeping men from being inappropriate with the teenage girl I was temporarily responsible for.

“There’s Beinhart,” Maddie said to me. “You already know him, but I’ll introduce Allison.”

“Call me Allie,” my niece said.

“Maddie,” Madelaine said to her. They were getting along very well. Beinhart was standing with a couple of people I didn’t know, his wife was off in the next room, talking to another small gaggle. They were laughing, lightly and pleasantly. It made me wish I had a life like that. Maddie made the introductions, mentioning Wag the Dog. Allison said, “I think I’ve heard of that,” clearly meaning that she hadn’t.

“That’s fine,” Beinhart said, seeming genuinely pleased that she didn’t know the film, let alone the book.

Then Mick came over. Speaking to Beinhart, sort of over Allie’s shoulder, he said, “Did you ever get that movie off the ground, that script you were trying to sell?” It wasn’t a real question. Mick knew—or guessed to a point of certainty—that the writer hadn’t gotten the film made or even sold the script. What he was really saying was, “I have the money, I could have financed it, but I didn’t, and you don’t have the money.”

A meet-the-writers fundraiser was not the appropriate venue to play rich-man-taunting-the-artist. Maddie did her best to transform it into something genuinely conversational.

“What project was that?”

“You remember,” Mick said, “the one about the cop, the black cop. Named Winston Churchill.”

“It was Walker,” Beinhart said.

My mind spoke silently to myself. It said, What the fuck?

“His name in real life was Winston Walker. I didn’t use it in the script.”

“Why not?” Allison said, “Doesn’t Hollywood love true stories, or based on a true story, or even kind of, sort of like a true story?”

I said, more pointedly, “You knew Winston?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I met him, oh, a long time ago. When you were in Europe.”

“Back in the late eighties?”