Cooking is not something I can talk about, or care about, really. I don’t even much care what I eat (as long as it isn’t liver or cauliflower or Brussels sprouts). But the food that day was a revelation. We had corn fritters still sizzling from the pan and with a spicy sauce of some kind of tomato and horseradish. A big messy sandwich full of pork cooked so soft it was almost buttery and a tangy sauce and crunchy greens and little crispy potatoes.

While we ate, all sorts of people came up to our table, all of them indignantly commenting on the black eyes and the Comet Club raid. I didn’t catch all the names when Terrence introduced me. Some were his cousins, or second cousins, his friends from Jefferson High School, his colleagues at the Challenger, or just people he knew. He had an easy, noisy camaraderie with each of them, and a capacious memory for the details of their lives.

“Do you know why my grandmother was so supportive of the NAACP?” I asked, after he had introduced me with a note of pride as Julia Greene’s granddaughter. “Or how she connected with them?”

“How would I know?”

“I just wondered. The day her will was read in the lawyer’s office, I just assumed she had supported the NAACP to offend Leon to his conservative core. But now, here with you, and what Mr. Branch said, and Ruby saying Julia used to bring me here when I was a kid, I think she must have truly believed in what she was doing. I wish I could ask her.”

“You still miss her?”

“I do. She and Leon were really my parents, and I was heartbroken when they split up.”

“Even if you got to go to Paris?”

“Even if. Paris was wonderful, though, and I’d love to go back, but now I have a job.”

“Yeah, what exactly does an agent do? I didn’t quite hear you at the Comet Club, the music was too loud.”

So I told him how the Granville Agency was an intermediary. “I’m like the feeder in the zoo,” I said, “the guy who walks around with the bucket full of meat and throws it at the lions, and the bucket of bananas for the monkeys, and the bucket full of palm fronds for the giraffes. Occasionally I wear a pith helmet. It’s a jungle out there.” I told him the story of how I went independent, dumping Rakoff/Holtz’s scripts in the LA River. I had long since shaped the story into something amusing, leaving out the part where Irv pressed his dick up against me.