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him.
    Michael smiled at her and spoke as softly as she (how sensitive was that?). “There is a get-out-of-jail-free card for people with money and influence. If you stole all the silverware here, I bet your dad could pay the owners to make it go away, and you would get off scot-free.” (I was glad Finn had managed to inveigle a tour of the kitchen and wasn’t there just then. He might have something to say about that and it would have ruined the flow.) “Although”—Michael laughed now and spoke normally—“who would want to risk getting trapped in the Italian justice system? Swear you won’t steal the silverware.”
    Snow clamped her mouth shut and refused to speak. That made us laugh.
    The next thing you knew, all the dads drove up or flew in to plead for their sons’ futures. Don’t expel them. Isn’t it sad that his roommates had fathers to fight for them and Michael didn’t? They threw Michael under the bus. He was, they claimed, the ringleader.
    “Why did you do it?” the dean asked him.
    Michael made up his excuse on the spot. “I was doing research for a play.”
    “I’d like to read it.”
    “It’s not finished.”
    “Leave it with Marjorie,” said the dean. Marjorie was his secretary.
    “This is where a lie can lead you,” I told Snow, although Michael said if he hadn’t been terrified, he would have burst out laughing.
    Imagine, this was our first night in Italy. I thought, if all the meals are this exciting and stimulating for Snow, it will be hard to go home.
    “Time to cover your ears, Snow,” said Michael, doing it for her. “I got high and wrote a play in three days.” He took his hands off. “Did you hear what I said?”
    Snow nodded.
    “I don’t believe you,” said Michael.
    “He ate three cantaloupes while he was writing it,” said Lizzie. “That’s my favorite part. The only part that’s true.”
    “She always says that,” said Michael. “Ignore her.”
    As instructed, he left the play with the dean’s secretary. For weeks he awaited his fate. His roommates had been transferred to other rooms to save them from further contamination. I can only imagine the terror and isolation. “It was a wickedly harsh March. I’ll never forget how barren the campus looked,” he said. Finally he got a summons.
    It was sleeting that day and he slid and skidded his way, nearly falling, and then dripped all over the dean’s Chinese carpet. The dean said, “I sent the play to Martin Loomis, and he wants to produce it.”
    “Who’s Martin Loomis?” said Michael.
    “Look him up,” said the dean. “You’re done at Yale but you have a future.”
    “A year later his play opened on Broadway and won the Pulitzer Prize. You’re dining with a very famous playwright, Snow.”
    I had Googled Michael before we took this trip to be better prepared to talk to him than I had been in London and had read the reviews of
Dealing
. “The reviews compared you to David Mamet,” I said.
    “He’s better than Mamet,” said Lizzie, so quickly I worried I had said something wrong. “And he’s a novelist too.”
    “Mamet’s play
Glengarry Glen Ross
was also about salesmen,” I said.
    “The men in my play sold pot, not real estate,” said Michael. “Out of their Yale dorm.”
    “Michael’s play has broader themes,” said Lizzie.
    “I’m sure,” I said.
    “About how the rich close ranks against the poor, and WASPs against Jews. And he gave himself a girlfriend in the play who wanted him and not the snotty guys with the pretentious names,” said Lizzie.
    “I wasn’t in the play,” said Michael.
    “Excuuuussssse me.” Lizzie threw her napkin over her face. “The character of Peter was entirely fictional.” She lifted up her napkin to speak, which made Snow and me laugh. Then Michael clapped his hands over Snow’s ears again. “Once the play came out, all I had to do was show up and I got laid. There’s nothing like a hit.”
    The most fascinating part to me was that, at the