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time it was produced, Michael could never talk about the inspiration for the play, its origins, getting kicked out of Yale, because he had to protect the dean. He was sly about it. All he ever admitted to was being a college dropout because the dean knew they were dealing other drugs too (Michael didn’t say what), and the police should have been notified. If anyone had really looked into the scandal, like a reporter, Yale would look bad. Instead the entire incident was swept under the Yale Chinese carpet.
    “Several years after the play closed, he started telling people,” said Lizzie. “Informally. At dinners. It wasn’t news but it was a great story. We love stories. I’ll drink to stories.”
    She raised her glass, and Michael remembered to include Snow, clinking her glass of Orangina first.
    Then Lizzie said, and this was sweet, “Let’s drink to your wives and how well they dress.”
    Finn wasn’t happy with the wine, it was tannic and too robust,a lot to be wrong with a red, and he insisted we get another before that toast, and then Michael said, “It might be interesting to be married to a woman who wears baggy clothes because then you’re the only one who knows the body underneath.”
    “That’s the thinking behind the burka,” said Lizzie.
    I did envy their repartee.

Lizzie
    M ICHAEL ENCHANTED AT DINNER , regaling Taylor and Snow with his boot out of Yale and into theater and fame, which became the monkey on his back. He left that part out. He left out the curse of early success. He never acknowledges what he has in common with Bret Easton Ellis. “Who is that?” my friend Geralyn said when I compared them. Geralyn is a therapist who lives in Berkeley and who helped scrape me off the pavement after this trip. She reads everything from
The Jew in the Lotus
to Donna Tartt and she listens religiously to
Fresh Air
, but she doesn’t know who Bret Easton Ellis is. Writers like Ellis never leave New York City (well, in his case, unless they move to Los Angeles to further their disintegration) because the only people who know who they are live in Manhattan.
    Oh, the cynicism. The spite. Mine, I mean. The world in which Michael and I lived. I was jealous of Michael. That was new, and hard to admit, the result of my own shelf life expiring earlier than expected.
    That first night, with Michael at his most disarming, I had the happiest sense of feeling free. Carefree. Finn was relentlessly naughty. I came out of the
bagno delle donne
and he was waiting. “Let’s take off.”
    “We can’t.”
    He blocked the way with his arm. I ducked under. “You are bad,” I said. “Bad. First of all, you’re playing with me.”
    “What’s second of all?”
    “You are full of shit. And you know I never cheat.”
    Even that felt good. The flirting was a way to reclaim something I’d lost, a sense of possibility, I think. It was harmless, just the ridiculous way we relate or don’t. (Although I do vacillate on that—what it was, what it became, and my own guilt.) I was happily adrift in a sea of other, surrounded by chatter I didn’t understand, menus I couldn’t read, unfamiliar streets wending past destinations unknown. I was severed from hope and despair. From e-mail and texting. I’d sworn it off. Tweeting too and Instagram, not that it mattered. I had only four hundred followers. I felt pretty, all in black, an off-the-shoulder Donna Karan sweater, and for the first time in a long while I felt competent because I was the one with the maps. I am good at maps. Maps and where to eat are things I excel at. I had purpose.
    Michael is a terrific raconteur, a skill he’d honed over the years. In his retellings, he plays with the facts, and I loved that. I found his stories as much fun the twentieth time as the first. He was dealing not simply pot but cocaine, he sometimes admits, and in other retellings, it wasn’t sleeting, it was spring, and he had only two roommates, and when he answered that secondsummons