Zelmo’s costume and manner had initially disguised the fact that he was, like me, and like Jared Orthman, in his thirties. It was the second time in a long day I’d been forced to see that my dress and affect, contrasted with peers in other professions, was less that of a grown, employed man than of a gas-station attendant or homeless person. The scruffy credibility my gear signified in my native habitat was lost on the Jareds and Zelmos, my antique wire-frame glasses only suggesting I couldn’t afford contacts. Los Angeles held this lesson around every corner, I suspected. Berkeley, still in its dream bubble of the sixties, never did.

The wine arrived, and Zelmo tasted it. “That’s the one,” he proclaimed. Then he confided in me specially: “You’ll love this.” Apparently the son wouldn’t be allowed to float in a funk through the meal. I required winning over.

My father sat beside me, separated from Zelmo by Francesca. Inserted between Zelmo and myself sat Zelmo’s date, Leslie Cunningham. That Leslie in her gray suit perfectly resembled an actress playing a legal intern on a certain television show didn’t prevent Zelmo’s announcing that she actually was a legal intern, one who worked in Zelmo’s firm. At Bongiorno’s we were past irony’s county line. I didn’t trouble myself to wonder what nestled behind the trim tailoring; I refused to desire Zelmo’s woman. In Berkeley I wouldn’t have glanced at her, I told myself. She’d have been a bank teller, an office manager, just another style-deaf California blonde. I also didn’t trouble wondering what she was doing on Zelmo’s arm, figuring the best things in life are free, but, as well, you can leave that to the birds and bees.

The women on either side of Zelmo bubbled along on his stream. My father sat in grave silence. I suppose we made two of a kind, only he’d earned his supper by two decades of service to the field. I was expected to at least act impressed and grateful. It was Abraham’s trademark, I’d learned at the panel, that he wouldn’t.

The sommelier filled our glasses. I had mine to my lips when Zelmo said: “A toast.”

“To you!” said Francesca. “Your generosity!”

Zelmo shook his head. “I have a toast. When I invited Abe to be ForbiddenCon 7’s artist guest of honor, I could have hoped the man would be as wonderful as his work. He is. But how could I have known he’d bring along a beautiful, magical lady! Francesca and Abraham, your story touches me. To have found one another, so late in life.” Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the table’s center. “To the human heart! ” Diners at other tables glanced to see what the matter was.

We clinked, a plate of fried calamari was set down, and the celebrated couple fell to some low squabbling. Zelmo put his arm across Leslie Cunningham’s shoulders and leaned to face me. “So how was it growing up in the home of the great man?”

I’m sure the look on my face was awful, and Zelmo said, “You don’t have to answer that. Abraham’s a tough bastard. That’s the only way anything gets done in this world. Too few people understand what toughness is. Nobody back at that hotel has any idea.” He laughed. “Leslie here doesn’t know why I bother running the convention year after year. She wouldn’t set foot in a place like that. Isn’t that right?”

“I don’t like science fiction,” she obliged.

“Well, I grew up loving it, honey. I didn’t discriminate. Star Wars, Star Trek, I loved it all. Abraham wouldn’t want to hear it, but it’s true. Later, I developed taste. That’s how it happens, Les-it develops, like film. And in the great men of the field I saw the same toughness that got me where I am. Only nobody pays your father six hundred thou a year-do they?”

“No,” I agreed, just to kick him loose again.

“I wanted to give something back. So I created ForbiddenCon. It’s my puppy. Seven years. You think I need this, dealing with the committee, those types? They hate me but they need me. A night like this is what makes it worthwhile.” He was still making certain I knew he mostly despised his puppy.

“Why ForbiddenCon?” I asked.

“You’ll find this hard to believe, but ours is the classiest of the conventions. Real talent goes begging at a majority of these things. Your father, he’d be pearls before swine.”

“I mean why the name? What’s forbidden?”

“It stands for things hidden, occult, revealed. The rare, the taboo, the seldom seen. Elusive or neglected wisdom. Acquired tastes, like caviar, or single-malt scotch.”

“I see.”

“Also it’s a reference to Forbidden Planet, the greatest science-fiction film bar none. Many people would catch that implication.”

“Ah.”

“I go all out. You think Fred Vundane has been to a convention in the last twenty years? He couldn’t afford the badge to get in, let alone the plane ticket. I had him flown out here, just for the privilege of Abe saying he never read the book.”

“A painful moment,” I suggested.

Zelmo waved his hand. “A man like your father should have whatever he wants.”

I couldn’t disagree, but I wasn’t sure Vundane’s public shaming had been high on the list.

“What do you do?” asked Leslie, leaping into the breach.

Zelmo took charge of this, too. “Dylan’s a writer,” he said proudly. “A journalist.”

“I write about music,” I said. “Lately I package collections for Remnant Records.”

I gazed into Leslie’s blue, stupefied eyes. I wished to have met her in a singles bar on my last night on earth, not in this moronic conversation.

“Remnant’s a reissue label. I put together collections on various themes, write the liner notes, stuff like that.”

“Give us an example,” said Zelmo, gesturing with his wineglass munificently, as though if I said the right words he’d whip out his checkbook and bankroll something. Again I was pitching.

“Well, The Falsetto Box is one you might have seen. It got some press. Four CDs of, you know, the history of falsetto soul-Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Holman. And some unexpected stuff. Van Morrison. Prince.”

“We missed that,” said Zelmo, speaking for Leslie. “What’s another one?”

“Some of it’s pretty gimmicky,” I admitted. “Remnant has sort of a novelty slant. So, uh, one example is we did a disc called Your So-Called Friends -all the songs that have that phrase.”

“I don’t understand,” said Leslie flatly.

“It’s just a vernacular phrase that shows up in different lyrics- so-called friends. Like, you and your so-called friends. Elvis sings it in ‘High Heel Sneakers,’ Gladys Knight in ‘Come See About Me,’ Albert King in ‘Don’t Burn Down the Bridge,’ and so on. It’s like a meme, a word virus that carries a certain idea or emotion…” I trailed off, humiliated.

Our entrées were set in front of us. “I’ll want to hear more about this,” Zelmo warned, wagging a finger at me.

But the lawyer was too busy presiding over the women’s meals, and I slipped his bonds for the time being. Instead I turned to my father, and over our twin plates of spaghetti and meatballs-had Abraham and I had the same instinct, to deflate the pomposity of Bongiorno’s list of specials with the downscale entrée?-we at last shared a moment of privacy.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“Sure. You?”

He only raised his eyebrows. “Before I forget, this is something I wanted you to read.” He palmed me a triple-folded sheet from his inner jacket pocket and passed it to me covertly, at the level of the table. I unfolded it in my lap. It was a photocopy of a clipping from Artforum. “Epic Crawl: The Hidden Journey of an American Titan,” by Willard Amato. It began:

What chance that the most dedicated abstract painter in the United States abandoned canvas in 1972? Or last showed in 1967, in a two-man show of figurative work which was barely reviewed? As likely that the most profound avant-garde filmmaker of our time would never receive a single screening in his native burg of New York, or that the last monumental modernist artifact should be eked out secretly, in an unnameable medium, through the long heyday of modernism’s toppling. Each of these improbabilities leads to the same place, an attic studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where-