“Read it later,” he begged. “Keep the copy, I’ve got others.”

So the forgotten man, the nobody, wasn’t quite content to be. It wasn’t news that Abraham’s aspirations still burned, but the clipping was a surprise. I stuffed it into my pocket.

“Tell me, how is Abby?”

“She’s okay.”

“Too bad she couldn’t be along.” I suddenly saw our table in another light: two couples and a broken third. I had no idea where Abby was tonight.

“She’s got school,” I said, hearing my own defensiveness, unable to stop it.

Francesca overheard and announced, “I wish we could have seen her, Dylan. She’s such a sweet girl!” This drew Zelmo and Leslie’s attention. “She’s a black American,” Francesca explained, wide-eyed in sincerity. Francesca and Abby had met just once, when Abby and I passed through New York on our way to a music conference in Montreal. “You should meet her,” she gasped to Leslie. “Such lovely skin.” Francesca’s good intentions vaporized conversation. We were left seated at our pasta and veal like obedient soldiers.

“Still in school?” said Zelmo at last, with pious sympathy: yes, my absent black girlfriend was underage too. Count a grown-up, employable blonde in the same category as bow ties, contact lenses, and wing tips: appurtenances Dylan Ebdus was not yet mature enough to brandish.

“Graduate school,” I said. “She’s completing her dissertation.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Zelmo, turning it into a congratulation to Abby’s race that she should be in such a position. I understood it was impossible to squirm from beneath Zelmo’s patronage. Artists were his broken, defective flock, and he’d herd as many as he could into the safety of his care-a plate of meatballs and a ticket to ForbiddenCon. And black people were pretty much artists by definition.

“Darling,” said Francesca to Abraham. “Tell him about his friend’s father.”

“Eh?”

“That poor man down the street, Abe. You said he’d want to know.”

Abraham nodded. “Your old friend Mingus-you remember his father, Barry? Our neighbor?”

Barrett Rude Junior, I corrected silently. Francesca’s logic was endearingly bare: Dylan has a liking for black Americans lead directly to That poor man down the street. I promised myself I’d be patient, though hearing Abraham begin so ploddingly made me want to scream. Our neighbor! Mr. Rogers has neighbors-we had a block. I merely grew up in that house, I wanted to say. I merely wrote the man’s biography in my liner note to the Distinctions’ box set. But the first I wouldn’t mention because Abraham would feel it as a rebuke. And the latter he didn’t know of, because I hadn’t mentioned it or sent him a copy.

Barrett Rude Junior couldn’t be dead, I was certain of that. I’d have heard. Rolling Stone would have called on me to write the obit-my guess was they’d ask for about four hundred words.

“His kidneys collapsed,” said Abraham simply. “Awful. They came in an ambulance. He was on a machine to keep him alive.”

The subject was too remote, and perhaps too vivid, for Zelmo Swift. He threw another conversational gambit at Leslie and Francesca, and my father and I were left to ourselves.

“He’d been alone in the place for weeks, basically dying there. Nobody on the street had any idea. He’s lived among us so long, but since the shooting, he’s very rarely out of the house.”

Abraham and I had never discussed what he called the shooting, either in the two weeks of summer that remained before I decamped to Vermont for college, or after. Mingus and Barrett had left my name out of any conversations with the police. My presence in their house that day had been kept secret from anyone but themselves, so far as I knew.

I recalled for the thousandth time those heaps of white powder- of course his kidneys collapsed. What had they been waiting for? I began writing those four hundred words in my head.

“At that point a miracle occurred. Your friend Mingus was found. In a prison upstate. They got a court order, and he was released to a hospital, to give a kidney.”

“What? ”

“They made a special provision-Mingus was the only possible donor. He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. And was returned to prison.”

I brought my wineglass up, a phantom toast, then sucked down what remained inside. Behind the glass my head was heating, and my throat tightening, so I nearly choked on the mouthful of Burgundy.

“So, Mingus is back inside,” I said.

“You thought he wasn’t?”

“Last I knew, Arthur said he was out. But that was maybe ten years ago, more. I don’t know what I thought, honestly.”

“Barry is a very sweet man,” said Francesca, leaning in, selecting her moment. “Very quiet. I think he’s awfully sad.”

“You know him?” I managed. Why shouldn’t she? It all seemed equally likely now. A mist fogged my glasses.

She nodded at Abraham. “Your father and I bring him food sometimes. Soup, chicken, whatever we’ve got extra. He doesn’t eat. Sometimes he just sits, out on the stoop. Sometimes he sits in the rain. The people on the block don’t know him. Nobody talks to him. Only your father.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and tossed my napkin on my chair. I was able to reach the men’s toilet before I wept or vomited into my meatballs. I was unwilling to brandish this new misery of mine before the lawyer who appreciated single-malt scotch and Forbidden Planet. Let my tears remain occult, elusive, seldom seen, ineligible for display in Zelmo’s Museum of the Pathetic alongside R. Fred Vundane.

He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. Every once in a while, every decade or so, I was forced to know that Dean Street still existed. That Mingus Rude wasn’t a person I’d only imagined into being. I took a minute to be shamed and then I pushed Mingus back to where he’d been, where he always was whether I bothered to contemplate him or not, among the millions of destroyed men who were not my brothers.

Then I rinsed my glasses, blew my nose, and returned to the table, where through the latter courses I ignored my father and Francesca, though they were my only reason for being there. Instead I did my honest best to get potted on expensive cognac and to demolish Leslie Cunningham with my wit and charm, my roguish innuendo. I think I might even have made an impression on her, but it was all wasted on Zelmo Swift. I would have had to bend her over the table to dent his implacability.

Zelmo took me aside as we rose from the table. My father had wandered off to the men’s room. “You’re staying for the film tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“It means a lot to your dad.”

It must be hard to strangle a man using a bow tie. That might be the reason for them. “I’ll try not to do anything embarrassing,” I said.

Zelmo frowned as if to suggest he hadn’t been worried, but now would reconsider. “What time is your flight?”

“Right after.”

“LAX?”

“No, my flight’s out of Disneyland. Goofy Air.” The joke soured in my mouth; it was indebted to one of Abby’s, earlier this endless day.

“Har har. I’ll drive you, if you’ll let me.”

Maybe I’d had more to drink than I realized, but this confused me. “I can take a cab,” I said angrily.

“Let me save you the fare. We can talk.”

Then Francesca was beside me, whispering. “Go with him, Dylan.”

“Talk about what?”

“Shhhh,” said Francesca.

I lay on one of the Marriott’s twin doubles in my underwear and spun channels, watched crocodiles fucking and Lenny Kravitz. Twice I rolled over to the phone and punched in my number in Berkeley; twice I hung up on my own voice on the machine. I tried to focus my eyes on the Artforum photocopy.