A dinner with L.

I had dinner on Tuesday at a restaurant on Melrose which I will not name — not for any reason of discretion, but because the restaurant has, in the past year, become the kind of restaurant one does not name, and naming it now would be a violation of an etiquette I did not agree to but am, at this age, too tired to fight. The dinner was at eight. I arrived at eight-fifteen, which was early.

My companion was a woman I have known since 2011 and whom I will call, for our purposes, L. L. is the daughter of a man who used to be a producer and is now something else, the name of which escapes me and, I suspect, him. L. does not need to work and has, in the manner of her class, invented a career for herself in what she describes as "wellness curation," a phrase which means nothing and which she delivers with total seriousness, and which I respect her for, because commitment to a bit is the only remaining form of nobility.

L. was in fine form. She had just returned from what she described as a "reset" in Tulum; she was wearing linen; she had recently acquired, through means she declined to specify, a piece of jewelry that I recognized from a photograph in W magazine in 2003. She asked, by way of opening, whether I had heard about C.

I had heard about C. Everyone has heard about C. C. has made it impossible to not hear about C., which is, as I have written before, the entire point of being C.

L. had, however, a detail I did not have.

I will not, in this column, share the detail. The detail belongs to L., and to a handful of others who were in a position to be in possession of it, and to a certain number of people who have, in the weeks since L. came into possession of it, had the detail whispered to them at other dinners at other restaurants one does not name. I will share, instead, the following: the detail concerns a phone call, placed from a specific area code, in late February of this year, to a person whose name will eventually appear in the record of this matter, whether that name is printed in this newspaper or another one. The phone call was not short. The phone call was not a wrong number. The phone call was, in my view and in L.'s, the kind of phone call one makes when one has not yet understood that a certain era has ended.

C. does not yet understand. L. does. I do. A growing number of people, at dinners like the one I had on Tuesday, also do.

This is the part of a particular kind of story where the people at the center are, briefly, the last to know.

I have been writing about this register of person for longer than I am prepared to specify in print. The pattern is always the same. There is a long period in which everyone at the level of dinner-on-Melrose knows something, and in which the subject of the thing is still operating as if the knowing has not begun. The knowing radiates outward slowly. It reaches, in concentric rings, the cousins; the board members; the attorney who has represented both parties and will shortly be asked to pick one; the children who are old enough to understand and the children who are not; the ex-wife; the current wife; the wife one does not discuss, whose existence has, for some years, been an open secret within a narrow circle and a closed one everywhere else. The knowing reaches the press last, because the press is, despite everything it believes about itself, a consequence rather than a cause.

I do not know what C. thinks is happening. I know what L. thinks is happening. I know what I think is happening. We are not wrong.

L. ordered the fish. I ordered what I have ordered at that restaurant for eleven years, which I will not name either, because naming the order would identify the restaurant and we have already had that conversation. The wine was a Sancerre, which was L.'s choice, and which I have no objection to, though I would have made a different one. The service was appropriate. The room was approximately 70 percent full at 8:30, which is the ratio at which that room is best — any less and it is self-conscious, any more and one cannot speak.

We spoke about C. for approximately forty minutes. We spoke about a number of other people — M., who has made a mistake; D., who has made a different kind of mistake; the woman who is no longer at the foundation; the man at the gallery who is finally getting his due, twenty years late, for a reason that has nothing to do with the work. We spoke about L.'s mother, who is in what L. called "a phase." We spoke about the piece of jewelry, which L. confirmed had been given to her by someone who could afford to give it to her and who had, L. said, "decided it was time."

At approximately 10:15 the restaurant began to empty in the manner that restaurants empty on a Tuesday — the bar tables first, then the two-tops, then the party of six in the back that had been there since six-thirty and was now, noticeably, going home. L. and I stayed. We were not quite ready to stop. We ordered what L. called "the last glass."

It was at the last glass that L. asked me, quite directly, whether I had "heard from" someone whose name I will not print, who lives in a specific city that I will also not print, and who has not spoken to me in the past decade despite a prior period of some closeness. I had not heard from this person. L. said, "You should." I said, "Why." L. said, "Because she asked about you last week."

I do not know why this landed the way it did. I can offer the reader no framework for why, at fifty-two, a sentence like that, from a person like L., about a person like the person we were discussing, should have any particular weight. I can only report that it did.

We left the restaurant shortly after eleven. L. had a car. I walked. The evening was mild. I thought, on the walk, about a woman I had met in 1997 at a party in a house on Mulholland — a house which has since been sold, and resold, and torn down, and rebuilt, and which is now, I am told, owned by a man who made his money in something adjacent to software. The woman I met that evening was not famous; she is not famous now; she is, as far as I know, well, and living somewhere in Oregon, and has not called me in nine years. I would like to hear from her. This is not the sort of thing I usually say in print. I am saying it anyway.

The restaurant, by the way, has closed. It closed on Friday. It will reopen in six weeks under a new name and the same ownership. You will not be able to get a table.