The card came on Tuesday, by hand, in an envelope. The hour was written in ink. The rest of it was blank, and the blank part was the invitation.
Julian came at eight.
The table was laid for eight. Seven arrived. The empty chair stood at the far end in the same place as before, but now someone had folded a napkin at it. A bare chair is an accident. A folded napkin is a decision.
They put him beside the hostess again. She talked about a painter she had found, and what she had paid for him, and Julian held the shape of a listener and spent the hour somewhere behind it.
At the soup the host said, to the table and not to him, "Our young man sent me something."
The table looked at its plates.
"Two pages," the host said. "Everything I said to him at dinner. In order. With the times."
"It was what you asked for," Julian said.
"It was what I asked for," the host agreed. "It was also accurate."
"Those are usually the same thing."
"Only in your hands."
The hostess asked what they were talking about. The host said, "Nothing that survives repetition," and she laughed, and the table took the laugh as permission and went on with the fish. That is what a good table does. It takes one small signal and builds the evening out of it.
At the fish an older woman said, "He hasn't come in a year. Not since the house."
Nobody asked who. The chair had a name and the name was being passed around carefully, the way you pass a plate that is hot.
"Three months," another woman said. "It was three months, not a year."
"It felt like a year."
"It felt like a house."
The man at the end said nothing, and drank, and the two women looked at each other and let it go.
When the plates were cleared the host leaned back and asked the room for a gift. The same question as before, made louder and with more wine in it. One woman asked whether this was going to become a tradition. The host said it became a tradition the moment Julian walked in the door, and everyone looked at Julian, and Julian let them.
He took a sheet of paper from his jacket and set it down. Not in front of the host. In front of the empty chair.
"Read it out," the host said.
"I don't read out," Julian said. "You read."
The host got up, walked the length of the table, took the paper, and stood under the painting to read it, which is where rich men stand when they want the room to watch them think.
It took him a while. There was not much on the paper.
What was on it was everything said at that table, in the hour before dessert, about a man who was not in the room. Twelve lines. Nine speakers. Every sentence exact, every speaker named, the hour and the dish noted in the margin, so that nobody could say afterwards that it had been overheard wrong.
The room understood what it was holding before the host said a word about it. That is the useful thing about a good table. It is quick.
The host lowered the paper.
"One dinner," he said.
"One dinner," Julian said.
"That is all it takes."
"It took the soup."
The host laughed once, without pleasure, and folded the paper in half, and then in half again. "And if I asked you for one of these about me?"
"You have one."
"I mean a new one. Tonight."
"Then I'd have to be paid."
"Name it."
Julian looked down the table, at the folded napkin, at the seven people suddenly very interested in their glasses.
"The name," he said. "The one everyone at this table is being careful with."
The host smiled at him for a long moment, and put the paper in his breast pocket, and sat back down, and asked the hostess whether there was cheese.
That was an answer, and the answer was not yes.
Outside, the driver asked him where to. Julian gave the address and then changed it to a street two blocks short, and walked the rest of the way, because he wanted the walk and he wanted the cold, and because a man who has just been paid should arrive at his own door on his own feet.
At home he wrote down what he had said that night. It came to less than half a page. He put it in the drawer with the other lists, and closed the drawer, and did not open it again until morning.