The table was set for nine. Eight came, so the empty chair stood at the far end, and no one mentioned it, which is another way of saying everyone did.
Julian was seated beside the hostess, twenty years younger than anyone, because he was pleasant to look at while she talked. He had learned to be pleasant the way other people learn an instrument: scales, alone, for years, until it needed no thought. "You must tell us everything," she said. "I've heard you're brilliant." "Everyone's generous," he said. The soup came and he did not touch it. Down the table a woman described her divorce like a house she was redecorating, and a man agreed with her a half-second before she finished, and Julian watched him do it.
At dessert the host said, "The boy doesn't eat. I've been watching him all night." "I eat," Julian said. "When it's worth it." The host laughed. He liked being watched while he ate.
Then the gifts. The others came wrapped in silver and silk and were opened with small cries. Julian's was last: brown paper, no ribbon, a secondhand book. Inside, on the flyleaf, in his own careful hand:
You're handsome.
You look like someone I used to know.
Smile for me.
"That's all of it," Julian said, into the quiet. "Everything you've said to me tonight, in order."
The host looked up. "You wrote this before you came."
"Yes."
"How could you know what I would say."
"Because you've said it before," Julian said. "Different dinner. Same host."
He left before the coffee. At the door the host called after him, "Come back when you've learned to enjoy yourself."
Julian turned. He smiled then, for the first time, and it was a good smile, and he knew exactly what it was worth.
"I did," he said. "That's why I'm leaving."