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How do you approach the sweetness of pickle relish on a cheeseburger? Does it complement or compete with ketchup? There was a legendary place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that used to do mustard, relish, and ketchup, and I can’t for the life of me decide if I loved it, or if I just loved being there in the middle of the night eating it. —Brian K., N.Y.C.

Honestly, I’ve never really considered pickle relish to be one of the hamburger’s totemic toppings. Sliced pickle rounds, certainly; spears on the side, without a doubt. But relish, that finely chopped, neon-hued, marmalade-textured stuff? To me, that’s a hot-dog thing—which I mention here not to issue judgment but rather to illustrate how distinct my own personal associations are from your own. Herein, I think, lies the answer to your real question, which is not actually about the sweetness of the relish. The question of what toppings make a burger great, while we’re eating it, is both technical and trivial, having to do with the nature of the patty and the bun, the mood of the establishment serving it, the sensibilities of the person eating it, even the time of day or night or life.

Regarding the substance of the burger itself, the same accoutrements that might show a slim, lacey-edged smash patty in its best light—a little slick of mustard, a few circles of raw onion, and a melty cap of American cheese, say—might be too flimsy against the brawny heft of a half-pound bar burger that can sustain degrees of sweetness, richness, and piquancy (your barbecue sauces, your secondary meats, your nontraditional cheeses) that would suffocate a smaller patty. But what you’re really asking, I think, is what makes a burger great not as it’s being eaten but as it lives on in memory. Or, more to the point, how can we know that our memories of happiness are true? I spend an inordinate portion of my professional life creeping around in my own psyche, untangling knots of nostalgia and pleasure and, god, so many emotions, not least self-love and self-loathing, all of them unavoidable colorants of any bite I take. I give myself the task of locating some sort of unassailable, uncontaminated truth: that this dish of dumplings, or that cocktail, or such-and-such restaurant is actually, inarguably, wonderful. It’s impossible, of course, and more than a little absurd, but it’s so irresistible, isn’t it, to attempt to discharge the burden of our own experience?

Was that burger you ate from the Tasty, in Harvard Square? I think it must have been, and it’s been nearly thirty years since that perfect little sandwich shop closed forever. I imagine it was a simple construction: a bun, a patty, a slice of cheese, ketchup, mustard, relish. But you created it, just as much as the white-capped guy standing at the grill did. The mouth and brain and cascade of sensations were yours. There is no true burger per se, lurking behind your experience of it; it didn’t become the burger you ate until you ate it. It’s a ludicrous idea, this notion of an objective culinary truth, but it’s even more ludicrous that we’re so quick to doubt our own taste in pursuit of it. Just as I go looking for proof that my rapture—or, at times, misery—at a given meal has nothing at all to do with me, here you are wondering whether you should append an asterisk to your reminiscence of a long-ago cheeseburger, one that you could never eat again, even if the Tasty were still up and running. Why question a recollection of sweetness, even of the pickle variety? You did love the relish. And you love the person you see in your memory: a young man, awake in the middle of the night, a burger topped with relish in his hands.

What exactly am I supposed to be doing with beef tallow? R.F.K., Jr., swears by it. It’s among the recommended fats in the new U.S.D.A. dietary guidelines. Is it a miracle substance? A MAHA scam? —Anonymous, Brooklyn

French fries cooked in beef tallow really are quite delicious, as anyone who visited McDonald’s before the great switcheroo of 1990 can happily attest. (Vegetable oil, in its defense, is both lower in saturated fat than tallow and a more welcome fryer option for the many people in the world with dietary or ethical concerns about animal products.) Any recommendations for tallow beyond fries—including its use in skincare, which is not bad, exactly, but is very weird—are, in my opinion, faddishness, fearmongering, or clever storytelling to boost the selling price of a beef-industry by-product. And, anyways, duck-fat fries are better. ♦

On a recent chilly day in New York City, I met the actress Amanda Seyfried for lunch inside Clement, a quiet, white-tableclothed restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel, in midtown. We’d selected the location because it was near the studios of “The Kelly Clarkson Show,” where she was set to sing a duet with Clarkson, of Clarkson’s 2003 ballad “Beautiful Disaster,” later that afternoon. “It’s, like, a very specific dream come true for someone of our micro-generation,” Seyfried said.

Seyfried, who turned forty in December, was wrapping up a press tour to support two very different films. “The Housemaid,” a runaway box-office hit, is a campy thriller based on Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel and directed by Paul Feig. In it, Seyfried plays Nina Winchester, a wealthy woman who hires a live-in housekeeper (Sydney Sweeney) who soon discovers that Nina’s private life is full of dark, twisted secrets. Seyfried smirks through the role with a feline wiliness; every time she flutters her big, wide eyes she looks more sweetly menacing. “The Testament of Ann Lee,” which expands this weekend, is a far less commercial endeavor. The film, directed by Mona Fastvold (who co-wrote the script with her partner, Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist”), tells the real-life story of Ann Lee, an illiterate woman from Manchester, England, who founded the American Shaker movement in the late seventeen-hundreds. Fastvold had a budget of only ten million dollars and shot the film in a little more than a month, but—thanks in part to Seyfried’s utter commitment to the lead role—it feels monumental in scale.

It’s also thrillingly strange. The Shakers were so named because their worship practice included singing, stomping, hollering, and spasmodic movements that they called “laboring.” Fastvold worked with the choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall, who infused the film with eccentric movement, and with the composer Daniel Blumberg, whose new arrangements of traditional Shaker hymns are both rapturous and propulsive. The film is part bio-pic, part musical, part religious awakening, part feminist epic. Ann Lee was one of the first women to lead a religious movement, which she based on the radical idea that sexual intercourse was the root of all human suffering and should be renounced for a life of celibacy. Before she became a Shaker she had four children, all of whom died in infancy. The role required a serious bodily investment from Seyfried, who is shown giving birth, nearly starving to death, almost drowning at sea, and being beaten, battered, and imprisoned for her beliefs. Watching a scene in which Ann Lee is locked in a jail cell and begins having visions, you truly believe that she is a woman possessed by faith.

Whether Seyfried will be nominated for an Oscar for the part is still up in the air—the field this year is, as she put it, “fucking stacked,” and the story of a woman mystic kicking and hooting with spiritual fervor might be a tough sell. But Seyfried, who was nominated in 2021 for playing Marion Davies in David Fincher’s “Mank,” told me that awards potential does not factor into her career choices. Over the past twenty-five years, she has worked across an eclectic mix of genres and mediums. She started out in soap operas as a teen-ager, had her breakout in Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls,” warbled her way through the “Mamma Mia!” franchise and through a remake of “Les Misérables.” She lowered her voice several octaves to play Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu series “The Dropout,” and starred in Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” and Karyn Kusama’s cult horror flick “Jennifer’s Body.” She resides far from Hollywood, on a farm in upstate New York with her two children and her husband, the actor Thomas Sadoski, and gets up at dawn every morning to tend to a gaggle of rescue animals. During the pandemic, she taught herself to play the dulcimer (a video of her playing the instrument and singing Joni Mitchell’s “California” went viral last year). In person, she has a kooky, conspiratorial mien; after our lunch, she encouraged me to hop into a van with her to head over to “Kelly Clarkson,” then got into the back row by flinging herself, head first, over the seats. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

You just flew in from L.A. and the Golden Globes, and you’ve been promoting both “The Housemaid” and “Ann Lee” at the same time. You must be tired.

You know, I’m actually great. I have a natural kind of electrical surge when I’m talking about things that I know about. But I’m also looking forward to the fact that I’m finally going to be back on the farm tomorrow. I’ve been away for almost two weeks. The only benefit of travelling, without my kids, is that I get to sleep. No one is kicking me or waking me up or yelling in my face or picking my nose. The kids are actually on their way upstate now. It’s about a two-hour drive. Apologies if I keep checking my phone. I just get so nervous when they are on the road.

I’m sure you’re excited to get back to the goats and the cows.

Well, there are no cows. But goats, yes. And a donkey, and a bunny, and ponies, and ducks, and chickens. We have a quarter horse, named Officer Herman, who used to be a police horse in the city. His legs are all fucked up. And we have a bearded dragon.

Wait, didn’t Rose Byrne say in her speech at the Golden Globes that she was also getting a bearded dragon?

I loved that. I mean, this is real stuff, and not enough people talk about it. It’s like breast-feeding. I had gotten, like, so much information about breast-feeding before I had my kids, and then I breast-fed for the first time, and it was, like, I didn’t know any of this. With bearded dragons, it’s kind of the same. Nobody talks about how hard it is to keep a bearded dragon alive.

I would think it’s just, like, give them some crickets?

They don’t eat crickets past a certain age! They eat worms. And sometimes you don’t feed them at all, because if you feed them too much before they brumate, it’ll kill them. It’s ridiculous.

Do they have personalities?

You can project anything onto them that you want. But I’ll tell you, I was told that my bearded dragon has a brain that is like the static on TV. And I don’t believe that’s true for a second. There’s a pretty shallow internal life in there, but there’s still an internal life.

How many animals do you have on the farm now?

Fifty-two. I had to count recently. But I say that having been gone for two weeks, so I don’t know. More might have shown up.

Your farm is officially certified as a nonprofit rescue?

Yeah, because I was, like, I shouldn’t be punished on my taxes for spending hundreds of thousands on vet bills! But now people in the area know to call us first. There’s also a nearby sanctuary that we support, and we go there a lot—they have pigs and cows, which we do not have—and we all share information about animals in town that are being treated poorly.

I can’t imagine that you grew up in a pastoral environment, being from Allentown, Pennsylvania . . .

No. I had a postage-stamp back yard. I think it was, like, ten square feet. I mean, we were working-class. My parents worked in health care. My dad still works at a hospital. We didn’t want for much, but we didn’t have much. And I think that was really nice, in a way, because my kids are not like that. Even though we like to pretend that we don’t have money, it’s kind of obvious that we do, with the things that they want and can get. And I want them to feel a little bit more of the wanting than the having. But, yeah, it was always my dream to have a lot of animals.

This might be a useful shift into discussing “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Ann Lee was also a woman who loved to commune with nature upstate. I have to tell you, I am so impressed with this film. I saw it in the theatre three times, just trying to figure out how you-all did it.

Well, the thing about this movie is that it was nearly impossible to get made. We’ve been doing Q. & A.s about the film nearly every night lately, and every time we tell people that we made this film for just ten million dollars and shot it in thirty-four days, everybody gasps. Like, O.K., I don’t understand money, and I only kind of understand budgets. But “The Housemaid” was made for thirty-five million, and that was considered cheap for them. There is such a difference when it’s a studio versus private investors.

I have been doing this a long time, and so I understood where we were saving the money on “Ann Lee,” and it made me even more impressed with the production team. We got artists at their height, and at their most inspired, simply because they loved the story and they loved Mona’s writing. Everybody who came on board knew that this was special, and everybody knew that nobody was making any money on this. We got paid our union minimum, but we weren’t doing it for any other reason than because Ann Lee needs to be celebrated, or at least she needs to be discussed, and put back into the fabric of history. And also Mona’s got goals. She’s got a vision, and she’s uncompromising. I’ve been working since I was fifteen, and have twenty-five years of experience watching people create stories, mostly on film. I see compromises being made all the time. But there was only so much that Mona would compromise. I was just, like, This woman is saying no in the most graceful way, with the most certain tone that I’ve ever seen. And I need more of that in my life.

I really understand what you’re saying, because I, too, was so nervous to advocate for myself for so long.

I saw an actress the other day, and someone asked her if she would do something specific. And she was like, No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that. And I was, like, Wow, that holds so much weight. I always grew up thinking that every time I gave a no, it came with so much instability. I would also project so much onto the other person, like, thinking they’ll be devastated. People keep asking me what I’m looking forward to about my forties, and I keep going back to the same thing: I don’t have as much control as I think, and I want to operate that way. I want to say no if I mean no, and then let people have their reaction. Also, it’s about giving people the benefit of the doubt, people that I normally would judge or be critical of. I’m not saying I’m giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, or any of the other evil, narcissistic succubi, but I do think that most people are doing the best that they can, even if they’re mean. I try to think, That person’s probably having a bad day.

Do you think that impulse to be accommodating comes from—

Being a woman? Yes.

Well, being a woman, and also starting in the business so young. Did you feel unprotected?

Yes. I was very, very pre-MeToo. I had to do underwear-less scenes when I was eighteen years old that I did not want to do, because I was afraid of being fired or being seen as high-maintenance. I’ve made accommodations that were not healthy for me emotionally. I have made people think that I’m comfortable with things that I was not, for the purpose of their art. I am lucky to say that I was not in any kind of uncomfortable situations with powerful men. I don’t know how I snaked my way out of those moments, because they were happening everywhere. They happened to so many friends of mine, and when those friends were able to feel liberated and relieved that they could actually talk about it without getting blacklisted, that was a moment. There are so many of us walking around out there who just smiled and nodded, and there’s some guilt and shame that comes with that as well.

It’s still happening. A few years ago, post-MeToo, I found out that someone who was on a set with me was being harassed. That was one of the first times when I felt the power of my job, of being No. 1 on the call sheet, where I thought, I cannot know about this without immediately taking care of it. One of the crew members was immediately fired. But then one of the cast members started harassing her, and she made the decision not to say anything until way later. I only found this out recently, because she was, like, you can’t complain twice. And you know what? She’s damn right. I still don’t believe I could complain twice. Or maybe I could now, but that’s just because of the hierarchies of the business.

Did the “Ann Lee” set feel different from others you’d been on? I know that Mona has talked about it as a work of “feminine” filmmaking.

There were no hierarchies. None. And it wasn’t just by accident, when you think about the story we’re telling and the person we’re telling it about. She strived to create a utopian community where everybody has the same purpose and everybody has the same job. There were freed slaves in the Shaker movement. It didn’t matter who you were. If you denounced fornication to save your soul—radical, but, hey, sure, it worked for them—you could choose to be in it. Nobody was coerced. She wasn’t leading from a place of fear. And, in fact, she doesn’t have a legacy because she didn’t care to make one. She did what she needed to do.

But I do try to make it so that most of my sets are like this—when I call them “my sets,” I mean the sets that I run in terms of being the lead cast—where they’re, like, Make yourself at home. Selfishly, I need people to be comfortable. It breeds happy times, nice moments, laughter, all this shit that makes you feel a little bit more liberated. And Mona needs that, too. She needs people to feel like they’re valuable.

What struck me was how many people seemed to be working at the top of their game here. The composer Daniel Blumberg, for instance, and the choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall.

Their work was essential to this project, because music and dance were how the Shakers worshipped. They cleansed themselves from their sins through movement and song and vocalizations. I don’t know how many times you have been to a church, but some of my happiest times were when I was eighteen and used to go to church with my boyfriend at the time. It wasn’t to feel closer to a higher power. It was to sing together, to commune in music. I always loved being in the chorus in school. I really wish there was an a-cappella group for men and women up near where I live. I’d join.

How did you approach the singing in this movie? You’re a classically trained singer, but I’ve heard you say that there was a freedom to not trying to sing in a particularly trained way.

I didn’t work with my voice coach for this. Where I spent the most time preparing was on the damn Manchester accent [laughs]. That was the hardest part. Though, to be fair, no one was there, so no one really knows what she sounded like. She could have been speaking in tongues, for all we know.

The singing was, for me, an extension of Ann Lee’s faith. It wasn’t about quality. It was about however I was going to sound, in the moment, with what I was feeling. The emotion came first. The devotion came first. And letting go of your judgment, and the criticism that is in your ear, is so liberating. I really didn’t realize how much I hated my voice before. But with Ann, and with the grief she had to take on, I started connecting to my voice differently. I was relating to her, and not to my own ego. What a perfect light-bulb experience to have on the eve of turning forty.

I know that you’ve been very self-critical about your singing in past roles, like in “Mamma Mia!” or “Les Misérables.”

I wasn’t even present during “Les Mis.” I was just listening to myself, every time, except for the funeral scene at the end, when I just didn’t give a fuck anymore because I was crying. I regret my lack of presence during that film. I regret how critical I was. But at least I did it differently this time. And now, as a mom, I’m just, like, I’ve gotta show all the way up with everything I do, or else it ain’t worth it.

Did you do a lot of research into the Shakers before filming?

We don’t have much of a record. We have testimonies. Sometimes there were things about Ann’s life that confused me, but I committed to the fact immediately that this was Mona’s version of the story, and she was telling it the way she wanted to. Ann Lee lived forty-eight years, so there is a lot that the script can’t cover. We looked at the foundation of what made her, what got her to her knees and made her take that journey across the ocean. The liberties that Mona took were in making Ann’s story more magical, more mythical, more enlightening, and sometimes dark. She chose to focus on the important aspects, and then she filled the rest in with a woman’s perspective. Like, the impact that Ann had as “a mother” to a society, because she could never be a mother to her own children.

In most Shaker histories I’ve read, they say, “Ann Lee had four children who died young,” and then they move on quickly from that fact. In the film, there is an entire sequence devoted to the births and deaths of Ann’s children. You see her in labor, you see her struggling to breast-feed, you see her almost bleeding to death—and all while she is singing the Shaker hymn “Beautiful Treasures” and praying ecstatically to God about her grief. It’s both terrifying and devastating, and for me it’s the best part of the film.

I’m gonna be honest. When I read that sequence in the script, I was, like, I don’t know how this is gonna play. There was dance and diegetic sound in it, and it seemed almost set up like a music video. It was so wild. Who else would have thought to do it like that? Again, I think the reason so many great artists dropped everything to work on this film is because no one’s ever going to make a movie quite like this again. I know people say that all the time, but sometimes it’s true. I don’t think it’s going to be easy for another woman to be able to tell this kind of woman’s story, in this way, where people will accept it and be reminded that art exists in many forms. There are still too many structures within the industry that make it impossible.

One thing that struck me while watching the film was the pure beauty of the Shaker aesthetic. The chairs alone!

We shot most of the film in Hungary, but we got to shoot twice at Hancock Shaker Village. It’s still a working farm, and they gave me seeds to make broom grass for brooms. The Shakers affected all of us. They invented so many things. The apple peeler, the washing machine, the wood lathe. And the Shaker hymns! A year before we shot, Mona sent me the hymns. I had a lot of time to play them on piano and sit with their simplicity.

I think it was a bold choice not to use “Simple Gifts” in the film. As far as Shaker hymns go, that’s the banger.

We almost did use it! During post-production, Daniel [Blumberg] and I were playing around with songs for the end credits, and we tried “Simple Gifts.” I was, like, I understand it, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I was so happy he composed an original song for the end.

I was surprised at how much humor there is in this film. I did not expect to laugh out loud at a woman pronouncing herself celibate, or at a bunch of people in bonnets howling in the woods.

It works because in the film we’re all so committed to being Shakers. We’re not laughing at each other. But some of this stuff is very funny. Mona is truly adept at capturing how absurd human beings are. We’re all crazy, and we make decisions based on magical thinking, and she gets at all of that. I’ve worked with a lot of directors who have a very special thumbprint, but few are as brave as she is. Maybe David Lynch.

How do you choose the projects you want to do? I imagine you’re pretty selective now, given that you don’t like to be away from the kids or the farm.

Yeah, it’s a tricky time. But I’ve wanted to do comedy again for so long, and, finally, I’m going to do one, with Bill Lawrence [the creator of “Scrubs,” “Cougar Town,” and “Ted Lasso”]. I’m currently casting it.

I’d say I’m surprised that you want to make a comedy, but you did get your big break in “Mean Girls.”

I love playing somebody who’s committed, but in a funny way. Karen, in “Mean Girls,” was so honest, but she’s a fucking idiot. Ann Lee, at times, had tunnel vision.

And you’re also getting more into producing?

I produced a documentary, called “Running,” about this woman, Allie Phillips, who is running for House representative in Tennessee. She was a TikToker who went through a life-saving abortion, because her child’s heart was missing chambers. She had to set up a GoFundMe to get to New York to get the abortion alone. I’m in the documentary because when I found out about her, her campaign, I gave what I could and sent her, like, pink sneakers or whatever, and just supported her throughout. I met her through Jessica Valenti, a friend of mine. Do you read Jessica’s newsletter, “Abortion, Every Day”? She’s really the only person that’s giving us the play-by-play. So I’m doing that, and I also executive-produced a documentary about “The Nutcracker,” because I love ballet. If someone asks me to help on their documentary, it’s probably always going to be a yes, because that whole genre is fascinating to me.

This is kind of an odd moment for you, because you had two films come out at once, and they couldn’t be more different.

I’ve never been pulled apart so much by two positive forces. You could lose your mind from two studios needing one person to be in two places at once. But it’s also a blessing. I do think right now I have a few more opportunities than I usually do, just because of the “Housemaid” and “Lee” moment, but I have to be super careful about what I take. Money does not motivate me, because we’ve all seen how that story ends. I mean, I like money. Who doesn’t? But it can’t be the deciding thing.

Is there anyone you still really want to work with that you haven’t?

Ari Aster. And I’d like to work with Paul Thomas Anderson, because he doesn’t really make mistakes. I’d also want to work with David Fincher again, but he knows that.

You were nominated for an Oscar in 2021, for Fincher’s “Mank.” What is your feeling about that film, now that you have some distance from it?

It was a stroke of luck for me. It was absolutely not something that I could have ever thought I was capable of, because that era, of the twenties and thirties, feels too foreign. They just walked and talked differently. I grew up watching old movies, because my dad collects projectors and reels of film—there are thousands of miles of film in our house—but it never felt like something I could attain. I mean, old-school Hollywood starlet—I just didn’t see that for me. People used to be, like, “You’ve got Bette Davis eyes!” when I was young, but I didn’t think I could get there. I remember I had a Zoom meeting with David, who told me, “I want to prepare you, this is not going to be an Oscar campaign.” So when they did decide to campaign me I was off my face happy.

Is winning an Oscar at some point important to you?

No. Do you remember who won in the past ten years? It’s not the win that’s important. It’s the nomination. It does thrust you forward. That’s a fact. Now, do I need one in a week or two or whenever? No, of course, I don’t. Would it be great? Of course it would, for every reason. But it isn’t necessary. Longevity in an actor’s career is designed. Longevity is about deliberate choices to make art among the big commercial things that are fun and pay. But, for me, all of it is art. Yes, “The Housemaid” is a thriller that didn’t cost a lot to make, and made a lot of money, and is a box-office hit. And yet every single choice I made in that movie was as artful as the choices I made in “Ann Lee.” I finally was able to marry the two in my heart and in my head, and I realized that is what I want for the rest of my career. I’m going to jump between genres as much as I can, and jump between indies and studios. So I’ve gotten this far without an Oscar. Why would I need one now?

You can get your Oscar at seventy-two, like Ruth Gordon.

Sure. But I feel I’m already proven. I’m getting people to trust me to do hard things. We all have ebbs and flows in our careers, and how we’re perceived can change from day to day, but I’m consistent in my choices and I’m consistent in my values and my needs. I’m also sitting pretty right now, because “The Housemaid” made money. That’s not always the case. Sometimes you’re in “Mamma Mia!” Sometimes, you do something like “Ted 2,” or “A Million Ways to Die in the West,” which were both supposed to do big box-office, and underperformed.

Would you ever think of doing a Broadway show?

No. I was working on one, but it’s too much. The last time I won a Golden Globe, for “The Dropout,” I wasn’t there, because I was doing a workshop for a musical adaptation of “Thelma & Louise.” It was just like how Michelle Williams missed winning hers this year, because she’s in a play. I remember going over to my friend’s house that night and watching myself win on TV and thinking, You idiot. But I was just so devoted to the show. I worked on it for a year and a half. Then it moved to London, and I’m not doing it. I think I’ve aged out of it by now, and I don’t have the stamina. I also think I don’t have the emotional stability to do it. I have too much panic and stage fright. I think it’s safe to say that the best thing for the show would be for me to not be in it, but it’s going to be the best thing you’ve ever seen. Neko Case did the music.

Bringing it back to “Ann Lee,” I did want to ask whether making a movie about a woman who was so unwavering in her belief altered your own relationship to faith.

I think it reminded me, in kind of a hard-core way, how connected we all are. For the Shakers, it wasn’t about what they worship, it was about how they worshipped. It was about what it means to be a follower. There’s certain religions that, you know, the dynamics are really unhealthy, and the stories and the rules are just so ridiculous, and some are inhumane. But there are also so many different faiths that want to cultivate love and compassion, and that, even though I don’t necessarily believe in a specific god, I’m still very much for being a member of a community. We are all yearning to feel a part of something, and faith really helps us to do that. I want that for my kids, but we haven’t found the right thing yet. Maybe the farm is my church. I do worship Mother Nature. ♦

In “Light Secrets,” your story in this week’s issue, the narrator has lunch with his friend P. A nasty rumor is going around about P., and the narrator will not mention this to him. At lunch, P. himself says that everyone has something to hide. But then he mentions the flip side: “Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden”—a light secret. Is the concept of the light secret something you’ve held in your pocket for some time? And how did it evolve in your mind during the writing of the story?

It recently dawned on me that there exists the opposite of the dark secret—the good action that never sees the light of day, never receives recognition, perhaps not even from the actor. Why this dawned on me I can’t say. It’s certainly not autobiographical—I’m not secretly a saint. Maybe I was trying to counteract the ever-strengthening tug of misanthropy, trying to tune out the morally deafening cacophony (from the Greek, meaning “evil sound”) of defamation and self-congratulation that is the soundtrack of our times.

The story never reveals the nasty rumor about P., and this is just one of several bits of withheld information in the story. Disclosure, or its lack, both shapes the story and is the subject of this story. Were you worried that too much might be withheld?

I gave some thought to what P. might have done, turning over in my mind the various nasty stories that all of us hear, but, in the end, I worried that to reveal the nature of P.’s misdeed would undermine the logic of the story. It’s more damaging, I think, to provide an overly disclosive or illuminating detail than to leave the reader slightly in the dark, as in life. Speaking for myself, I dislike the feeling that I’ve got to the bottom of a story and fully lit up its depths. A short story, like a poem, should always retain an element of mystery.

The narrator, who went through a divorce during the pandemic and is currently single, wants to surround himself with “fine souls.” Do you think he has a good sense of what that means?

I suspect that he’s like the rest of us: we can’t define a fine soul, but we believe that we will recognize one when we see one. Of course, the narrator believes that his old friend P., a person of poor reputation, is a fine soul. I think that it’s to his—the narrator’s—credit.

The narrator is going through several forms of scrutiny simultaneously—a background check, dating, and the social fallout from having lunch with P. How did these parallel pressures shape the story’s architecture?

This story came together, as my stories tend to, like an Italian ice cream. I take separate ideas and, instead of writing one story per idea, I lump them together in a single story like scoops of chocolate and pistachio and cherry in a cornetto. This happens intuitively. Once the elements are in place, you begin to see patterns—and sometimes you begin to understand how your unconscious has worked. For example, it was only after I’d finished the story that I realized that the Simon Morgan character had grown out of someone I knew many years ago, a friend of mine who died as a young man and who, for various reasons, believed himself to be a far worse person than he was. His name was Simon Morgan, I think—he used several surnames—and this story is informally dedicated to his memory. ♦

I was in a yellow cab in high summer when I saw it. Twenty-three at the time, I sometimes skimmed articles about politics on my clunky BlackBerry while cruising through Central Park to my first real job, fund-raising for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign. Usually, the ride was placid. This time, I opened a link to an article in Politico (still an upstart outlet at the time) about a quickly growing controversy. Apparently, the latest cover of The New Yorker was a doozy.

Barry Blitt’s already infamous illustration, which graced the July 21st issue, shows Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. The rug in the room, flat and ornate as a coin, looks proper to its setting. So does an insouciantly drawn old chair. But look at the Obamas! Instead of their customary J. Crew-ish Presidential attire—thin lapels, a sleeveless dress—the charismatic couple are outfitted in clothes that look like the loose parts of one big racist joke. The presumptive Democratic nominee wears a white thawb and sandals, and the future First Lady appears in the clichéd garb of an outdated Black radical: black shirt, camo pants, a rifle slung across her back. He wears a turban shaped like the Guggenheim; she’s got a scribbled-in Afro. Her face looks cruelly joyful while his is impossible to read. In the fireplace, an American flag is being eaten by flames. Osama bin Laden’s face sneers from a portrait on the wall. The couple bump their knuckles together, a reference to a recent bout of hysteria over an identical real-life gesture, sparked by a Fox News host who referred to it as a “terrorist fist jab.” It’s an image tightly packed with complex meanings, to say the least.

Nearly two decades later, it can be hard to remember just how flagrantly racist the rhetoric against the Obamas often was. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton’s aide Mark Penn spent a whole TV interview testing how many times he could smoosh the words “cocaine” and “Obama” together. Right-wingers insisted not only that Obama had been born outside the United States but that he’d been educated at a Muslim “madrassa.” Michelle Obama’s throwaway comment about not having felt fully “proud” of her country until recently was pilloried as if she had cried, “Kill Whitey!” Speaking of “Whitey,” someone started a spurious rumor that she’d been recorded using the word.

Blitt’s cover was, at heart, a work of media criticism, aimed at this latticework of horseshit. Here’s one big risk a public satirist of racism takes: by displaying a panoply of tropes and crude imagery, he reveals just how well he knows and can deploy them himself. It’s a generous act: assuring the rest of us—just as fixated on and poisoned by this stuff, whether we acknowledge it or not—that someone else is weighed down by this, too.

Once I got to the office, I found out a lot of people were furious. Or at least they acted that way. One strain of the uproar had a touch of blithe condescension: there were people out there who wouldn’t get the joke, and who would take the cover as a straightforward assertion by The New Yorker—of all the joints in the world—regarding the attitudes and ideologies of the Obamas. Another strain, somewhat more reasonable, still rang of a prudish fear of images to which I have never been able to relate: to reproduce this imagery, for any reason at all, some said, was to add to its total volume and, over time, to augment its dark power.

I’ll admit, I laughed in the cab. I still do when I see the cover now. I regard it as important evidence of the darker edges of a promising moment, a portrait of a nation that too often sees cartoons when confronted with flesh and blood. ♦

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Joseph O’Neill reads his story “Light Secrets,” from the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. O’Neill is the author of a story collection and five novels, including “Netherland,” which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2009, “The Dog,” and “Godwin,” which was published in 2024.

My friend P. and I agree to have lunch at a restaurant equidistant from our respective homes. A nasty rumor about P. has reached my ears. I’m not going to mention it to P., of course. That would be hurtful. But the rumor prompted me to instigate the lunch, out of a solidarity that cannot be revealed.

P. turns up in what looks like a safari suit.

Everyone’s deep into their forties these days and getting touchier by the minute. I must choose my words carefully. “Looking sharp,” I say.

“Pants, jacket, the whole thing—twelve bucks,” P. says.

A thrift store has recently opened in his neighborhood. Everything there fits him. He’s an XL and everything in the store is XL. “I realized something,” P. says. “Everyone dies when they’re XL. It’s the size of death. And now it’s my size.”

We laugh.

The food, when it comes, is excellent.

P. says, “I ran into your friend Simon Morgan.”

“I don’t know any Simon Morgan.”

“Well, he knows you. He sends his regards.”

“Mysterious,” I say, although it’s not really a mystery: Simon Morgan is almost certainly some kind of friendly acquaintance. The problem is my very poor memory, which is worsened by stress, which I have recently felt under a lot of. I’m dating again—dating, as in eating meals with and being interrogated by women I don’t know—and at the same time I’m going through a job-application process that involves a background check, which itself involves giving my fingerprints and listing every address I’ve ever had and, most strange and sinister of all, stating every name and alias I’ve ever used. I ask P., “What do these people think they’re going to find out?”

P. says, “Everybody’s got something to hide. Everybody.” He wears his usual gloomy face. With no lessening of the gloom, he says, “But you know what else is true? Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden—the opposite of a dark secret.”

“A light secret,” I suggest.

“Precisely,” P. says.

“Like an anonymous donation?”

P. shrugs. “It could be a lot more interesting than that.”

“Can you give me an example? One of yours?”

“You want me to tell you a light secret? I can’t do that. It’s a secret.”

I would laugh except that P. isn’t joking. I say, “I’d tell you one of mine, but I can’t think of any.” I’m not joking, either.

“Everybody’s got a light secret. Everybody.”

This is a wonderful thought, and I believe that it reveals P.’s benign essence. Having lunch with him is exactly the kind of thing I’ve decided to do more of. It is a matter of self-care in dark times. I want to socialize more intentionally and discriminately. I want to surround myself with only the wisest and most admirable friends, people whose kindness and good sense are not in question, people with a strong awareness of their lucky stars, witty people, people who like being alive. I know a good number of such people—fine souls. New York is a dirty, untranquil city, but it has a large population of fine souls. What is a fine soul? That is a nice question. It certainly doesn’t mean someone who has never entertained a black thought or someone who has never erred as P. is rumored to have erred.

We split the chocolate ice cream fifty-fifty, then decide to walk it off. But walk it off in which direction? I live uptown, P. lives downtown.

“Why don’t we head downtown,” I suggest.

With a little nod, P. agrees. We set off.

Tenth Avenue is hot, hot, hot, hot. With his epaulets and breast pockets and jacket belt, P. could be a colonial police inspector. Of course I don’t give voice to this thought. Nor do I say out loud that, with his ruminative air and portly gait, he gives the impression of someone chewing over the contents of a second stomach. Don’t make personal remarks, my father once cautioned me, and I have done my best to comply with that instruction. When (last year) P. told me that he was suffering from “burnout,” it was on the tip of my tongue to ask him, without malice I hope, if “burnout” was a new, maybe more dignified way of saying “nervous breakdown.” But I remembered my father, and I confined myself to repeating after him, Burnout? Inexplicably, this simple echo upset P., who responded, Yes, burnout, is that a problem?

The point being that not giving offense isn’t easy, even with the best will in the world. Despite my failing memory, I suffer more and more often from excruciating flashbacks in which I relive moments when I said or did something foolish. The worst, most haunting kind of foolishness is unkindness.

(When I looked into it, I learned that “burnout” is not synonymous with “nervous breakdown,” a term that has fallen into disfavor. A nervous breakdown is a mental-health crisis with a variety of possible causes. Burnout, typically, is a state of dysfunctional exhaustion that results from overwork or from shouldering too many responsibilities for too long. P.’s burnout was presumably atypical.)

Tropical Clouseau P. suddenly stops. “I’m feeling sick,” he says. He puts a hand on his stomach.

We’re standing in front of a deli. “Let’s get you some water,” I say.

I buy P. a bottle of water. He takes a couple of sips.

The deli is filled with cool air and has a little window counter with barstools. P. and I take seats.

“Drink more,” I tell him. “Drink all of it.”

He does as I say. Then I buy him a second bottle and get one for myself, too.

Cartoon by Sarah Kempa

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We sit next to each other, rehydrating. Since we’re in a deli and not in a restaurant, I permit myself a glance at my phone. There is no trace in my communications history of anyone named Simon Morgan.

One New Yorker after another walks past the window. I’ve lived in this city for a quarter century, and I fear that I am falling out of love with it. But this is a nice moment.

“See that?” P. says. I did see: in front of our noses, a car has quickly and perfectly reversed into a tight parking spot. “That’s a light secret.”

I say, “Parking skillfully?” The driver has gotten out of the car and is looking for something in her pocket. Now she disappears from view. Who is she? Where is she bound? “I thought it was about secretly doing good,” I say. “You know—like a mitzvah, but on the down-low. Schindler. The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

P. shakes his head. “It’s anything that’s admirable,” he says. “Anything that would make people think better of you.”

He has finished his second bottle of water. “I’ll walk you home,” I say. When he protests that it’s out of my way, I insist.

We part company at the corner of his block. “You helped me out today,” P. says. “You’re a good friend.”

Am I, though? What P. doesn’t know, because I have kept it from him, is that a fingerprinting outfit is located a mere stroll away and I planned to go there even before I suggested lunch. In other words, even as I was apparently thoughtfully accommodating P. by walking him home, in secret fact I was not going out of my way for his benefit. It makes me feel bad. I have failed to act with the uberrima fides expected by good friends and insurance companies.

Superior Hand Analytics is an authorized fingerprint taker. Its premises are in Suite 914 of one of those beautiful midtown loft buildings filled with miscellaneous little enterprises and crazy people. I once had a financial adviser who worked in one of those buildings, about whom it was whispered that he had murdered his wife. When I arrive at Suite 914, I am met by a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. It looks like a thoroughly temporary setup—one of those sublets granted for the duration of a lacuna in the lease. Then, from a partitioned area behind yonder photocopying machine, the hand analyst materializes.

She accepts my paperwork and bids me sit down. She takes hold of my left hand. Starting with the thumb, she seizes my fingers one by one and presses them, with a little side-to-side rocking motion, into the ink pad, repeating the process with the fingerprint sheet. She has a firm, kind, thrilling touch. Who is she? What is her story? What path has she taken, what seas has she sailed to be here with me, holding my hand?

“Can I ask how you got into this business?” I ask.

She presses my little finger onto the paper. “Army.”

Army? Interesting!

“Mm,” she says. She points at the paper. “See? You got no good prints there.”

“I don’t have fingerprints?”

“You got poorly defined prints. It happens. The ridges wear out. We see it with nurses—always scrubbing up. You a nurse?”

Either she’s mocking me or she’s curious. “A nurse? No, I’m not a nurse.” I tell her, very generally, about the work I do.

The hand analyst grips my hand some more, authoritatively. I’m sure she made sergeant. I’m sure she is a fine soul. She says, “That work make you wash your hands a lot?”

“No,” I confess. However—I decide not to tell her this—I am a diligent hand washer. I don’t hesitate to use a little wooden nail brush on my fingertips. Is that strange? Am I an outlier?

She tells me not to worry, it’s all going to be O.K., the F.B.I.’s going to have plenty to work with. My face must have expressed something, because now she’s saying, “That’s where the prints go—Federal Bureau of Investigation. You didn’t know that?” She rerolls one of my problematic fingers in the ink, blackening it even more intensely. “Yes, sir—eff, bee, eye.”

When she’s done making prints, she takes each darkened finger in turn and repeatedly yanks on it with a towelette. Very soon, my hands are clean and she must let go of them, and there is nothing to be done.

T hat night, I have a dinner date with my friends Fred and Sejal at their home, in Brooklyn. I drive across the Triborough Bridge in the bright early evening, and soon after I catch full sight of summery Manhattan Island, its newest, tallest towers rising as if from a meadow. It is beautiful to behold, even in dark times.

I arrive a little early. What’s his name, the son, whom I have known since he was a baby, now transformed into a long-limbed high schooler, thunders downstairs to answer the door. Sejal is covering the table with a cotton sheet brightly patterned with orange-and-yellow circle segments. “It’ll be cheerful,” Sejal says. “Or is it too wrinkled?”

Fred says, “Too wrinkled? Nobody cares about wrinkles anymore.”

He is cooking Norwegian halibut with green olives and calamondins. Calamondins, he teaches me, are a small, sour citrus fruit. They have recently appeared on the little calamondin tree that grows in the pot outside the front door. You remove the seeds, roast the orange globes atop the fish, then eat them, peel and all. Fred says, “I hope you guys will like it—but I’m not going to stress about it. That would be meaningless stress. I don’t do meaningless stress. Not anymore.”

“What,” I ask, “would be meaningful stress?”

“Meaningful stress,” Fred says, “is when you’re digging children out of the rubble.” He gives me a hug of welcome.

Boy, it feels good—the hug, the home, the hope. I want more of it. I want to see more of fortunate people—men and women with strong marriages and functional children and healthy parents and happy lives.

The sound of laughter reaches us. It’s Werner and Nicky. “I’ll get it,” I say.

When I open the front door, the racket of a helicopter suddenly fills the air. It is at once terrifically loud and invisible, as if made by a god. The three of us stand on the stoop, looking skyward.

Sejal’s voice says, “Come in, come in, I’m so sorry, just ignore it, it’ll go away.” Werner answers her with a hug so powerful that he fractionally lifts her off her feet.

“O.K.,” Sejal says, and laughs, then double-locks the front door.

As Fred is serving drinks, a deep physical vibration passes through the house. “It must be right above us,” he says, going to the rear window. He peers out. “Who knows what they’re looking for this time.” He locks the back door. “Now it’s moving away.”

It’s true: the chopper is less audible.

It is my duty, I feel, to lighten things up. “I almost fell in love today,” I declare. Naturally, everyone is curious. I describe my visit to the hand analyst and tell of how she carefully held my hand.

“That’s such a lonely story,” Sejal says.

“You gave your fingerprints to the F.B.I.? Are you out of your mind?”

The person saying this is Werner. He and I are acquainted, sure, but I wouldn’t say we’re friends. We’ve met only at dinners hosted by Sejal and Fred, who got to know Nicky and Werner because they and their children were in a COVID pod together in Montauk. I, who was getting divorced at the time, was in a heavenly pod of one.

“It’s just routine,” I tell Werner. “You know—criminal record, identity history . . .”

Werner says, “Identity history? Who has an identity history? What does that even mean? What are we doing here?”

The chopper is back, louder than ever.

“Hey, guys.” It’s Fred, who has been peering out of the front window. “Get over here. There’s something you need to see.”

We all inspect the street for something untoward.

“I don’t get it,” Nicky says.

“Our cars!” Fred shouts. “Look at them! All parked in a row! Right in front of the house!”

We laugh. “Oh, Fred, you’re so funny,” Nicky says. Fred notoriously claims that his block, on which cars are parked diagonally to the curb, like police cars outside a police station, is the best block for parking in New York.

Of course, all this puts me in mind of P. and his crazy theory of the unacknowledged parallel parker. When we are seated and eating Fred’s (delicious) halibut, I make a second announcement: “I had lunch with P. today.”

“How is poor P.?” Sejal asks.

“Why ‘poor’ P.?” Fred asks Sejal.

Werner says, “Is this the P. who . . . ?”

Fred says, “Yup.”

“And you had lunch with him?” Nicky says.

I look around the table. “We go way back,” I say.

“Did he say anything to you?” Nicky demands.

“If you mean—no, he didn’t. It didn’t come up. Why would it?”

“Because you ‘go way back,’ ” Nicky says, actually making quote signs.

The house is shaking. Red flashes and white flashes of electric light enter from the twilit street. “Now what?” Fred shouts.

Everyone follows him toward the lights and the noise. “Stay inside,” Fred sharply tells his son, who has joined us. And there, visible at last, is the glittering police helicopter, hovering above the street, then banking out of sight. While the others stay at the front window, discussing what they can and can’t see and what may or may not be afoot, I drift away. I want to keep my distance from Nicky. Why was she so rude to me? Is P. her foe? Am I her foe, too, on account of my lunch with P.? Is it possible that during our very occasional dealings I once hurt her feelings? Did the hand-analyst story bother her?

Who knows. Who cares. Human society suddenly feels overwhelmingly trivial and stupid and not worth the trouble.

There are two boys in the back yard. I see them clearly enough from my vantage point at the rear window. They are crouched under the metal staircase that leads down to the garden from the floor we’re on, the parlor floor. The boys are in their mid-teens, I’d guess. They are trying to hide among the gardening equipment. The bigger one is holding the shoulders of the smaller one, whose hands cover his own ears. Both look terrified.

Fred approaches me. “See anything out there?”

I shake my head.

The helicopter roar subsides. Everyone returns to the halibut.

Werner speaks up. “You want to talk about parking? Here’s something that really shook me.” When he’s satisfied he has our full attention, he goes on, “So I’m at this function thing, talking to these guys—reinsurance guys. You know what one of them says? On his block, which is in Brooklyn, on his block, people have started not moving their cars on street-cleaning days. They’re just leaving the cars on the street.”

“Why would they do that?” Sejal asks.

“Why? Because it’s easier to pay the sixty-five-dollar parking ticket.”

“Where is this block?” Fred asks. “I’m going with Cobble Hill.”

“Do you think I shouldn’t have given him that cookie?”

Cartoon by Will Santino

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“Carroll Gardens,” I say.

Werner says, “That’s not relevant. The block is not relevant.” He seems upset. “Do we not get that? I’m not talking about parking. I’m not talking about street cleaning. I’m talking about the implications. Do I have to spell out the implications?” He is looking squarely at me, as if I’m the one whose grasp of the implications is in doubt.

The table is quiet, and then Sejal laughs and says gently, “I think we get the implications, Werner.”

Werner says, “I’m sorry, I get worked up much too easily, this country is driving me out of my mind, I didn’t mean to raise my voice, poor Nicky has to put up with it, it’s, it’s . . .” He seems to be choking.

“No need to apologize,” Fred says. “Are you crazy? We’re all in the same boat here.”

I am nodding in agreement—but Werner’s outburst, like his wife’s, was made in a spirit of hostility, with me as the object. Why me I don’t know and don’t care. As far as I’m concerned, the final nail has been hammered into this dinner’s coffin. When the conversation moves on, I privately go my own way. I eat another portion of fish and I drink another glass of wine and I smile, but otherwise I keep my mouth shut. I have not driven across multiple boroughs to be harangued. I leave at the earliest opportunity that’s consistent with not giving offense to my hosts.

Night has fallen. When the dashboard welcomes me with its merry multicolored constellation, I feel halfway home. When I am really halfway home, I remember the two young fugitives. How could they have slipped my mind? They are out there somewhere, enjoying the cover of darkness. Good luck to them!

Three weeks later, I learn that P., who is forty-seven years old, has been dead for several days.

My mother once foretold that I would find happiness with a foreign woman. When I asked why, she replied that a foreign woman was more likely to appreciate my traits. My traits? I said. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t inquire further. Let sleeping dogs lie.

At any rate: this is my first-ever date with a foreigner. Sometimes I have trouble committing a person’s name to memory, but in this case I am helped by a rhyme. My date is named Martina, and she is from Argentina.

We meet at a tapas bar in Chelsea. She has long dark hair and flashing, kind eyes. We eat croquetas and chorizo al vino and calamares fritos, and we drink Rioja. It is hard to believe that this woman, so balanced and open-minded and uninjured by life, could be single. How interesting to learn about the discothèques of Buenos Aires! How pleasant to reminisce about my childhood in Sacramento! What a happy respite from the dark times! Things go so well that I confide in my companion. The confidence is as follows: I believe that she, Martina, is a fine soul. Martina smiles—whether out of amusement or gratification or embarrassment, I cannot tell. What is a fine soul? she asks. Can you give me an example? By way of an answer, to my own surprise, I talk about P., beginning by explaining that his name was Paolo, but he liked to be called ‘P.’ And suddenly I’m turning my head away from her and drying my eyes with a cocktail napkin and laughing apologetically.

Am I dreaming, or did Martina place her hand on my hand, fleetingly?

I share with her that my old friend P. died alone in his apartment, from natural causes, according to an announcement his family made on P.’s Instagram page, never offering more particulars, which for some reason I found painful; that last Friday I went to his funeral service, organized by P.’s aunt, at a funeral home in New Jersey; that it was a strange and sad affair from my point of view, because the family, which was totally unprepared for the whole business and still in shock, had let it be known that all of P.’s friends were welcome to attend the service, but in the end, other than myself, only two nonfamily people turned up, neither of whom I recognized, not even the guy who shook my hand and said, with a mysterious air of significance, Long time, no see; and that moreover P.’s family, which hails from Maine, was represented at the service only by the aunt and her four daughters and various plus-ones, out of all of whom the aunt seemingly was the only one with any personal knowledge of P., and even then, as her brief eulogy revealed, she recalled him only as an only child in Maine, splashing around on the sand beach in a little yellow sun hat, on Fortunes Rocks Beach, to be exact, and not as an adult in New York, which was why she, the aunt, invited those present, “who I’m sure got to know Paolo much better than I ever did,” to offer their memories of P., whereupon none of us spoke up, in my case because I simply could not recall in anecdotal detail the numerous what-ought-to-have-been rememberable times that P. and I had shared from college days onward, all of it was a fog, I tell Martina, except in one important regard, namely, my heart was not a fog, my heart clearly and truly contained my affection and I guess love for P., but of course this fact about my heart was too solipsistic to mention at P.’s funeral, at which the only truly specific thing about my deceased friend that came to my mind was that he and I had blissfully smoked thousands of cigarettes together as young men, which was another inappropriate fact, in the circumstances, needless to say.

Martina says, “Why so few friends came?”

P., I explain, was funny and thoughtful, always noticing this and that, always good company, a cultured person, always going to movies and art galleries and restaurants, always popular—until the last months of his life, when an ugly rumor cast a shadow over him, a rumor that I would not repeat to Martina, not only out of respect for P.’s memory but also out of my general distaste for ugly rumors, a rumor that naturally caused P. to suffer what must have been a very painful loss of reputation and undoubtedly turned people against him, even in death.

“That is a sad story,” Martina says.

“It is.” I’m tempted to add, The good that men do is oft interred with their bones, but I think that would be stretching it, bearing in mind this is a first date, and in any case I’m not sure I’ve got the quote right. “But to go back to your question,” I say, cheerfully, “let me give you an example of why P. was a fine soul.” This is when I mention P.’s concept of the secret that is the antithesis of the shameful hidden fact, the secret that nobody looks for, the secret whose existence is itself a secret: the light secret. Martina listens and smiles.

Soon it is time to leave. While my date briefly absents herself, I take care of the check—for once, I feel flush, I’ve started my new job—and then she and I step out into the brilliance and kinesis of a timeless, darkless New York night. New York! I suddenly feel very fortunate, and I would like my hand to hold Martina’s. Instead, at her request, I use it—my hand, that is, not Martina’s—to hail her a cab.

She doesn’t answer my follow-up text. Or the text after that. My traits have not travelled.

My practice is to direct unidentified calls to voice mail and to listen to voice messages once a week. Days can pass, in other words, between the receipt of an unidentified call and the moment I listen to the message left by the caller.

This is what happens in the case of a caller with a New York area code who phones twice and, after the second call, leaves a message. Four days go by before I listen to it:

Hey there—it’s Simon, Simon Morgan. It was good to see you at P.’s funeral. You know, it was P. who gave me your number. Anyway. Um, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you, if I could. A personal thing. Sounds a little weird, I know. But there’s something I’d like to straighten out. If that’s O.K. with you. Maybe we could grab a coffee or something? Let me know. Thanks.

I call Sejal. She says, “Yes, that is weird.”

“He wants to straighten things out? What things? What does he mean, ‘straighten out?’ ”

“Mm,” Sejal says.

“I’m telling you, I don’t know the guy. And there’s zero trace of him online. Is Simon Morgan even a real person?”

“Look, just ignore him. If he starts harassing you, then it’s a different story. But for now do nothing. Don’t even answer him.”

“It’s stressful,” I say.

“It must be,” Sejal says. “Are you O.K.?”

I don’t have to say anything about my ongoing financial difficulties. She knows the score. “Honestly,” I say, “I might be close to burnout.”

About a month later, a handwritten letter arrives in the mail. It’s from Simon Morgan. How did he get my address? I’m frightened, as if a ghost has written me.

The letter begins,

I hope you’ll forgive this intrusion. But there is something I feel I must say to you.

The rest I scan quickly.

It boils down to this: Simon Morgan is a self-described “addict.” As part of his recovery program, he has vowed to make amends for the harm he has caused others. To this end, he wants to remind me of the help I gave him back in the day, help that I offered with a pure heart, help that, until now, he has never acknowledged or thanked me for. Enclosed is a check for two hundred dollars, which is the amount I loaned him all those years ago and never requested repayment for.

I don’t cash the check. How could I? I don’t remember him. When Sejal asks me whatever happened to Simon Morgan, I represent to her that I never heard from him again and that Simon Morgan, if that’s his name, must have got me mixed up with someone else. ♦