Later, in retrospect, that abortive pool party would seem unreal, a hallucination. It was one occasion when my family’s history may have intersected with that of Iran-Contra, but the stories seemed all but impossible to put together. To bring my dad—the dad who fixed things around the house, washed the cars, ate chips—into that tangle of secret machinations and planes full of weapons parts, meant recasting him as a different kind of person, a naive gringo in a geopolitical melodrama. Yet to work the other way, to try to reconcile the bigger picture with the kitchen on Albemarle Street, with our life circa 1985, seemed just as distorting, the product an erratic family comedy in which a cartoonish Oliver North had an odd cameo. I could inflate everything or I could minimize and poke fun. It was the same thriller vs. satire problem I’d had with the screenplay.

But this much I do know: eighteen months after the party, the joint select committees’ investigators learned that my parents had entertained the special assistant to the Saudi ambassador, and they made a point of asking both my dad and Mitchell about it in the depositions each gave in advance of the hearings, as though perhaps a deal had been done poolside, i.e., my father and/or Dick Mitchell might’ve solicited an illegal contribution to the Contras from Mr. Abdulaziz. The suggestion seems outlandish to me. No way did that happen: I’m convinced. Still, I wonder whether they could’ve possibly meant to do it, intended to make their own freelance solicitation, until I’d interrupted them with my injury.

(From the deposition of Richard Mitchell, March 9, 1987)

MR. LEGRAND. What did you hope to gain from your contact with Mr. Abdulaziz? Or is it Prince Abdulaziz?

MR. MITCHELL. I was never clear on whether he is a prince or not. They have a lot of princes over there. He may have been one.

MR. LEGRAND. But in terms of your objective.

MR. MITCHELL. I would say that I was pursuing a relationship but not that I had a specific objective.

MR. LEGRAND. Did you notify your superiors at the State Department?

MR. MITCHELL. Yes. My boss was Elliott Abrams and I told him about it.

MR. LEGRAND. Did you notify anyone on the National Security Council staff, other than Mr. Atherton?

MR. MITCHELL. I personally did not. I believe Mr. Abrams may have mentioned it to Ollie North.

MR. LEGRAND. Were he and North friends, to your knowledge?

MR. MITCHELL. To the best of my knowledge they had substantial professional contact, which was friendly in nature. I would describe them as being close, on a professional basis.

MR. LEGRAND. And were you friendly with Mr. North?

MR. MITCHELL. Our interactions were always friendly.

MR. LEGRAND. Would it be fair to say that your friendly relationship with Oliver North ran counter to the prevailing attitude at the State Department?

MR. MITCHELL. He had his detractors, but it wasn’t a universal attitude within the department. Certain people considered him an activist.

MR. LEGRAND. Activist in what sense?

MR. MITCHELL. Very operationally driven, and capable of manipulating people in order to get done what he wanted to get done.

MR. LEGRAND. Did you share that view?

MR. MITCHELL. I saw him as someone who was very passionate and very effective.

MR. LEGRAND. Would it be fair to say that his detractors included the secretary of state?

MR. MITCHELL. I was present at a meeting during which the secretary of state told Abrams to “watch Ollie North.”

MR. BENNETT. Can we go off the record?

MR. LEGRAND. Sure.

(Discussion off the record.)

MR. LEGRAND. Back on the record.

The inquiry into the alleged solicitation was dropped, after it was revealed that the Saudis had already been contributing to the cause, secretly, for more than a year by the time of the pool party. Only a handful of people had been briefed on the Saudi contributions, and my father and Dick Mitchell had not been among them. Even the president may not have been fully briefed—at least that would become his defense. Nobody had the big picture.

We never had anything close to a big picture on Albemarle Street. I hardly had any picture at all. The scandal would bewilder me, it would become entangled with the general confusions and fears of adolescence, so that I still, all these years later, wanted to sort it out, to arrive at some kind of big picture for myself. What had my dad done—who had he been? I still wished we could collaborate, which is to say I wanted Dad to tell me what had happened and then I could write it, or both of us could, but if he chose to keep quiet I would go on trying to piece it all together, assembling fragments and figments.

I’m inclined to believe that Dick Mitchell was the type of person who would find older mentors he could flatter and profit from, men who liked to see themselves in him. In the early eighties, he’d met North, and though North wasn’t much older than he was, not a mentor exactly, Dick ingratiated himself with the lieutenant colonel. By that time my father was already on the NSC staff, and so it was easy enough for his friend to pull him in, to cut him a piece of the action. I’m not trying to blame it all on Dick, but had it not been for him I bet Dad might not even have known what North was up to. After all, there were plenty of NSC staff people who had no idea.

*   *   *

My quote-unquote manager called me while I was at the grocery store. I always felt a quick jab of hope at the sight of Phil Franklin’s name on the phone display. Although I was not an optimist in general, I would enter contests (screenwriting competitions for one, but also raffles to win luxury cars or gourmet cookware, whatever was there to be won), and I answered phone calls from him in the same spirit, wanting to believe and so semibelieving that a studio executive had gone into raptures over an idea or a script of mine. That never came to pass, though. Now Phil announced he was quitting the entertainment business to help out a friend who’d started a custom yacht company in Marin County.

“You’re going to build boats?”

“Of course not. I’m going to sell boats.”

“Boats.”

“It’s a great opportunity.”

Here I’d thought of him as one of Hollywood’s enthusiasts, someone who would never leave the industry, but turned out he was just an enthusiast. His sentiment for TV and movies could be transferred to boats. And where did that leave me? Even though Phil had not actually helped me to become the working writer I’d hoped to become, his news was upsetting. Now I have nothing to go back to, I thought. It wasn’t necessarily true, but I thought it anyway. There was nothing for me in Los Angeles anymore.

The house was empty when I returned from the store. I didn’t know where Dad had gone. The answering machine blinked: Tim, this is Roy Kotler, I wanted to let you know I won’t be able to make it to the panel on Tuesday. I’ve got family coming into town, and … The event was less than a week away, and acquaintances of my dad’s kept calling to say they weren’t coming.

It had been a while since I’d found myself alone in the house where I’d grown up, and without my present-day dad to remind me that the twenty-first century was well under way, I started to feel as if I would wake up the next morning and have to get ready for school. That my sisters and my parents would all be in the kitchen, eating breakfast, reaching around each other for the milk—and when I pictured that ordinary, harried, unfeeling moment I both regretted what I saw there and longed to return to it, as though I might better appreciate something about it or even inject a larger dose of love into it than had been there the first time.

I drank a beer and watched TV, fell asleep to a report of another roadside bomb somewhere in Iraq.

When I woke up, I went online to look for temp work. I was so accustomed to making efforts that led to nothing, to writing pilots and pitch documents that wound up in wastebaskets—and meanwhile to taking jobs in production that, unglamorous though they were, I’d found by knowing the right people—that I’d almost forgotten there were other kinds of jobs that were more or less readily available to college graduates, at least in D.C. in 2004 there were. Although I was ten years too old for filing and Xeroxing, I sent in a résumé. I touted my experience with the relevant software. I talked to some woman on the phone for less than ten minutes, and the next week I landed in an office in Crystal City, consisting of a handful of small rooms that had been modern circa the midseventies and so were plain and dreary now, in a humble building linked by tunnel to underground shops and the Metro, so that I came and went without ever stepping out of doors, a working gopher. My desk had nothing on it but a telephone and a file tray. Between tasks, I watched the light change out the window.