“The part that’s most disappointing is that I haven’t spoken to the president in several weeks. I haven’t spoken to Melania or any of the kids,” Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer and confidante, lamented to me last week. It was a Friday morning and Cohen was biting into eggs over easy and dry seven-grain toast at a coffee shop in Water Mill, the hamlet of Southampton, which was sandwiched between a Tracy Anderson studio and a farmers’ market, and near his vacation home. It was the unofficial last weekend of summer, and while the diners around us discussed their upcoming boat trips or blueprints for new houses, Cohen was facing a more pressing, and public, summons. As one of several figures under scrutiny in an F.B.I. and congressional investigation into purported links between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cohen was preparing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee.

The testimony, originally scheduled for the Tuesday after Labor Day, had been delayed by the time we met, leaving him to spin his wheels as his name appeared in stories and across cable-news chyrons. His profile had recently been amplified by a Washington Post report noting that he had reached out to the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential race seeking help for a potential Trump real-estate project in Russia. And Cohen was already a co-star of the infamous dossier on Trump and Russia, prepared as opposition research by a former British Intelligence agent. In the unverified report, he’s said to be a crucial conduit to the Russians. “It’s like a Michael Crichton novel,” Cohen told me.

In advance of the hearing, Cohen said that at the advice of his lawyer, he and the Trumps were now on a forced break from speaking to one another. “All parties thought it would be best if we ceased communication unless it was an emergency so that when the questioning occurs, nobody can say to me, ‘Well, did you speak to the president within the last week or three weeks? What did you talk about?’” He continued: “It’s good legal advice,” he said. “But it’s not the advice I want. . . . That’s something that’s difficult for me because I routinely spoke to all of them on a regular basis.”

Cohen has been described as the sixth Trump child, or as the Tom Hagen in this twisted version of The Godfather, and sometimes as both, even by Cohen himself. It is, in many ways, a fair description. Like Trump, Cohen has a porous filter, a perennially puffed-up chest, and a penchant for histrionics, particularly when things are not going his way. He also grew up on the outskirts of New York City looking in, doesn't sleep more than three hours per night, he said, and appears to subscribe to the notion that all press is good press. When I asked Cohen how he handles being the object of social-media ire, he responded, without a breath, “It means I’m relevant.”

Perhaps most pointedly, the two men prioritize loyalty. After a decade as a counsel for the Trump Organization, where he rose to executive vice president, Cohen resigned in January in order to serve as Trump’s personal lawyer, thereby avoiding the appearance of a conflict that would come with cashing a Trump Organization check while working for the president. But as Cohen put it to me, the distance was now grating on him. He would much prefer to be in Washington with his former boss, especially as the president faced the roughest stretch of his tenure amid the Russia investigation, a pair of historically catastrophic hurricanes, and forthcoming debates over the debt-ceiling, tax reform, and health-care. “At times I wish I were there in D.C. more, sitting with him in the Oval Office, like we used to at Trump Tower, to protect him,” he said. “I feel guilty that he’s in there right now almost alone, especially now that Keith has resigned,” he said. (Cohen was referring to Trump’s longtime bodyguard and confidante, Keith Schiller, who is reportedly leaving the White House.) “There are guys who are very loyal to him that would have gone in, but there was a concerted effort by high-ranking individuals to keep out loyalists.”