And so I finally laughed, as, in the end, I always laughed with my mother. “OK,” I said. “No fights. But you have to promise me that you’ll try to get well, really try.”

My mother laughed, too. “I’ll do my best,” she said. “Now, how many people are you going to try to squeeze into this party in June? Could we manage something elegant that is not a mob scene? Could you restrict yourself to friends about whom you actually have some feeling?”

As we ate dessert, my mother described the terrible food at a wedding she’d attended the previous week, soup “like library paste with small chunks of wood” and the meat “which had been put in to roast the same week the invitations were printed” and the cake “with icing you could have roller-skated on.” We began to spin out the plans for my party, and it became magnificent. We both laughed and laughed and everything we were imagining seemed so real to me that I could not hold on to the fact that my mother was planning to kill herself, and had just told me all about it.

• • •

I suppose that losing Bernard was my own doing, and I think I did it to practice for losing my mother. I spent the month of October loving my mother, and that love took on a purity because all my rage and hatred were taken out on Bernard. I wrote him a cruel letter about abandonment, and I plotted the terrible things I would do to him. I would go into his flat and smash the set of espresso cups his grandmother had left him. I would smash his Chinese vase. I would smash his Chinese vase over his head. I would find the keys to his windows and throw them away so that he couldn’t get to his window boxes. I would mutilate his cat. I would tell him that I had AIDS. I would go in in the middle of the night and smother him with his own pillow. I wrote him a letter carefully designed to make him fall in love with me, hopelessly in love, so that I could reject him brutally. I would cut the sleeves off all his favorite shirts. I would castrate him with a straight razor.

Helen was immeasurably patient with this catalog of fantasies, but said very definitively that the most effective revenge was to be charming and blasé, so that he would regret having allowed the relationship to slide. I am not entirely persuaded that this was more effective than some of these schemes of violence would have been, but it was certainly more sensible; and, as Helen pointed out, it was something I would be unlikely to regret later on. It allowed me to keep some dignity, and was not illegal. For a while that October, Bernard phoned every day, but I did not answer my telephone and let him leave messages on my machine. I called his machine during the day, when I knew he would be out. At first, I told him what was happening, but finally I asked him not to phone me anymore.