“Listen, Julia, I’ve been wanting to tell you,” I heard myself say, the words tumbling out in a sudden, clumsy, headlong rush, “I’m a friend of Marco’s. Marco Rosedale. I see quite a lot of him in New York.”

7

7

IT SEEMS EVEN CLUMSIER NOW, that declaration, than it did at the time. Brutal, almost. But then in hindsight practically everything I said seems tinged with brutality.

The effect on Julia was instant and extreme. She seemed to recoil from me, physically flinching back into her chair, all the little nuanced tensions of amusement on her face slackening at once, giving way to a look of hurt shock, followed by anger.

“Is that why you’re here?”

“No.”

“Did he send you?”

“No.”

“He sent you, didn’t he?”

“No. I’m here because you invited me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?”

“I’ve been wanting to. Ever since you called. It’s just—not the easiest thing in the world to bring up.”

“What isn’t?”

“Well . . . the whole story.”

She gave me a hard stare.

“You’ve heard it then.”

“Parts of it. His side, obviously.”

“What does he say?”

“Well, mainly that he didn’t, you know . . .”

“Rape me?”

I nodded. She looked down, her lips moving for a moment without sound.

“What I’d like to know,” she said, raising her head again, “is why the fuck, in that case, he thinks I’m saying he did?”

I’d decided by then that I was going to be absolutely frank. I felt guilty for not having told her right away that I knew Marco, and it seemed to me I owed her a full account of everything he and I had discussed. More pragmatically, I also sensed I was as close to the heart of the story as I was ever likely to get, and that in my role as its custodian, so to speak, I ought to do whatever I could to keep pushing forward. Frankness on my part, it seemed to me, would be as good a method as any to provoke frankness on hers.

“He has a few theories,” I said.

“Such as?”

I looked at her as levelly as I could.

“Money, principally.”

She breathed in, long and slow. I saw a muscle clench in her jaw.

“Money?”

“He seems to think you . . . you’re in a position of needing to make money.”

She gave a mirthless smile.

“Well, it’s true. I am. Who isn’t? Not him I suppose, with his money-bags father behind him. Anyway, so what?”

“That’s why he thinks you wrote that thing,” I said. “Or one of the reasons.”

She closed her eyes, shaking her head slowly.