“Yes! I said I was sorry but I didn’t want to go on. I told him about Gerald. I couldn’t have explained the other thing, even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t understand it myself until recently. I probably didn’t even realize I was offended. Not that it would have made any difference. Telling him about Gerald certainly didn’t. If anything, it just spurred him on. Anyway it was all over very quickly, as they say. Very quickly.”

I nodded, absorbing the casual pragmatism she seemed to be admitting to. Apparently she saw nothing odd in adapting her emotions to fit her evolving perspective on the event.

“But you stayed with him, all the same,” I said.

“What?”

“You spent the night with him. That’s what he says. You were there the next morning when the cameraman came to wake him for the flight home.”

“Oh. Well, yes, that’s true. But what of it? I was drunk and I passed out. But I’d have stayed anyway, probably. I’m not going to pretend I was conflicted about that, at the time.”

“But I mean, if he’d just forcibly . . . you know . . . why would you stay in his bed?”

“I told you. I couldn’t articulate what I’d experienced, at the time. I didn’t tell myself: I’ve been raped. I knew something I didn’t want to happen had happened, but I didn’t know how to think about it. It wasn’t as if I was lying bleeding in a ditch, or tied up in a dungeon. It’s taken me a long time to see things for what they were. That’s not unusual, by the way, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”

“No, of course.”

She shook out the last drops of wine into her glass and went to open another bottle. I got up to pee. In the cramped bathroom a leaky tap hissed into a basin. There was a meager clutter of jars and half-squeezed tubes. I wondered what it must be like for Julia to live in a place like this. It wasn’t a dump, exactly, but it had a peculiar canceled atmosphere, as if it had been deliberately chosen for its lack of any qualities that might suggest the idea of a home.