… Even now as I write this I am in a state of the most incredible, delicious, unbearable tension. I think about the things you’ve told me and wonder about what you really know … You see, I’ve been struggling for some time to take you into my confidence. I’m not sure that this effort will be successful. It’s not that I don’t trust you. The question is, am I brave enough to reveal to anyone what I know is my deepest, darkest secret? And it is not merely a secret, oh, no; it is also my shame, pleasure, and treasure—I hope! I mean what I say about shame. It adds to my pleasure to know I must make myself completely vulnerable to you. If I knew why I was riveted to this, like a hypnotized chicken with eyes glued to a pebble, I think I would have the key to free the world.

My brother Joe had this. At the end of his life, Joe was obsessively interested in watching couples making love. What he said, what he told himself, was that he liked three-ways, but because I watched him watching me, I knew the truth. He looked like there was some part of it he didn’t understand.

This was news to Devlin. The two or three times he and the Brennan brothers had gotten into free-for-alls, it had been for the purpose of passing the girls around—or so Devlin had thought. Would he be able to remember something else if he tried? Those nights had been too many years ago, and he had been drunk continuously throughout. He didn’t like what he was feeling now about Jack and Joe Brennan. They hadn’t been much when he’d met them, and if Jack was telling the truth about his brother as well as himself, they hadn’t been much afterward, either. Something inside them had deteriorated and given way. What was the letter itself but evidence that its author was evolving for the worse? Devlin didn’t like what he was feeling at all. It was like remembering the worst of being a lush. If Devlin didn’t keep reading, the emotion would sweep him into the awful memories of raging at his father, being thrown out of gin mills, stealing from his mother.…