My mouth was full. “Mmm,” I said, chewing bone. “Mm-hmm.” They all waited for me to go on. My three glasses of wine were hitting me, which made Lonnie’s words make more sense. None of these people mattered. “I was really inspired by these obscure, sixteenth-century Italian erotic dialogues,” I said, thinking of a book I’d found in Lonnie’s office.

“You know, the history of the body.” I lifted the phrase from Carlow.

I felt something scratching my foot and peeked under the tablecloth to see Aldous running his nails over my skin.

Everyone nodded. Gigi squinted at me. “Are you thinking about the male gaze?” she said.

I shook Aldous off my leg. He didn’t look up—I was nothing but a pair of disembodied legs to him. I heard him scamper over toward someone else, and jammed another glob of fish into my mouth, chewing in earnest. Was I thinking about the male gaze? Should I have been?

I nodded at Gigi. I could feel my face flushing. Lonnie was crazy for sending me in here. All I could think about was the ending of the movie Sisters where conjoined twins are on an operating table in the middle of a swimming pool while an audience looks on. The nurse pulls a meat cleaver out from underwater. It’s passed down the line of onlookers, slowly, with reverence, until it finally reaches the hand of the doctor.

“In what way?” Gigi said. “Are you giving the erotic dialogue a multiplicity of views?”

“Yes, exactly,” I said, taking another mouthful of trout, not knowing in the slightest what she meant. I kept picturing that doctor’s hand reaching up with the meat cleaver.

The man next to me picked up the conversation with a series of names that held no meaning for me. I nodded along with everyone else, relieved to have someone else speak and terrified the conversation would circle back to me, but it never did.

My decimated trout plate was eventually cleared away and we were served thick wedges of gooey chocolate cake. I matched little Aldous bite for bite. He glared at me from across the table, stuffing the confection into his pink maw with a frantic combination of fork and fingers—chewing openmouthed, sucking the remnants off his stubby digits. I swigged more wine, my stomach tight and painful.

When people finally started to trickle away from the table I slipped outside. Lonnie and William were sitting on the far edge of the porch, by the back entrance to the kitchen. William ran to me when he saw me coming, but Lonnie didn’t turn. She was wearing a large black sweatshirt over her dress, the sleeves pulled down around her hands. I picked up William and noticed a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich on crusty bread in his hand. He held it to my face, offering me a bite.

“No,” I told him, feeling sick. “For you.”