Thinking that in a sense she’d triumphed over Ned Spires. He’d been reduced to begging her not to ruin his life, a coward’s life. As Juliana’s lover, he’d been ardent, ecstatic. He hadn’t had a mind for his unhappy wife, then. And so now Juliana cared nothing for him. She pitied the man, a weak man finally, like Gordon Kechel, who’d given her up without a fight—who’d simply repudiated her without ever seeing or even speaking with her again.

How could Juliana have loved Ned Spires!—the acne-roughened face, shadowed eyes. The pathos of his poetry, about which (though he tried to disguise it) he was so vain.

Mere scribbled words, publications in magazines in which a poem was merely decorative amid a page of prose bounded by advertisements, a poetry prize or two—did the deluded man think such meager achievements would make him immortal?

He would beg Juliana to relent, eventually. He would beg her to forgive him and to love him again. She knew. A drinker will always return.

Yet when Juliana returned to the Wild Goose Tavern the next night, Ned Spires wasn’t there. She waited at the bar in her usual place until eleven p.m. He’d let her down, she should have known. Weak, a coward! Acquaintances of his from the university stopped here, weeknights. Juliana knew them by their faces, not names. She’d never been good at names. Nodding at Ned Spires when she was with him, and at her. But when Juliana wasn’t with Ned, not seeming to see her.

Bastards. She hated them all.

Into the Wild Goose in the later part of the evening came a familiar face, a white-haired older friend of Ned Spires, possibly a fellow poet, to whom Juliana spoke as a naïve young girl might speak.

Asking this person if he knew “Ned Spires”—if “Ned Spires” was to be trusted? A good man?

The white-haired man stared at Juliana in surprise.

Asking her, why did she want to know?

Juliana said that “Ned Spires” told her he was separated from his wife and filing for a divorce and she was wondering was any of that true …

Seeing in the white-haired man’s face an expression of doubt, dislike, Juliana ceased speaking. For she was not accustomed to men regarding her with such condescension, especially not older men who were (usually) grateful for her attention.

Carefully the white-haired man told Juliana that he “had not heard a word” about a separation, still less a divorce.

“But Ned Spires is a ‘good man’—to be ‘trusted’?”