‘Was the woman pretty?’

‘Her body was terrifically sexy. She really blitzed me.’

What was the good of saying, ‘She was a nymphomaniac. You get no credit for that.’ No. With Oriental patience, I held still while he loaded me like a beast of burden with his anecdotes. So that long after he had forgotten, I still remembered his sexual afternoons and evenings. Even his mornings, when, waiting in a doorway, he watched a husband leaving for work.

‘Were you giving the woman time to change the bed?’

‘Change! Where do you get such an idea! This is the action.’

His big eyes, dilated to the limit, demanded your admiration. Heat, crowding, limbs and trunks, lust, dirt, and histrionics. The cameras were always on him. In my generation, these darting on-camera glances were common. Like the movie made of Street Scene, by Elmer Rice – the camera moving melodramatically from the crowded East Side street, up the fire escape to the window of the adulteress, while the audience was crazed unaware by suggestive music.

I seemed to Jay to drown my emotions in my face, Chinese style.

Amy had it right. She understood that he briefed me on his sexual activities. Jay believed they were memorable. They should be told.

She asked me more than once whether Jay had played the incriminating tapes for me.

‘No,’ I always said.

‘They were heard in chambers. After a few minutes, I asked the judge to excuse me. I admitted that it was my voice, and he said I could go.’

‘It never occurred to you that Jay had you bugged?’

‘Never. And he’s always been an obvious man. He couldn’t wait to tell you what he was up to. He’s not the kind to have long-range cunning silent plans.’

‘As a divorce lawyer, he must have recommended secret traps to clients, to husbands or to wives.’

‘Of course. He used to tell me about it. He dealt with several detective agencies,’ said Amy.

‘You didn’t think he’d do it to you.’

‘He lost all interest in me, that way. About ten years ago, we went through the final stages of black underwear and doing it in front of the mirror. I had to bend over the back of a chair.’

I wished that Amy wouldn’t tell me such things.

I told her when I returned from Burma and Guatemala just how she had figured in my life. Of course, she didn’t know the full extent of it. Nor did she ask for the particulars. By asking, she would have opened herself to my questions, and that inevitably would have brought up the specifics. Better generalities than the minute particulars in such matters.

People like Jay Wustrin present themselves so as to dramatize or to advertise – they put forth an image. Their idea of themselves is a public idea. Thus Amy in her black underwear being done from behind by her stout husband can become a picture suitable for framing. Hang it in your guest room … Your inwardness should be – deserves to be – a secret about which nobody needs to get excited. Like the old gag … Q: ‘What’s the difference between ignorance and indifference?’ A: ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care.’