“I loved Max with all my heart. He never left me.” I could see that Inga was thinking about how to phrase what came next. She looked at me with open, earnest eyes. “The truth is he was fragile, sensitive, and a little volatile. He threw things across the room a few times. He roared like a lion when he was angry. He could be cut off, too, hard to talk to sometimes, but she used the words ‘physically aggressive,’ a euphemism, I presume, for wife beating or something. You can’t respond to that; it sounds like denial. You can’t say anything. There’s no recourse at all. She also mentioned Scotch with a little sneer, asking me which label he preferred, and then she brought up the time he punched that stupid reviewer at a PEN dinner. Max drank, but he worked hard every day of his life until he was too sick and that was only near the very end. Even in the hospital he kept notes. All the time I knew him, he got up in the morning and wrote. The difference was that when I met him, he wasn’t sad. He was so hungry for everything, but as he got older, he got sadder. After his mother died, he suffered, and I suffered with him. He was my best friend, but did I know everything about him? No, I didn’t, and I didn’t want to either. This awful woman will round up Adrian and Roberta. They were both married to him for exactly three years. Adrian won’t say much, but Roberta will be delighted to crap all over him. God only knows how many of his ex-lovers and one-night stands are out there. She’ll talk to the ones who continued to like him and the ones who hated his guts. She’ll listen to the envious yakking of this third-rate novelist and the next one, and she’ll write some garbage that will all be accurate, not a word misquoted, and then she’ll parade it out there as the real story. That’s how it goes, Erik. I know that. What sickened me was what I felt in her—something intrusive and ugly that made me feel polluted, no, not just polluted, frightened. I was scared.”

“Of what?”

“I had the feeling that she knows something . . .” She paused. “She mentioned Sonia too, in an unpleasant way. She said something about all those women and just one child—it was so . . .”

“Mom.” We both turned to see the girl herself standing in the hallway. “Who was talking about me?”

“A creepy journalist.”

“Did she have red hair?”

“Yes,” Inga and I said in unison.

Sonia took a few steps forward. “I was at the Bowery Poetry Club with some friends, and she came up to me, ‘You’re Max Blaustein’s daughter,’ blah, blah, blah. I tried to be polite and blow her off, but she kept pushing. I’m afraid I got kind of angry. I told her to piss off.”