“Have you never realized that these feelings of inferiority that you are swamped with are legitimate? Why is it that your odd, slimy romp is always initiated with a knock at the door of your room in the middle of the night? Hasn’t it occurred to you that the men who take you to bed never take you anywhere else? Never let anyone know about it? Never, ever, allow themselves to be seen with you? Don’t you think it possible that they would be ashamed to have it known that they were forced to stoop to the likes of you as much as if they had used a sheep or a dog that way?”

The gently insistent inquiry of my voice still deceived her. I was very proud of that control over my voice. It allowed her to feel, even then, that she dealt with something familiar and might yet prevent any major damage, circumvent my intentions somehow. The words that had clotted in her teeth spilled out in the second that my interrogation voice ceased.

“I always thought it was because they were living with someone who didn’t satisfy their sexual needs, but whose feelings they didn’t want to hurt,” she said. Her gall enraged me. My blood surged through my head. I glared at her and felt a small stirring from the place where Ray was sitting. He thinks she’s right. I knew it and felt the fear of shame scoring my face. I sipped at the wine, rolled it against the top of my mouth.

“No,” I began calmly, “it is something else, you know. To begin with, there is your phony accent. Three months of speaking another language does not account for five years of polluted English. Then there is your personal hygiene. I had always heard that there was nothing dirtier than a dirty woman, but I never realized what that meant until I met you. Have you ever washed your sheets? Or are you lying in two years’ accumulation of crusty semen and mucus and sweat? And how many times a month do you take a bath? Or is it that often? In all the dozens of times I have seen you on every day of the week at any time of the day I have never once been near you when you didn’t smell like an overloaded outhouse. That’s why no one wants to eat your cooking. They’re all afraid of food poisoning.”

She was feeling it by then. She drew her pudgy feet beneath her skirt to hide their grime. She clenched her hands in her lap and then slid them beneath her armpits to conceal her stained fingertips and the gray dirt beneath the nails. She even folded in her lips to protect her teeth from view. She trembled.