I couldn’t tell her how fat she was, how grotesque her hips and legs were, pegged onto her merely plump top. Any mention of her fat would lead to comparisons to me and redound to my sorrow. Any reference to rudimentary ugliness would do the same. I sat watching her cry. She didn’t look at me anymore. She seemed to know I was finished. I drained off my wine and refilled the glass. I turned and poured more wine for Ray without looking at him. I sipped. A delicious fatigue was leaking through me. I had done precisely as I had planned.

“Go, now,” I said. “I’m through with you.”

She scrambled about her for her coat and purse before getting onto her knees and then onto her feet. She closed the door softly and I listened to her heavy clogs on the stairs all the way down. When the quiet came I turned to Ray. He lit a cigarette. I waited until he’d exhaled.

“What did you think of that?”

“A bit like hitting a fly with a two-ton truck,” he said.

From the moment he spoke the vile sensation in my chest began. He had been curious enough to stay for the show, but indifferent to whatever reason I had for wanting him there to witness it. The reason has been lost to me now, too. It was forgotten the precise moment that Ray spoke. The unpleasantness in my innards was the conviction, born full-grown, that I had been behaving despicably and that, given the slightest encouragement, I would have continued to do so. If he had only sat reviewing the scene with me, if he had only been impressed by my leonine ferocity and restrained delivery, that harangue, so magnificently purging, might have stood as one of the great pleasures of my life. As it is, the incident, even after many years, remains bitterly humiliating and is the true cause of my lack of correspondence with Ray.

It is not Moira Clancy that bothers me. She was a groveling, glutinous beast and any wound she picked up that day was at least genuine rather than imagined. It certainly did not drive her anywhere near suicide. If I had gone to her room and said those things, I would regret none of it. I could sit over coffee in the morning light and click my tongue proudly at having once in my life said what I thought to the person involved.

But I had to have an audience. And not just an audience, but an ally as well. Without his presence would I have dared to do it at all?