He never said hello when I came back from work but went on reading or staring at the wall as the record spun out on its wheel of sound. I would come in as softly as my bulk permitted, kick off my broken shoes, and cavort cautiously to plant a kiss on his troubled brow. He would pat my head as polite as anything, and then I would seek out my hidden treasures while hanging up my coat. I’d rattle open the wax bag, take a bite, change my clothes, munching all the while. Then I’d flush the crumbs down the sink and rinse the sugar off my cheeks before going back to sit at his feet and ask what he’d like for supper. As often as not, he would say, “Nothing.” He seemed to live on red wine, dried apricots, and the odd salt binge. Then I would tell him tall tales and resort to my caches repeatedly during the evening. In the morning I would wait until I got to work where the donuts would be hot and fresh.

One day when I returned home, the donuts were all gone. “You…” I began tentatively, “you haven’t done anything with my donuts, have you?”

His swiveled his lovely head toward me with a chilly glitter in his eye: “They’re out there.” He nodded at the fire escape. “I pissed on them.”

“Hee hee,” I said, trotted to the window, and leaned out. He had always been amusing, perhaps he was joking. We kept an old five-gallon paint bucket on the fire escape as a garbage can. I pulled it toward me; it grated over the steel platform. Inside, melted sugar ran down, a shining syrup, and chocolate frosting was crushed into the donut mush. I also whiffed the stench of his urine.

I gasped, pushed the pail away, and whirled round on him, where he sat in my wing-backed chair. I was outraged. I unleashed the unadulterated anger I’d been holding in for months: “Why did you do that?”

“Because you must weigh two hundred pounds already. I pissed on them all day.”

I was burnt by grief, rage, frustration—not, at that moment, by shame, not at all, but because the donuts were no longer edible.

I tried to stop eating them. The shame took hold and festered long after that particular hunger had evaporated. Shame was not new to me and had only been held off, like the remission of a terminal disease. Thinking about how he was shamed by me, brought low, as it were, by my very proximity, fills me even now with misery.