She said, You talk now. I can’t bear the sound of my own voice anymore.

As on my last visit, I tried talking about the usual things, books I’d read, movies I’d seen, but kept lapsing into silence, at which she would become agitated and start talking herself again.

Do you know who came to see me yesterday?

She named someone I knew only by reputation but who’d been a good friend of hers since journalism school. He’d been fired from his paper’s staff and from his teaching position within hours of being accused of a half-dozen incidents of sexual misconduct, including an affair with a TA.

He was always that way, she said. As the bad joke about Harvey Weinstein goes: came out of the womb groping his mother. A dirty old man when he was still in his twenties. He was one of them: always ogling and drooling and unable to keep his hands to himself. Well, I didn’t know what to tell him, my friend said. In the blink of an eye his life is destroyed. He’d even thought about suicide, my friend said this man had confessed to her. Imagine, he sat right there where you’re sitting and talked about how he might as well end it all, and then he caught himself and started begging my forgiveness for being such an insensitive prick, and then, my friend raised her voice as she said, he started crying. I kept saying it was okay, she said, because I couldn’t stand to lie here listening to him crying and apologizing, but Jesus, you know, it was not okay, she said, it was anything but okay, my friend said emphatically to me.

That’s the one thing I will not tolerate, she went on. Do feel bad for me, but no goddamn sniveling or blubbering in front of me. I won’t have it, she said. Now I’m sorry I ever confided in him. But he’s such an old friend, you know, and so far I haven’t told many people. And in fact that’s something I have to start thinking about, isn’t it, my friend asked rhetorically: Who should I tell and how should I go about telling them. And, more important, who do I want to see. There’s a lot to think about. I’ve been making a list. I have to say goodbye to people, you know. I have to— Should I give a party? I’m serious! Should I make an announcement on Facebook? I’ve seen people do that. It makes sense, of course, but it seems so bizarre to me. I’m not sure I could bring myself to do that.