If A takes the email at its word, the woman is nothing more than a bête noire of B’s. He had found her amusing, and was describing her to amuse A. Throughout the game, B wrote, the woman kept pouting about jo and obi. There was no point in playing, she would pout, because B had already demolished them all, right out of the gate. She grew increasingly petulant, especially when it became clear to her that—among the four players—she had by far the lowest score, irrecoverably low. Do I really have to keep playing, she would ask. Oops, she would say, feigning to drop her beige tiles on the carpet, but in fact scattering them everywhere like a child. Things came to a head toward the end of the game, B wrote, when B—in the lead now by dozens of points—played za (the latest addition, evidently, to the Scrabble dictionary: slang for pizza). The woman had a field day over za. Za?!, she shrieked, B wrote. What is za?! Za is a word, B assured her: he could look it up in the Scrabble dictionary, if she wanted. But by this time the woman had had quite enough of the Scrabble dictionary. She did not bother challenging za. For the remainder of the game, she simply kept exclaiming to herself, at random: I still can’t get over za!

A is disinclined to take B’s email at its word. Over and above his caricature of the woman, there is something B wants A to know. For one thing, A does not like the sound of all this pouting. It sounds to A as if the woman was flirting with B. Each indignant outburst seems to bear a double message: You cheat, you play fake words means You know such esoteric words. You demolished all of us means Your vocabulary ravishes me. B was not an idiot. Surely he was alert to these flirtations. But if he was alert to them, then why had he included them? Why had he sent them for A to read?

Perhaps B thought nothing of it, or thought that A would think nothing of it. Or perhaps he knew that the anecdote would make her jealous, and had included it to let her know that strange women were flirting with him. Conversely, the anecdote might have been designed to allay her jealousy, and to reassure her: B might have been demonstrating his fidelity by skewering his would-be suitors.

And there is another interpretation, too, A realizes: that the person B is reassuring is, not A, but himself. For it is always possible that he is skewering the woman for his own sake. If B had initially been attracted to her, and even considered pursuing her, then he might have felt pangs of guilt at some point during the Scrabble game. Out of remorse, he would have begun to resent the woman, and it would be for this reason—to atone for his mental or emotional infidelity—that he would have caricatured her so mercilessly, picking her apart, destroying her, then bringing her remains to A’s doorstep, with an almost feline fealty, like some bird he had slain.