Summary

After making herself another gin and tonic, Popkey’s narrator plays the video of the woman telling the story of Norman Mailer’s party. She is tortured by what she knows to be true: Norman stabbed Adele, and neither she nor her boyfriend did anything about it. Days after the event, the headlines are present, but spare: “Buried halfway through the Times, a column and a half, barely, plus a half-column-sized picture of Norman…Wife Stabbed, Novelist Held” (121). She marries and then divorces Bill, and after establishing herself in a career of her own, is still haunted by Adele. She remembers “thinking I should look her up and say something, something like I’m sorry. It’s too late now, of course. I never spoke to her again” (123).

Her testimony captivates Popkey’s narrator, who spends the next hour trying to figure out the...