When his mother had left the room he closed the door, and then tried to camouflage the obdurate hardness of his apathetic eyes with a contrived smile. Closure was nonetheless in those eyes. They were hard and hallowed and they were permanently enclosed like tinctured and opaque glass windows. How, she remonstrated against herself, had she debased herself by knocking on a door of this family home and why did she stay here with him whose orbs were like slammed doors in one's face. How was it that she continued to knock? He smiled since there was every chance that she could rectify herself in his eyes through discomfort and contrition. Seated with this nemesis, he gained pleasure at the thought that she had been allowed to squirm in a seat for over an hour the way her son had waited and squirmed in the principal's office while dreading the forthcoming paddling. "I tried to call you," said Gabriele, "but I think you were trying to avoid me." "Possibly," he said. He could have told her lies that his mobile telephone was not functional or he could have prevaricated beyond the emphatic use of perhaps. Instead, he had made a truthful statement. She thought that she had to give him points for at least that; but as she pondered this he pulled out a cigar, lit it, and blew the smoldering flames into her face. That face turned red in anger and hate. It just bit a lower lip as an arm fanned away the smoke. These were hard gestures that were in part flailing against the personal life sucking her into its vortex of winds, and in part a protest of a man's insolence toward this womanly weakness that he correctly presumed to ooze within her. He saw hate in eyes harder than his own and finding not only them erotic but also the breath that was trying to extricate itself from the inhalation of smoke, he wanted to exercise against her will. He wanted to use her as if she were the gravity and the bar by which he might do pull-ups to claim masculine strength and virile complacency. He wanted to toss her onto a mattress and rape her like any gentleman. She feigned a smile unsuccessfully. It was a hateful smile of hubris against him and all his male counterparts to whom a woman, and a female to a lesser degree, supplicated herself. Even more, it was a hateful distorted smile against herself who, no matter how hard she tried, could not fully exit the trivial sphere of the personal domain any more than an obese woman could easily leave her apartment. "Monogamy, what a premier virtue, it is!" she thought sardonically. This denunciation was a defense against her feelings of guilt over the sexcapade with Candyman. She knew that it was so, for the guilt was spraying out onto consciousness with that constancy of a fizz of breakers on a beach. She knew that it was so, for there was a feeling disgorging within her that was a nasty flair of a warm shaken can of beer oozing from between the closed tab.