Annabel Poe

By Robert Trainor

My maiden name was Annabel Poe, but then I married Dirk Peabody, and in an unfortunate burst of romantic enthusiasm, I consented to have my last name changed to Peabody. I say unfortunate because when I had been Annabel Poe, I had always thought of myself as a beautiful woman with my raven-black hair, attractive figure, and feisty personality. But after twenty-five years of living under the name of Annabel Peabody, my hair turned grey, I began to put on weight, and it wasn't long before I developed an inferiority complex. However, after I was arrested and charged with murder, I began to revert to the person I had been when my name was Annabel Poe. I still looked the same with my somewhat homely appearance, small stature, and old-fashioned Granny's-bun hairdo, but quite unexpectedly, a very dark side of my personality emerged when I was thrown into the limelight and had to defend myself against a number of powerful people who were determined to send me to prison for the rest of my life. It was only after enduring the mockery of the crowd and the taunts of my persecutors that I was able to spring a trap that took everyone completely by surprise. Relentlessly tormenting the judge, who physically assaulted me and called me the biggest piece of trash to ever enter her courtroom, I came away from my trial with over a half-million dollars in settlement money. Nowadays, the only thing I regret about my encounter with the law is that I forgot to tell my accusers one very obvious fact about Annabel Poe: Sass me and I'll sass you back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Trainor
• Release date: Feb 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223153368

Robert Trainor

Over the past twelve years (since I retired at the age of 59), I've written nineteen novels, four novellas, four non-fiction books, and seven anthologies, all of which you can find in the Kindle Store. Instead of writing a biography of myself, which seems rather irrelevant, I would prefer to write a biography of my books. Here, in the order in which they were written, is a brief sketch of the plots, themes, and subject matter of these books.1/ The Voice of the Victim describes a series of murders in a small city. I've always felt a great deal of empathy for the victims of violent crimes, especially those who are murdered by guns. What, I wondered, would these people say to us if they could speak? When reading this book, it is important to remember that my intention, from first page to last page, was to present the voice of the victim. And, to me, this voice is not a straight-line accusation of weapons and murderers but tends to veer to a pervasive mockery and total indictment of modern culture. This novel is much different than anything else I have written, and there will be many who will object to what the "voice" is saying.2/ Some Things Are Sweeter than God is somewhat along the lines of a classic murder mystery but is certainly not one of those books where the conclusion is some wild revelation that no sensible reader could ever discern beforehand. The protagonist is a forty-year-old woman lawyer who, in her role as a public defender, is required to represent a man who is accused of brutally murdering his ex-girlfriend.3/ The Road Map to the Universe is a well-constructed novel--at one time, I was a tournament chess player, and this book required a great deal of planning and analysis. Essentially, it's a highly unusual murder mystery, but the perceptive reader may be able to identify a standard plot theme lurking in the background. The Road Map also examines an interesting philosophical question: In a universe of four billion galaxies, what relevance, if any, does the human being have?4/ The Great Barrington Train Wreck, a truly offbeat social commentary, includes a unique type of murder mystery and is one of my favorite novels. Although I almost never include anything from my own life experience in my books, I was, just like the protagonist in the Train Wreck, homeless for many years. So I'm familiar with the lingo and attitude that some of the homeless have. This is a catchy, captivating book where the plot seems to materialize out of thin air until it becomes the elephant in the room. Also, to my mind, this tale could describe what happens to Holden Caulfield, the anti-hero of the Catcher in the Rye, as he approaches forty. It's not all peaches and cream! Especially when he falls in love with the daughter of a millionaire, and even more especially when he ends up on death row.5/ Your Kiss Is Like the Sweetest Fire describes a teenage romance between Jaime and Renee, who were adopted at a young age into the same family. It seems illogical to me, but in almost all states, the law views a sexual relationship between adopted siblings who live in the same family as a crime of incest--exactly as if they were related by blood. So Jaime and Renee have this difficulty to contend with, and also, their mother and father are both rather repulsive characters who are totally incapable of helping them. Wait until you meet Renee--I love her.6/ Requiem for the West is partially based on an apocalyptic poem that I wrote during the 1990's. Ten thousand hours is a lot of time to spend on a seven-hundred-word poem! Requiem is also an examination of some apparently abstract themes that seem highly relevant to me: 1/ The pervasive role of explicit sexuality in our culture and the very different ways that people react to it; 2/ The often farcical, Dilbert-like nature of the modern workplace, in this case a college; and 3/ Is doomsday just around the corner? The 1960-2000 version of myself considered a nuclear apocalypse to be inevitable, but nowadays, I'm ambivalent.7/ Frontier Justice was easy to write because once Adriana Jones arrived on page 10, she took over the book, and all I had to do was keep up with her as she overpowered every obstacle that crossed her path. I hadn't intended for that to happen, but that's the way life goes sometimes. Do I agree with, support, condone, or advocate Adriana's way of doing things? Difficult questions. Adriana is my creation, so I have to take some responsibility for her, I suppose, but I look at it this way: To be true to a character, one has to let the person speak and act in a way that is appropriate to his or her personality. I just can't legislate them into political correctness! Adriana didn't just overpower the other characters in Frontier Justice--she also overpowered me. I really like this book--I wish, as a writer, I could think of more characters who are as dynamic as Adriana.8/ A Tale from the Blackwater River is a novella that is meant to be a satire on a certain kind of story that is showing up far too frequently nowadays, but on another level, it's just kind of a humorous tale that was a lot of fun to write. This book is written in the first person by a forty-two-year-old woman named Alanda Streets. I almost published it under the pen name Alanda Streets because I thought some people might say that no woman would ever write a story like A Tale from the Blackwater River, but for those who feel that way, I hope you will ask yourself this question: If the name Alanda Streets had been on the cover of the book, instead of mine, would you have felt that a woman couldn't have written it?9/ The Blackwater Journal is another Alanda Streets novel--this time, she is only sixteen. I couldn't seem to get away from Alanda--she does have a spunky survivor's attitude towards life that appeals to me. In this book, she has to call on all her resources when her evil father imprisons her in a room and tells her that she has only a week left to live. As the days pass by, the terror mounts on her own personal death row. Does Alanda escape? Maybe so, maybe no.10/ Love Letters (Soaked in Blood) is another murder mystery that has a humorous undertone, which many will probably miss. The problem with writing a murder mystery is that anything that can be thought of has already been done about a thousand times. The only original idea left would be to have the most obvious suspect turn out to be the murderer. Think of it--that's probably never been done! And so...maybe you can guess the rest.11/ The Book of the Dead is about a man who goes to his 25th reunion and meets his high school sweetheart. The two of them embark on an impulsive twenty-four hour car ride that will take them through three southern states and bring them face-to-face with death. This is a tale where the boundaries of ordinary reality are stretched out a little bit! I'll leave it to you to decide whether The Book of the Dead is a fantasy or a reality.12/ Destroyed by Malice sees the return of a character who played a minor role in The Voice of the Victim. He's the world famous novelist Barker Drule, but unfortunately, he (and his wife) exit the book on page 1 when they are gunned down in their driveway. It isn't long before detective Jeff Willard is convinced that the murderer is a member of the Drule family. Perhaps it's Lenore, the older daughter, who was, years ago, secretly raped by her father; perhaps it's the beautiful Raylene, who wrote a novel about a rape victim that her father managed to have the publishing industry blackball; perhaps it's Ricky, the cocaine-addicted son who is desperate to get his hands on his father's money; and perhaps it's Dalton Drule, Barker's irascible eighty-two-year-old father who just happens to own the gun that was used to murder his son. In the end, when the truth finally comes out, there will be very few left to tell the tale.13/ How to Write an Imaginative Novel takes you through the whole process of writing a novel and then uploading it to Kindle. Among the many things covered are: Where will you find a plot? What is the best way to find names for your characters? How important is it to punctuate your book correctly? Is there a quick way to learn punctuation and sentence structure? What is the best way to write dialogue? What kind of things should one avoid in a novel? What is the significance of the first draft and why is it so important? How does one begin a book so that it immediately commands the reader's attention? How does one revise and edit a novel? Is it possible to create the cover for your book without spending any money? How does one convert a book to the correct format so that it can be uploaded to Kindle? And finally, how does one upload a book to Kindle?14/ I Ching 2015 contains a complete translation (minus the Confucian commentaries) of this ancient Chinese classic. Also included are detailed instructions on how to consult the I Ching using either yarrow stalks, coins, or dice. (For those who have been using coins, one should be aware that a significant error has crept into the method that many people use to cast an omen. This error, which involves using either three or four similar coins will seriously affect the accuracy of the omens you receive.) Additionally, there is extensive advice on how to interpret an omen. By using the correct method of interpretation, you will be surprised at how much clearer omens become. As part of this advice, I have posed a number of questions to the I Ching and have then interpreted the omen I received. Finally, for each hexagram, as well as many of the lines in each hexagram, I have included my own observations as to the essential meaning of these hexagrams and lines.15/ Blood and Blackmail is an elegant murder mystery with an unusual plot twist that took me some time to piece together. For those readers who enjoy the challenge of solving a crime before the final chapter arrives, this novel should provide you with a truly interesting puzzle. I doubt many people, if any, are going to see the underlying deception that runs throughout this tale because...if I say anything else, I might help the reader unravel this mystery, and I certainly wouldn't want to do that!16/ Fairy Tales by Martians takes a humorous look at the theory of evolution. Science, of course, claims that the human being originated from an amoeba that eventually became a tadpole that eventually became a frog and so on and so forth. However, I just can't conceive of the fact that ten million years ago, two frogs mated in a swamp and because of that event, I eventually arrived on the scene. What kind of a genealogy chart is that? Neither does the seven-day religious version of events appeal to me, so what I'm left with is a very cynical view of both the religious and scientific theories concerning the origins of our existence.17/ The Book of Dreams repeats a very old idea that has been used in many a novel. But here, in this murder mystery, the idea is taken to another level entirely and contains a twist that not many will see coming. The clues are there, starting with the poem in the Preface.18/ The Dark Side of the Moon is a tale about an attractive high school teacher who falls in love with one of her students. However, Carolyn Black is nervous that her sexual liaison with the student will ruin her career. Eventually, she tries to break off their relationship, but when he threatens to commit suicide, Carolyn is faced with an excruciating dilemma.19/ The Murder of Nora Winters was inspired by John Dickson Carr who wrote a number of locked-room mysteries. In this type of mystery, the murder victim is found in a room that does not allow the killer any means of exit. The doors and windows are all bolted from the inside, and it's considered very poor form for the author to create a room where there are sliding walls or secret panels. The solution to the murder of Nora Winters is, I think, relatively simple, but I've woven in enough deceit and misdirection to confuse all but the most astute readers.20/ The Vanishing Victim is a tale of a psychiatrist and a troubled woman who comes to him for counseling. What she reveals to him proves to be a confession to a brutal crime, but he is unable, because of the doctor/patient privilege, from revealing this crime to anyone, including the police. But even more troubling is that the woman's confession, although it contains a number of factual inaccuracies, turns out to have a terrifying reality of its own.21/ The Fatality Game follows a series of innocuous crimes in a rich neighborhood that seem to be more pranks than anything else. But when a woman is murdered in her bed, Detective Cody Barnes realizes that there is something evil lurking under the placid veneer of swanky mansions that are inhabited by millionaires. And when Cody becomes romantically involved with one of the earlier victims, the beautiful Lucinda Kane, the case begins to take on a life of its own that will eventually lead to the deaths of three more people.22/ How to Write an Intelligent Murder Mystery describes some of the adventures I encountered while I was writing murder mysteries (of my twenty-one novels, thirteen are murder mysteries.) This is a somewhat unusual instructional book that attempts to relate the problems encountered in the writing of a murder mystery to the more general problem of writing fiction in today's market where any new novel is almost instantaneously buried under an avalanche of new novels.23/ The Real Meaning of Life is definitely one of my favorite books. It's written in the first person by Patrick Devlan, a twenty-seven-year-old guy who writes murder mysteries. But his father, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, wants Patrick to write something that will take his readers to a "better place." Patrick decides to follow his father's advice, but a few days later, his roommate's pregnant girlfriend is murdered, and Patrick becomes entangled in a real-life murder mystery. Eventually, after his roommate is convicted of the crime and sent to death row, Patrick is faced with a dilemma that will lead him to the discovery of the real meaning of life.24/ Flight 9525 is a non-fiction book that attempts to answer the question as to why there is so much suffering in the world. For the most part, this book bypasses the usual political, psychological, and social reasons for suffering and examines the following: If God is real, then why do human beings suffer? Why would an all-merciful, all-loving, and all-powerful Being permit its creations to suffer? The usual explanations, such as the hypothesis that God granted man free will, don't answer the question at all. In fact, this is a question that's never been answered satisfactorily.25/ The Scriptwriter is the tale of a man who becomes entangled with three different women. There's the incredibly beautiful woman, the incredibly rich woman, and the incredibly homeless woman. Which one will he choose? Events, mishaps, and character flaws lead him to an interesting decision.26/ The Murder of Marabeth Waters contains a considerable amount of subtle black humor and describes the investigation that ensues after a prostitute is found strangled to death. Detective Devin Driver is quickly able to focus on a suspect; not only did this man send a threatening note to Marabeth, but also, her blood is found in his car. As it turns out, the real murderer lurks elsewhere, and unfortunately, Devin isn't a particularly perceptive detective, so it isn't surprising when the wrong person is convicted of the crime. However, even if Devin had been Sherlock Holmes on steroids, he undoubtedly wouldn't have solved this murder.27/ The Trial of Shada King--a district attorney in Hartford, Connecticut, is charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of the man who had raped her ten days before the shooting. Shada claims that she acted in self-defense, and since she was wearing a recording device at the time of the shooting, her claim of self-defense seems to be valid. But why was she wearing the recording device? The prosecuting attorney is convinced the crime scene was an elaborate stage production that was intended to deceive those who would be listening to the tape and that the victim was murdered in retaliation for the rape.28-34/ Finally, I have seven anthologies on Kindle that combine complete versions of many of the books listed above: Four Novels, 5 Novels, Four Murder Mysteries, The Blackwater Novels, Dark Tales, Six Novels, and Five Murder Mysteries. The purpose of the anthologies is that it gives the reader a chance to buy, for instance, five novels of mine at the rock-bottom price of $2.99.I spend a great deal of time revising my books. After finishing the first draft, I go through the book at least eight more times--first page to last page. Each journey through the book is slow and painstaking--no less than three hours and no more than thirty-five pages a day. From my experience, the kind of errors that pop up on some of the later readings can be rather surprising, if not downright alarming! I particularly look for inaccurate punctuation, lackluster sentence structure, and inaccurate or repetitive vocabulary. I also do not permit confusing sentences to stand--I can't imagine that any reader will want to read a sentence twice because I couldn't find a way to explain myself clearly.Finally, I would ask you all to keep an open mind about novels by an author who has no brand name. I am quite unusual because I do not advertise myself in any way, shape, or form (outside, I guess, of this little biography). My books are well-written, entertaining, and thought provoking, but they are often truly original, and I worry about the page-six syndrome. That's the point where some readers abandon a book by an unknown author because of a single sentence, idea, or attitude that seems amateurish to them. Have faith that there are some genuine diamonds in the Kindle arena and have faith that your instinct to buy one of my books was a good instinct. If you read any of my books to the finish, I think you'll feel that your time was not wasted because these novels are not cheap imitations--they are real creations.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE: THE PURPLE PLAGUE

Being a wannabe writer who had occasionally written some novels, I remained in obscurity because I had never attempted to publish any of my books on a site like Kindle since I was afraid of the criticism I might receive. Most readers are hypercritical nowadays, and many of them take special delight in ganging up on unknown authors and shredding their books with abominable reviews. However, I do think my novels are rather good—certainly they’re original, but the problem is that they’re perhaps too original. Now what does that mean?

Unfortunately, if I answered that question, you might think that I’m using the word original as a synonym for mentally disturbed, touched in the head, or just plain crazy. A lot of people have said things like that about me—maybe not a lot of people but enough—actually, to put some kind of number on it, I’d say it’s considerably more than a handful. Obviously, if I was a famous novelist, no one would be calling me crazy, but if you’re like me and are just some oddball creature with a husband who was yanked out of the bargain bin during a flash sale, then people might begin to wonder whether you’re in need of some serious medication.

I don’t like to talk about my husband, whose name is Dirk, because he’s kind of pathetic. The only reason I stay with him is because he’s got enough money so that we can survive, even if we do spend a considerable amount of time scrounging around for bargains. Dirk likes to pretend that he has a lot of money, but other than his small roll of twenties, I’ve never seen anything beyond an occasional fifty, and I’ve always thought it suspicious that he hides his bank statements from me. Unfortunately, I don’t work—Lord knows I’ve tried, but I’m not cut out for it. During my glory years, as I call my twenties and thirties, I must have tried about fifteen different jobs, but I either quit or got fired. Mostly fired, actually. For one thing, I was kind of a kleptomaniac, so when I worked in department stores, I often hauled out some fairly pricy items from the woman’s section of the store. That doesn’t sit so well with some folks, but I never went to jail or anything like that.

I have to give my husband some credit because he always seemed to put up with my antics. He’d sigh when I told him that I had been laid off (my euphemism for being fired) or that I just couldn’t hack the idiotic jobs that I always seemed to fall into. Like there was this time they sat me down at a desk and had me punch numbers into a computer all day long. After one day of that, I was ready to throw a screaming fit, and that’s exactly what I did when Dirk tried to talk me into staying at Macropolis Enterprises, which was some kind of insurance company that specialized in car wrecks and all sorts of other catastrophes.

Dirk just didn’t turn me on anymore—he was tall and kind of gangly with a frizzy goatee, and also, he was beginning to go bald, which is not something that I aspire to in a husband.  But at least he didn’t fool around with other women, not that he had any opportunities anymore, and although he was prone to giving me lectures, he had never hit me or smacked me around. Plus, like I said, he was good enough with money that I didn’t feel like a malnutrition case, so about five years ago when my affair with Burt Averman flamed out after his wife caught us in bed, I decided that I would probably stay with Dirk until one of us died.

Last fall, in 2019, I thought I had come up with an excellent idea for a novel. I’d just read a book about the influenza pandemic that devastated the world in 1918, and it suddenly hit me that a novel that had some kind of lethal virus in it could be a big seller. There’s something frightening about a tiny microscopic particle that lurks around and gets into people’s bodies where it multiplies hundreds of thousands of times until the poor person has to give it up and ends up leaving planet earth as part of a mass burial in some filthy trench about a mile from the hospital.

After thinking about it for a while, I came up with the idea that my virus would kill people by paralyzing them. It would start off like any normal cold or flu with a few sneezes and what not, but by the second day, a slow creeping paralysis would set in. Beginning with the toes, it would work its way upwards until it reached the heart—at which point, you would be a goner. The whole process, from first sneeze to last breath, would take about five or six days. Amazingly, even an early amputation of the legs at the knees did nothing to counteract the deadly progression of the paralysis to the heart, and with a series of heartrending gasps, the patient passed into permanent obscurity.

For a while, a significant and very vocal percentage of the population claimed that the virus was no worse than the ordinary flu. Or perhaps it was a little bit worse, but it was obviously ridiculous for everyone to get so paranoid about it. We couldn’t lock ourselves up in our houses and hope the infernal virus would die out because life had to go on; people had to make their money; and the stock market, the beloved, all-powerful stock market, had to go up.

However, in my make-believe world where the paralytic virus reigned supreme, the bodies began to pile up at an absolutely alarming rate. One would walk down the street and see semi-paralyzed people staggering down the sidewalk; or even worse, those in the last stage of the disease would be lying around all over the place—so much so, that one had to step around them. As the death rate soared into the hundreds of millions, the medical profession went into maximum overdrive and attempted to come up with a cure or a vaccine, but it wasn’t long before these people suffered a deluge of casualties, which made them flee in terror from their laboratories.

The disease, which had started relatively slowly, had morphed somehow, and now it came on like a tornado. The politicians disappeared into their bunkers, but there were rumors flying around that the virus had invaded their bunkers and that they had all been wiped out. Armed gangs now appeared on the streets, but the virus was an equal opportunity avenger that had no respect for guns, even the vaunted assault rifle, and the armed gangs quickly devolved into agonized people who were writhing around on the pavement as they attempted to clutch onto their lethal toys. 

Although I hadn’t intended to write an end-of-the-world novel, I could see that by the time I had brought half of civilization to the end of their breathing cycle, I had no choice but to go all the way. Finally, grimly, the last remnants of humanity began to sneeze, which meant they’d be gone in a week for parts unknown. So sad. But if I had to sacrifice all of humanity to further my writing career, then it seemed like a choice worth making.

Look, I’ve never been one who could say that I’ve been lucky. If you saw a picture of Dirk, you would immediately know what I mean. But beyond the failures I encountered over and over again in my love life, I’ve never been particularly lucky in my writing career. In fact, I haven’t been lucky at all in anything. But regardless of my previous history, I couldn’t help but be excited by my new novel, which I had entitled The Purple Plague. I figured purple was the best color to represent my paralytic plague because at the end, in the last couple of hours of their earthly existence, the victim’s lungs began to freeze up, and because the person wasn’t getting enough oxygen, they began to turn purple.

But then, like a runaway freight train, all my plans and plots went up in smoke when the coronavirus hit.  I really thought The Purple Plague was going to be a fantastic novel, but now, COVID-19 had stolen all my thunder. True, it wasn’t anywhere near as horrific as my paralytic plague, but it was certainly bad enough to create its own swath of destruction through an aspiring novelist’s attempt to break out of the pack and become recognized. Because now, The Purple Plague would be seen as trite since we already had a plague and didn’t need to read some copycat book about another plague. Besides that, my novel would be a gross exaggeration because the coronavirus wasn’t about to wipe out humanity. Or at least it probably wasn’t going to unless there was a dreadful mutation of the virus that proved to be extremely contagious and defied all attempts at vaccines or cures. But hey! Let’s not be paranoid.   

And so, with deep regret, I had to stow The Purple Plague away. COVID-19 had taken all the air out of its lungs, and I was forced to pronounce it dead. You wouldn’t believe me if I said that I had tears in my eyes, so I won’t say it, but when my cat, Edgar the Third, died in March of 2020, I tossed him and the manuscript for The Purple Plague in a plastic bag, buried them in a patch of ground beside our parking lot, and dumped two bottles of Drano over them. Goodbye, my dear friends, and I hope the next world treats you better than this one did. It was just a case of COVID-19 ruining a life, but at least I could still breathe, which is a whole lot more than some very unfortunate souls could say.    

CHAPTER TWO: DOLLAR-STORE PUDDING

Dirk and I had been invited to a place owned by someone that I knew all too well even though Dirk had only a vague idea of my previous relationship with him. His name was Walter Berryman, and I had met him thirty years ago when we were juniors at the University of Pennsylvania. We were both members of a creative writing seminar, and it wasn’t long before we discovered that we had a mutual attraction for each other that began because of our love for the short stories of Poe. Walter was going out with another woman at the time who was a really sexy blond, and as Walter and I began to become more acquainted with each other, he told me that Delina, the Blond Bombshell, was not a very good lover. Apparently, at least according to Walter, she just went through the motions and didn’t put her heart into it. 

I couldn’t tell whether Walter was stringing me along with his tale of the icicle mistress who could only thaw out after she had drunk a fifth of liquor or whether he was leveling with me. I was an OK looker back then, but it wasn’t like I was a beauty queen. I wasn’t blessed with a fabulous figure and couldn’t even dream of those hourglass proportions that men seem to crave so much. So I had a confidence problem, and that wasn’t helped by the fact that there were about a dozen photos of the ravishing Delina in Walter’s dorm room. I say photos, but that’s a bit of an understatement. There were three or four where she was wearing a bikini, and in one of the bikini photos, she wasn’t wearing the top half of her skimpy outfit. That particular photo was sitting conspicuously on a small table by Walter’s bed, and when we put the honky-tonk music on and went to our own private amusement park on his bed, I often caught Walter staring at the lurid twelve-by-sixteen photo of Delina. 

I also noticed that Walter never asked me for any photos of myself, and finally, when a second topless photo of Delina showed up, I decided that I had to make a stand. It was just too weird to be at the amusement park with Walter as we rode the roller coaster all over God’s creation and then catch him staring at one of the semi-naked photos of Delina. And when I say staring, I’m talking about a stare that is similar to the stare a cat has when it becomes fixated on a mouse.

Eventually, I felt compelled to talk to Walter about it. I told him that I found it insulting to have all the half-naked photos of Delina staring me in the face as we cavorted around on his bed. Walter was quite dismissive of everything I said and claimed that the photos shouldn’t be taken seriously—they were nothing more than room ornaments. When I asked him why there were no photos of me in the bedroom, he told me that I wasn’t that kind of girl. I didn’t have to be an honor student at a prestigious university, which I was, to realize what that meant. Delina was like some kind of twenty-year-old movie star while I was just average pudding. That was a favorite expression of Walter’s, and sometimes, when we went down to the Student Union for lunch, he would look at a woman sitting near us and confidentially inform me that she was just average pudding. And what made this crass display of manners even more insulting was that the average pudding he was referring to was more beautiful than me. I guess that made me dollar-store pudding.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and told Walter that I was leaving him. He didn’t seem the least bit offended and said that he’d been thinking of breaking off our relationship but that he hadn’t wanted to ruffle my feathers because he knew what a delicate temperament I had. After I returned to my off-campus apartment that day, I had some kind of ugly mental breakdown where I began smashing all my dishes on the kitchen floor. I had a cat in those days whose name was Edgar, and he hid under a couch as I hurled glasses and plates all over the place. I even had an impulse to throw all my clothes out the window but thought better of it, and eventually, after a lot of sobbing and weeping, I took two Valiums and collapsed onto my bed.

After all that, one might think that I would have avoided Walter like the plague, but in 1995, about five years after I graduated, I got an email from him. He was very apologetic about the way he had treated me and told me that during the time he had known me, he was seeing a psychiatrist for schizophrenia and had been suffering from a lot of delusions, including what the psychiatrists call grandiosity. He said that grandiosity was an unrealistic sense of superiority characterized by a sustained view of one’s self as being better than other people. There had, he said, never been a Delina—he had simply made her up and taken her photos from a collection of secret photos he had collected since he was a teenager. He had invented her because she fed into his grandiose impulses—with a name like Walter, he had always felt inferior, but with his imaginary girlfriend Delina, he felt like a king.

These days, he told me, he had mostly been cured of his condition although he still had moments of depression and would suffer from a feeling that he was really nothing special. There had been that one awful day when he realized that, at best, he was just average pudding. He was so sorry about the way our relationship had ended, and although he was now married, he hoped that we could still be friends because when we had first met, we had written some really good short stories together.

That much was true, and so, in a kind of half-hearted way, I began a sporadic email conversation with him that has lasted up until the