I guess I made Nat Sparrow hate me. Or did he figure that out for himself?
Once we were jellylike and warm, when I first poured myself over him, although in the hardened dark of that night, and from that position, I should have worried.
Whereas, on the job, I felt somewhat confident I did my best with any challenge that demanded “my personal treatment.”
My colleague Alma as much as made a spiral of herself, with one arm across her belly, the other behind herself at her hip as she twisted to say, “Amanda has arrived!”
I am Amanda!
Then she said, “At least she contributes something!”
“Think so?” Nat said. “Don’t talk to me!” he said, when I tried to. “You’re crazy!”
A man in a scally cap, equally angry, barged in on us, shouting—“Is the bank manager here? Or is he not here! Just answer me!”
I left the bank as soon as I could.
I was behind a mastiff who, while leashed, stalled in place.
I stopped, too, and the dog turned to stare at me, long enough for me to feel condemned, and it then pivoted and proceeded jauntily alongside its master.
In the morning, the bank lobby was filled with a crowd of persons unfamiliar to me, including a woman who placed her cane against her back as if it were a back scratcher.
Not one of them joined me when I stepped toward the elevator.
I work in the installment loan department, where I must deal easily and tactfully with people. I must make a plan, present a plan—organize and control.
I must have been broken, though. I recovered myself and so got into a conversation, quietly, with Nat. “All I need to know . . .”
As my string of words got longer, he did get angrier. Still, I could not identify what was happening at the edges of his eyes.
A period of continuing problems followed, during which time I was effectively isolated.
To tell you the truth, that’s not the reason I stopped trying to see Nat Sparrow. I don’t know why, apparently. If the point is to accurately and faithfully know. 
Diane Williams’s twelfth book of fiction—I Liked Rex—is due out from New York Review of Books in the Classics series in the fall of 2026. Her fictions appear in the current editions of Granta and McSweeney’s. She is the founder and editor of NOON.
