Nathan's reunion phone call with his former lover

Nathan's reunion phone call with his former lover turns a long separation into a renewed conversation about the affair, the book made from it, and the cost of being written about. The Unnamed English woman calls after reading Nathan’s novel; what begins as an awkward exchange about where he lives becomes a reckoning over secrecy, anger, and the intimacy that survives in speech even after the relationship has ended. By its close, the call has reopened both the connection between them and the possibility that Nathan will make their renewed conversation part of another book.

The Call After Separation

The Unnamed English woman reaches Nathan in America, asking for him at the studio in England where she expects to find him. He corrects her: he is no longer there and is living in America permanently. The distance is therefore more than a matter of time since their last conversation; the call finds Nathan established in the country to which he has returned, while she approaches him from a life he has left behind. Her reason for calling is the book. Since reading it, she has repeatedly wondered whether to contact him, and Nathan acknowledges that he, too, has thought about the book’s effect on her marriage.

They reconstruct their earlier silence differently. Nathan recalls that their last conversation ended with her making clear that she had to go her own way; he understood that he should go his, and the separation then lasted a couple of years. She remembers the decision less as a mutual parting than as a boundary he had imposed: she had not called because he said he did not want to see her, since the relationship was no longer a love affair, and because he could not bear more of their guilty secrecy. Her uncertainty about whether she said this does not settle the disagreement. Instead, the call makes the old imbalance audible: even the reason for their separation has no single, confidently shared account.

The Book and the Burden of Secrecy

The Unnamed English woman explains that a friend, having finished Nathan’s book, remarked that one of its characters was extraordinarily like her and asked how often she and Nathan had eaten lunch. Her husband was sitting beside her. She answered, “I don’t eat lunch,” a terse evasion that concealed the history even as the novel threatened to make it recognizable. The episode gives the book’s disclosure a domestic setting: its implications reach her not only as a reader but in the presence of a husband who has not himself read it.

Her deeper objection is not simply that Nathan used recognizable material. During their relationship, she says, secrecy had distorted their time together; Nathan had insisted on keeping the affair hidden for the sake of his wife. She cannot reconcile those efforts at concealment with his decision to write a book that his wife, she believes, could hardly avoid suspecting was based on a real person. Nathan answers that writing is what he does and rejects her description of his precautions as paranoia: he says he was protecting his wife from something she could not be expected to welcome. He adds that his wife believes the real model is Nathan's former lover Rosalie Nichols. That explanation exposes the practical shelter offered by one story about the book, but it does not resolve the former lover’s complaint about the secrecy imposed on their actual relationship.

Anger That Has Not Passed

The Unnamed English woman describes her response as angry and identifies a contradiction between the secrecy Nathan demanded and the public existence of the novel. She imagines how she would read the book from his wife’s position: as evidence that he had been consumed by someone else for a long time. In that light, the deformations and restrictions imposed on their time together seem pointless, because Nathan has written about the affair anyway. Nathan says he was not worried about himself, since Rosalie served as his beard, and claims that he thought publication would be worse for the Unnamed English woman. She allows that it could have been, or might still be, but the risk does not undo what the book has already meant to her.

When Nathan asks whether she has got over her anger, she says she probably has not. The admission keeps the conversation from becoming a clean reconciliation: affection and resentment occupy the same call, and neither cancels the other. Still, she says she has missed talking to him, adding that she sometimes talks to him in her head. Nathan says he does the same. Her reminder that she has also missed him “taking down what I say” makes the bond newly specific. She recognizes that their talk feeds his writing, and speaks of that habit with both intimacy and a pointed awareness of what it can cost.

Conversation as Material

The call’s final turn makes that cost explicit. Nathan invokes the Odyssey and the figure of the person who has gone home, then describes himself as Homer and says he has been thinking about writing a book about her. He calls the proposed work Kiss and Tell, presenting exposure not as an incidental danger but as its subject. When he asks whether he should write it, she refuses the role of simple permission-giver: she cannot tell him not to, especially since she may write another book about him herself. Nathan laughs and says that, of course, this conversation will be part of it.

The exchange ends without resolving whether renewed talk can be separated from the act of recording it. The Unnamed English woman has returned to Nathan partly because she missed the conversation, yet she knows that what she says can become material; Nathan openly confirms that it already will. Their old secret has thus changed form. The call does not restore the affair or erase her anger, but it does revive the reciprocal attention that once bound them—and turns that attention, once more, toward a book.