"I did not refuse. I simply pointed out that the invitation was ten days belated and followed you giving them some furniture. You know that it is less of an invitation than a token payment to make sure that the giver keeps giving. How obvious can it be? They haven't communicated with me for twenty years, so why should they bother now? And as for this idea of yours that if I don't go I don't love you, maybe it successfully manipulates children but it is rather reprehensible to adults, wouldn't you say? If I were to go what would I say about my personal life? I'm forty years old, unmarried, and they are bound to ask. I can't exactly continue to stammer out some evasive nonsense to the question about my involvements: that I am still looking, or laughing uncomfortably and ignoring the question altogether— whatever I said or did last time. I really don't remember what I said. Maybe it was that I wanted to get my career in order first. Maybe I was silent like a mental and social retard."
"Don't go then!"
"What?"
"Don't go. I don't want you to be there. You aren't welcome."
"I want to know why in all of these many years you never even show the least interest in my life relationships, friendships, where I travel, where I live, what I do."
Her face cringed at the steering wheel and dashboard and he could see in it repugnance at what she believed to be the turpitude of his life.
"Why can't you ask anything?" he importuned.
"I don't want to know anything. Go back to Thailand and do God knows what. You don't even live with anyone do you? It is just sex. Your life is just filled with sex."
"You don't know anything. How could you with nothing ever asked or said. You make assumptions without knowing anything."
"What you do with your male friends—your sex life, I don't want to hear about it. It is private—your private business and I don't want my nose rubbed in it."