The telephone, for him, was a cipher for being shut out, betrayed, abandoned. To call the feelings that surged up in him mere “upset” was too mild; “volcanic” was more like it; “panicked” might be better still. Jim felt victimized and alone in the minutes before he erupted—as if he were back in the chaos of his own childhood. “I felt,” he says, “as if I could stand there and slit my own throat and she’d just go right on talking.”
