An unemployed writer named Joseph Feigenbaum receives a Christmas card from Ellen, a woman he knew three years ago. They spent one afternoon together eating lunch at her parent’s house, after which Ellen never contacted him again. Feigenbaum tried calling on her at her house, but she avoided him multiple times. The surprising arrival of the Christmas card unlocks a well of resentment within him. He lashes out in his reply, accusing her of ‘stifling’ all thoughts of him and trying to pretend as though she had completely forgotten him, when this is evidently not the case. This is followed by a second letter that sheepishly wishes her a merry Christmas. Unable to stop writing, Feigenbaum mails a third and a fourth letter. He rants about the possible reasons as to why she could have ‘left’ him, accusing her of being scared of falling in love with him. Caught up in his delusions, he invents a fiancé for her, a man named Willard, and argues that this fictional man is never going to understand her the way he does. Feigenbaum goes as far as to include sexual passages about how he has already imagined her naked, defending this inappropriate comment with the reasoning that he thought of her so ‘realistically’ that some aspects of her body did not even appeal to him. Switching between derision and despair, Feigenbaum recounts their first meeting and how Ellen had gone out of her way to flirt with him. He calls on her again, only to find that Ellen will not even come to the door. In the fourth letter, he professes to love her. At last, he decides to ‘let her go’ with a growing sense of his own self-importance. Throughout all this time, Ellen does not reply.