After a while, Glenna said, “That for school?”

“No. It’s a collection of stories by James Joyce. In this one, he uses the falling snow as a metaphor for the loss of love and the hope for redemption. I’ll never be able to write like him, but his use of snow is a function of craft, and I might be able to learn that. It’s such a trip trying to—” I stopped when I saw Glenna smiling at me. “What?”

“Writing’s a lot more interesting than this.” She held up the New England Journal of Medicine.“It’s an article about tissue rejection and heart transplants.”

“It’s remarkable they did it. Seventy years ago, that surgeon, Paget—”

“Paget’s disease? That’s a bone disease.”

“Same guy,” I said, putting my book down and sitting up. “Sir James Paget. He predicted that science would never be able to fix a heart.”

“I don’t get you. All you do is read and write. You’re so smart, but you blow off school and you get up every day like you’re on some personal intellectual adventure. How do you do that?”

“It’s my life. Who else is supposed to do it?”

“I admire it. I couldn’t do it.”

“You don’t have to. You want to be a doctor.”

She shrugged. “Well, I didn’t want to be a nurse.”

“What’s wrong with nurses?”

“Nothing when they’re not hassling me. I was almost a nurse. My mother’s plan was for me to find an Ivy League husband. After I told her that wasn’t going to happen and chose UVM, my father tells me he read in the catalog that Vermont offers a BS in nursing. Fine, I’ll try that. So I start taking bio, physics, organic chem. The girls in those classes were going to be nurses; the guys were applying to med school. We had to take the same courses for God’s sake. I switched to premed.”

Glenna fell silent, gazing up at me. Then she said, “I love when you look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re listening.”

I said, “That’s what I’m doing.”

“No. Really listening. Guys don’t know what a turn-on that is—listening.”

“But you listen, too.”

“Women always listen.”

Glenna had on a pair of beige jeans that fit her like a second skin, and the fingers of my right hand were drawing circles on her thighs.

“You really like that?” she asked. “The listening?”

“I like listening to you.”

Glenna was studying me as if trying to peek behind my eyes. “I can’t tell what you’re thinking.”

“You’re not supposed to. It’s private.”

“But being inside me. You like that.”

“Best of all.”

“Not the fucking, Gordo.”

“No, not the fucking. Being inside you.”

“It’s different,” she said.

“Philosophically speaking.”

Glenna laughed. “I’m serious.”

“Me, too,” I said, my fingers going, the circles widening.

“Not the sex part. The fact of being inside me. That’s what you like.”

I nodded, unsnapping her jeans, my hand sliding down.

Glenna closed her eyes. “When you’re first inside me, you don’t move.”