“I wish there was a way to have my research—my writing—be of interest to a wider audience,” she said thoughtfully, all traces of her previous tipsiness gone. “I don’t mean that in a conceited way, like I think I’m some great intellect. Just that we publish in these obscure academic journals, and I sometimes think, Why? What is it all for?” She shook her head and with it shed some of her seriousness. “Anyway, no one likes all aspects of their job, right? And honestly, I’m lucky to have this one. Tenure-track gigs in English are extremely few and far between, and I managed not only to get one but to get one in New York, so blah, blah, poor me.”

He was tempted to say that a person could be lucky and unhappy, that those two qualities were not mutually exclusive, but he wasn’t sure how such a statement would be received coming from him. And he would much rather talk about her. “When do you get tenure?”

“I go up for it in about a year. And I get a teaching release this coming fall semester—my pre-tenure leave. The idea is to allow junior faculty time to really work on their tenure files, but for me it will come too late to really make a difference.”

“Why didn’t you take it earlier?”

“I tried, but I was informed that too many senior members of the department were already scheduled to be on sabbaticals.”

Max was liking the sound of this department and its culture less and less.

Dani snorted. “Anyway, it’s better this way. I already have a strong tenure file, so maybe I’ll just take that semester and be a lie-about.”

“What if you could do anything?” he asked, returning to his original question. “Hypothetically. It doesn’t have to be realistic.”

“I think I’d like to hole up in a garret somewhere far away and write a book that had popular appeal. A popular book about obscure nineteenth-century writers. Ha!”

“So why don’t you do that?”

She looked at him for a long time, long enough that he started to get uncomfortable. “Everything is easy for you, isn’t it?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. Materially speaking, the answer was yes. He didn’t want for anything.

“I mean, you flew to New York for a ‘huge party’?” She made the air quotes with her fingers.

“Yes.” That was what he’d told her. And technically, it was true.

“The Depraved Duke, right?” She laughed.

He did not. “Right.”

The bartender returned, and after they ordered some pasta, she said, “Tell me about this party.”

He had hoped she’d forgotten.

When he didn’t answer right away, she said, “Come on. I told you all the gory details of my career ennui.”

“It’s an annual Christmas party held by a woman named Lucrecia von Bachenheim.”