“I’d be afraid.”

Her expression grew sad. I noticed that she was pale, her eyes bloodshot.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

Two or three days before the end of the holiday, Jim took me to a nightclub where jazz was played. We sat in a booth in a dark corner and talked and drank wine.

“Have you ever drunk wine before?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well, you have a lot to learn.” He laughed but there was an edge to his voice.

“You know I don’t really want to get involved with anyone, not in a real way. Once I almost killed myself over a Mexican girl. I was in love with her and wanted to marry her but of course that was out of the question. My father threatened to cut off money for my education. I would have gone ahead and married her anyway but her parents also forbade her to see me.”

“And that was the end?”

“One night we met secretly. It was a beautiful night. We hugged each other for hours, not saying anything, but both of us crying.”

“Well, that’s too bad.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“What else is there to say?”

He became sullen. I watched his face in the twilight-red of the restaurant—it seemed troubled. He drove me back to the campus, remaining sullen all the way.

When we reached the dormitory he stopped the car without turning off the engine and I got out.

I saw him once more. He was sitting in Louise’s room when I came in. I was about to leave but she insisted I should stay. Attempts at conversation fell flat and I found my eyes clinging to items in the room for something meaningful. Gauze curtains, a checkered bedspread, brown furniture—the same things found in every room.

After a few moments I got up and left. Out in the hall I heard Louise saying, “Well, she’s from a different culture.”

I did not hear Jim’s response or what he had said to provoke Louise’s remark. I went into my room and cried. Louise and I were never the same with each other again.

My new friendships were never as rewarding as the one with Louise had been originally. But then, doing well at school became my object. Biology began to fascinate me; the subtle and complicated interplay of cells—dying, reproducing—or the way drugs could make changes in the development of an organism.

During the summers I worked: twice as a file clerk in an office in a hospital, once doing research for a biologist.

In the summer, right after graduating, I met Tony. I had a job as a research assistant to a psychologist at a university in Cambridge, where I would start graduate work the following year.

The office was off a long corridor with many small rooms and laboratories, mostly wired for pigeon and rat experiments. The sound of pigeons pecking and rats pressing levers echoed along the corridor like a clock gone haywire.