The telephone line was beset with static when Marya, in turn, spoke rapidly and half in embarrassment of herself. She had the idea that Wilma followed very little of what she said, that her questions and approving murmurs were only courtesies (an article accepted where?—what kind of journal?—will it be on the newsstand in town, will people see it?); but at the same time it was Marya’s obligation to supply Wilma with something—virtually anything—about which she might casually boast to her women friends. (Oh, Marya called last night, she keeps in close contact though her life is very busy, yes she’s planning to come visit next time she has a chance. . . .)

Afterward Marya’s ear invariably ached from pressing the receiver so hard against it. She rubbed it, caressed it, gently, for some time.

IT WAS TRUE that her career prospered; she was doing very well for herself indeed. For instance, Maximilian Fein so clearly favored her that the others in his circle were jealous and even a little offended. She was one of the newer students in the program, after all; she was a woman of a certain sort . . . attractive, outspoken, possibly rather contentious; she certainly wasn’t self-effacing. (Maximilian Fein preferred his women—and his young men too, for that matter—to be self-effacing; or so it had always been thought.)

If Marya had been awarded a certain coveted grant for next summer, it was clearly Fein’s doing; if one of her seminar papers was scheduled to appear in Speculum, that most distinguished of journals, it could only be by way of intercession by Fein . . . after all, he was an advisory editor, wasn’t he? . . . and known to force his protégés on others.

One of Marya’s colleagues, a perpetually melancholy young man named Ernest who had been an assistant of Fein’s for several years, asked her pointedly one day what Fein was really like—the implication being, of course, that Marya was on some sort of intimate basis with him. She felt her face go hot; she chose her words carefully. “If I were in a position to know,” she said, “anything I said would be a betrayal. And I’m not that sort of person.”

SHE HAD’T INTENDED to fall in love with Fein, or even to fall under his spell, as so many people, male and female, evidently did. That wasn’t Marya Knauer’s style, that wasn’t quite the way she saw herself in this phase of her career. (Adulatory, calculating, subservient, “feminine.” She had learned to think of herself as genderless, just as knowledge itself was genderless; just as the scholarly life was genderless. In truth she had learned in graduate school to think of herself scarcely at all—she was too absorbed in her work.)