Fein was bored with her, Marya saw; his mood had changed in a matter of seconds. He said, She’s nothing to you now, really—as if it were more a statement than a question; and Marya, blinking angry tears from her eyes, said Yes, yes, yes. Oh God yes.

TO HER RELIEF (and to her disappointment?) Fein never brought the subject up again, during all the months of their relationship. Perhaps he simply forgot. Perhaps he was bored. And Marya, who intended to do nothing about locating Vera Sanjek, nothing whatsoever, pushed the issue out of her mind entirely.

She had enough to absorb her at the present time. She was in fact pushing herself a little too far, at the present time.

CAN THERE BE love, Marya wonders, if the word itself is never uttered; if it seems to stick in the throat . . . ?

Still, there are the manifestations of love; the long rapturous moments; the sobbing exclamations. Marya’s lover caresses her with slow reverent fingers, speaks constantly of her beauty—the beauty that resides in her flesh—charts an iconography altogether new to Marya herself. She reminds him, he says, of certain baroque madonnas—there is a powerful mater dolorosa by the Spaniard Murillo—has Marya ever seen it? Fein will show her; Fein has all the books in his library, the costly full-color reproductions.

Marya, brushing her hair out of her eyes, still short of breath, finds herself laughing in delight—being confronted with a Marya not herself, a fictitious Marya, worshiped if not precisely loved.

MARYA LOSES HERSELF deliberately in long aimless daydreams. To recollect, to anticipate, to brood, to puzzle over—these are wholly absorbing activities, complete in themselves. When she is actually with Maximilian (in one or another of the anonymous hotel rooms to which he takes her, or in his very study on Azazel Drive) the experience is blurred, her sense of things confused. She hears herself speaking—she seems to see herself behaving in certain prescribed ways—but it is not altogether real to her: not so real as the anticipation was, or the languorous memory will be.

In her daydreams she is invariably challenging Maximilian with her love; declaring it, confessing it; exacting from him a confession in turn. Yes I love you, Marya, of course I love you, Marya, how can you doubt me?

FOR A WHILE Marya’s passion for Maximilian Fein inspires her in her work. He cannot see her very often, not even every day: he has warned her that they must leave each other a considerable measure of privacy. So she does her meticulous research—she studies her languages—she writes her essays—with Fein as her ideal audience, her admiring listener. She is, in fact, always speaking to him in her imagination; sometimes, locked away in her room, very late at night, she murmurs aloud—to him, always to him, in reference to him. If she spends some time gazing at herself in a mirror it isn’t Marya-seeing-Marya but her-lover-seeing-Marya. And the young woman he sees is invariably beautiful—with the pale suffering features of a Latin mater dolorosa.