If anyone should inquire, Marya’s official relationship to Maximilian Fein is that of his research assistant. But no one inquires—not even Else Fein who, in midsummer, suddenly goes away for several weeks. Her absence is a surprise to Marya; but Fein insists that the trip had been planned all along. For most of the time Else will be staying with a friend in Cape May, New Jersey, the widow of a professor of German, German-born herself, like Else. Has she left because of us, Marya would like to inquire, but of course she does not. The very word “us,” uttered in Fein’s presence, would have a proprietary ring her lover might find disturbing.

Marya waits, Marya waits . . . for Fein to suggest that she move temporarily into the house with him; after all, he isn’t really equipped to live alone and unattended, wifeless. But Fein never brings up the subject, Fein can manage with a cleaning woman once or twice a week, and of course, with Else gone, he is invited out to dinner far more frequently: there’s something attractive, even rakish, about Maximilian Fein as a scholarly otherworldly bachelor, alone for six weeks during the summer.

He does speak vaguely of their going to a seashore of their own, perhaps in Maine—then again the mountains, the Adirondacks, might be even more secluded—but of course there is the problem of his work, his innumerable books, papers—there is the problem of his “capricious” health.

MARYA IS ALARMED, apprehensive: for several days during his wife’s absence Maximilian goes into seclusion, tells Marya not to come by. He is going to steep himself in that other world, that Night World: he’ll spend most of the time in his study with the blinds drawn, sleeping there, eating very little, descending into . . . well, he supposes it is only himself. But by way of that self he enters a dimension of psychic experience otherwise inaccessible.

What about me? is Marya’s immediate childish rejoinder.

Then, more prudently: I wish I were capable of accompanying you.

Fein laughs, strokes her hair, smooths it away from her brow. She can see that he loves her, in fact he adores her; why has she ever thought otherwise? Marya the beautiful one, Marya the adored. . . . He says in a tone she can only interpret as fatherly, “No, Marya, you really don’t wish that.”

GRADUALLY IT HAPPENS that there are two “times” in Marya’s experience, two aspects of time. One is vivid and pulsing with life (the hours she spends with Maximilian), the other is bleak, drab, achromatic (the hours apart from him—which in fact constitute most of her experience). A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.