“Then I’ll have to report you,” Marya said angrily, “if there’s any more trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“You know what I mean. Trouble.”

He stared at her, his teeth still bared. The gold filling gleamed like a witticism. He was in his forties, perhaps, very dark, burnished-dark, his skin oily, his nose slightly flattened. He belched and Marya smelled beer. “Doan know what in hell you do mean, Professor,” he said, with that little catch in his throat that signaled mirth.

As Marya walked away (she was losing her nerve, she couldn’t keep it up, another minute and she’d be shouting), he spoke more loudly, laughing, angry himself, as if addressing an audience, “Doan know what the hell that’s all about, what kind of shit she handing me! Ain’t no trouble I ever heard of!”

Marya could hear him all the way up the stairs. Even his accent, his black dialect, Marya thought, was in mockery.

RACIAL PREJUDICE WAS so much a fact of life back home, the separation of the races (economic, social, demographic) so taken for granted, Marya had long ago vowed to stand apart from it; which is to say, above it. So she made the effort now to think of Sylvester not as a black man, but simply as a man; a workingman with a very poor job; hostile toward others because he despised his own condition in life.

(In fact Marya uneasily suspected that Sylvester wasn’t all that badly paid. The custodians’ local had gone on strike the year before, their contract was reputed to be impressive, Marya’s colleagues often joked about it in reference to their own salaries.)

She tried to separate the man from his skin; Sylvester from his blackness. She tried not to see him—only to envision his nettling little pranks in her office, the pictures hanging crooked, the stiffened Kleenex, the unflushed toilet. There was the thin scar on his cheek . . . there was the gold filling . . . the slight limp . . . the slump of the fatty rounded shoulders. Sylvester. Sylvester and his “G’morning, Professor!”

Did she imagine it, did he one day call after her softly, “—Marya!”

MONTHS BEFORE, IN October, Marya was walking on a downtown street with several of her colleagues when she happened to see Sylvester approaching: a tall big-bodied black man in checked trousers, a pinkish-orange shirt, a maroon cloth cap set atop his wiry hair. He was walking with a black woman of his own approximate age, lighter-skinned, chunky, with an attractive face that had gone puffy and sullen. Marya, caught up in an autumnal mood of gaiety and camaraderie, called out hello; but Sylvester, his chin uplifted, passed by without so much as glancing at her. (His companion, however, had stared at Marya. Who do you think you are, she seemed to be asking.)

Marya’s friends asked her who the black man was. Marya, flushed with embarrassment, said he was the janitor—the custodian—in their building; didn’t they recognize him? She was also rather angry at having been so resolutely and so publicly snubbed.