No, Marya’s friends said, they hadn’t recognized him, they didn’t know him, and, anyway, weren’t there several black custodians in the building?

Not long afterward the window in Marya’s office was left open at the top over a weekend; rain soaked into the carpet, damaged papers and books on Marya’s desk, gathered in a little puddle on the floor. Marya was puzzled at the time because she never opened the window from the top and found it highly difficult to manipulate the window at that angle at all. But it wasn’t until a while afterward—she was slow, very slow, in coming to certain conclusions—that she realized the janitor had done it. Even then it was a while before she realized he had done it deliberately, to punish her for calling out to him on the street, for making a pretense of their sociability.

After that the persecution became more evident. Though it was still sporadic and unpredictable. Though, with so many other urgent things to consider, she rarely had time to consider that. (Wasn’t it petty and demeaning, Marya asked herself. Purposeless. Childish. And here she was on the faculty of one of the most distinguished colleges in the Northeast, twenty-five years old, well respected by her students and colleagues, passionately caught up in teaching, teaching, teaching . . . which she wanted to make her life’s work.) Still, it was difficult to ignore Sylvester’s taunts when he made it a point of passing her in the corridor, on the stairs, dipping his head in her direction in a parody of gallantry, twisting his mouth around the word “Professor” until it had never sounded so forlornly pretentious. And then she discovered one afternoon (how long had it been there? had any of her students noticed?) a bloodstained sanitary napkin placed innocently on the bottommost shelf of one of the bookcases. The thing had dried and stiffened into a peculiar arched shape.

WEEKS PASSED, NOTHING further happened, nothing that impressed itself upon Marya’s feverish brain. She was so caught up in the present tense, hurrying from place to place, spending much of her free time in the library, taking notes, preparing lectures, assembling ideas for articles, essays, for her second book. (She wanted to study “magical” narratives in nineteenth-century fiction . . . apocalyptic romances of a sort. . . . She wanted to pay a good deal of attention to neglected writers, to unknown women writers, in whose work radical and even revolutionary themes might be discovered, beneath, or behind, the formal conventions of a genre. And at the same time she had begun to be interested in writing pieces of a more immediate general interest: why no one in this part of the state had ever explored in print the significance of the Rhinelander Air Force Base thirty miles to the north where the Pentagon stored cruise missiles, and B-52’s—two, three, five, seven, as many as a dozen at a time—incessantly combed the sky. It should be a matter of great local interest, Marya thought, that, if or when the “enemy” struck, Rhinelander would be one of their first targets. An enormous nuclear blast—firestorms of incalculable ferocity—invisible radiation borne on the wind! Professors in the humanities spent their lives rigorously analyzing texts, classical and otherwise, but displayed a curious reluctance to examine the “text” in which they played out their own lives. Perhaps the irony of the situation might be explored, Marya thought.