So he lectured Marya, and she sat humiliated and shaken, until, laughing to cover his embarrassment, Fein’s colleague observed that they were each wonderfully persuasive; listening to them, he felt like the animals in Orwell’s parable who agreed with whatever was being said while it was being said. . . . But he excused himself soon afterward and left Marya and Fein alone together, no longer speaking, each flush-faced and resentful, staring at each other.

FEIN BROUGHT A bottle of whiskey to the motel room, and they drank out of plastic cups, and said very little, and Marya thought, eyeing her lover’s pale pocked face and those blue-tinted glasses, In this man there’s the answer to the very riddle of my life, but I can’t find it. And Fein, regarding her somberly, unsmilingly, may well have had the same thought.

Still, they made love successfully that afternoon. Maximilian Fein, slightly intoxicated, was hilarious—an almost boyish lover—inventive, improvisational, willing to be silly. And Marya, greatly aroused, dared pummel and wrestle him in their ludicrous king-sized bed, even snatching at his penis, jabbing, tickling—as if, in this neutral territory, nothing she did or said mattered.

THEN OF COURSE the reaction came. There was always a reaction—a recoiling—on Fein’s part. And he didn’t telephone her for days, forced her to telephone him, told her vaguely that he was caught up in his work, that Else wasn’t feeling well. . . .

“Yes. Oh yes. I see. I understand,” Marya said quietly. Since she really did see, she really did understand.

MARYA WAS LYING in the dark, alone, in her bed. Though perhaps she wasn’t entirely alone.

Something crouched in one of the corners. A frail, shadowy, hunched shape. Something was scuttling crabwise across the ceiling. Marya, dear Marya, we have come to make our claim. . . . Suddenly a hot little demon did a jig on her belly, digging in his heels. Hey nonny nonny hey nonny nonny d’you love me Marya will you kiss me Marya . . . !

She shook herself frantically awake. The creatures were still in the room with her but they had become invisible. A terrible pressure grew in her head—she had never experienced such a sensation before. Tighter and tighter it grew: ever tighter: now tighter still: a pain beyond pain, stretched to the breaking point. Marya knew suddenly that this was madness, this was death. This was extinction.

Now the pressure, the pain, became a bubble—pink-streaked, translucent—growing larger and larger, about to burst—

But now she did manage to shake herself into consciousness. And the telephone was ringing.

ELSE FEIN CAME by in the Mercedes to pick Marya up, to drive her to the hospital where Fein lay in a coma, dying. (Though at that time it wasn’t known that he was dying, only that he was in very critical condition in intensive care.)