As soon as she unlocked the door to her office she knew immediately that he had been in there again—the smell of cigarette smoke assailed her, and the way the venetian blind had been yanked to the very top of the high window. Even the metal wastebasket was defiantly out of place. Sylvester has been here, Sylvester has made his mark, left his calling card. . . . It might be a cigarette butt mashed out in one of Marya’s potted ivy plants on the windowsill, it might be a Kleenex stiffened with a yellow stain, crumpled and left on the very seat of her chair, it might be a cigarette dropped in the toilet bowl in her lavatory, sodden, unraveling, striking the eye, for an instant, like a tiny piece of feces. Marya knew herself upset out of all proportion to what was happening, what was actually being done, she knew it was absurd to have so immediate a reaction (her heart pounded, her blood seemed to go cold—the old hackneyed symptoms, dear Christ!), but it was impossible to remain calm.

Why, she thought, like any victim, swallowing her anger, her sickening fury—why me, why me?—why me at this time in my life?

It took her a very long time to enter the room and close the door behind her and make her way to the desk, walking carefully, her head held as if she were balancing something precariously on it. Yes, the black custodian had been here, of course he had been here, it was his responsibility to keep the offices in his building clean, he had every right to enter her office. . . . And if he felt the need to smoke, to make his wretched job a little more agreeable, Marya needn’t take it as a personal affront. . . .

She saw that the middle drawer of the desk had been left an inch or two open, as Sylvester always left it when he wanted her to know he’d been rifling through her things, examining them, rearranging them according to an eccentric pattern of his own. Perhaps it would be wisest for Marya not to investigate at the moment; she had a class to teach in twenty minutes, a lecture on Emily Dickinson, two hundred students to face in an old amphitheater with rising tiers of seats. . . . It might be prudent not to check the little lavatory either.

Yes, the swivel chair behind the desk was out of place. Sylvester had been sitting in it not long ago, his heavy thighs straining at his khaki work pants, his expression earnest, somber, the cigarette drooping between his lips. His big beefy fingers poked about in the drawer, but what was there lately, now that Marya had taken away her personal letters? Rubber bands, pencils, ballpoint pens, paper clips, departmental memos, loose change. (Of course Sylvester never touched money. He wasn’t a thief, not Sylvester; you couldn’t accuse him of that.)