When Marya first realized that the black janitor for the building had been deliberately leaving traces of himself in her office, and that his manner with her wasn’t quite so ingenuous as she had thought, her first response was simple disbelief. It could not be happening, this could not be happening! Had she come so far (from Innisfail, from the Canal Road, from the tarpaper shanty of a house near Shaheen Falls) to be persecuted by a stranger . . . ? She was incredulous, baffled. Then she was angry. Then frightened. One day she casually brought up the subject of Sylvester (whose name she hadn’t known at the time) to a departmental secretary; not precisely complaining but indicating, hinting, that there were some problems with him. The woman was sympathetic at once. She knew, she knew, everyone knew—Sylvester could be difficult. He was sometimes rude to students, even to faculty members; he called in sick at least once a week; he drank beer down in the basement, and frequently got drunk; he did a poor job of cleaning, was generally lazy, unreliable. Unfortunately he belonged to the union and couldn’t be fired. He could only be shifted about the college from one building to another, working his way down, so to speak, to the old Humanities Building, where the plaster was falling in many of the rooms and the furnaces were so old. She didn’t know what the next stop for Sylvester might be—perhaps there wasn’t any. Marya might find it easier, she said, to look after her office herself, except of course for the heavy cleaning.

Yes, Marya murmured, subdued, in a way chastened, I will.

Today there was the drawer left open; and she couldn’t resist (though it was foolish to upset herself, to get her nerves racing) glancing into the lavatory, where the toilet had been used and not flushed. She flushed it herself. She thought, This could all be accidental. She thought, The filthy pig.

The class went well, her lecture was a success, Marya’s spirits were high, brash. So she sought out Sylvester on the stairs leading down to the basement. He was lounging in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, half dozing, inert. All bulk, gone shapeless and sullen, with that soiled railroadman’s cap perched cockily on his head. When he saw Marya he blinked in surprise; his eyes actually flashed yellow.

She told him that she didn’t want him “interfering” with her things any longer. It wasn’t necessary for him to clean her office at all—she could do it herself. It wasn’t necessary for him to ever go into it again.