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.

So she thought only occasionally of Sylvester; and was able to forget him for days at a time. She worked very hard and thrived on it, was invigorated by it, uncomplaining, zealous, filled with ideas about how to organize her classes, how to draw out her quieter students, how to . . . make her way in this extraordinary phase of her life. Because she was new on the staff she hadn’t the immediate pressures of promotion and tenure to deal with; she even thought it rather petty, rather vulgar, of certain of her colleagues to spend so much time in careerist speculation. They were a few years older than Marya, extremely bright, competitive, hard-working; slightly fanatic on the subject of their futures; their youth a bit tarnished by habits of drollery and self-mocking irony. Impatient with the tone of an entire evening’s sociability, Marya made the point that teaching and scholarship really ought to be their primary concerns, and that this dwelling upon competing with one another, always competing, competing, made anything approaching friendship extremely difficult. And the group turned laughing on her, their good humor a little tinged with contempt: Why, how very extraordinary of Marya to have made this discovery! And had she come to such conclusions by herself? And was she planning not to “compete” but to leave the field to . . . her friends?

ONE WINTER AFTERNOON, late, Marya returned to her office from the library, to discover Sylvester seated boldly at her desk.