They might go for a thirty-mile bicycle ride on an impulse, Gregory said. Or hire a Piper Cub and be flown to the ocean. Or a balloon, one of those gorgeous striped hot-air balloons, did Marya know what they were?—the fee was $50 an hour per person. Not so much, really, when you considered that the sport was dangerous, the balloon could collapse.

When Marya didn’t immediately respond he gripped her head between his hands and pretended to be erasing frown lines from her forehead with his long lanky thumbs. “You look like a mourner, Marya,” he said, chiding, teasing, on the very edge of bullying, “aren’t you being premature?”

She drew away, laughing. She hated his hands when he was being willfully playful, when his mood was forced, a pretense of gaiety, stoical high spirits. They were not precisely lovers, after all—it couldn’t have been said what they were—so Marya was spared the necessity of falling in with his moods, placating and pleasing. She said that the bicycle ride might be just the solution. To dispel anxiety, nerves, animal terror—she was smiling, saying this—to take them away.

A man she once knew, Marya continued, feeling now rather playful herself, used to say that if the future is as strictly determined as the past, aren’t we really free to do what we wish?—and all without being blamed.

Who was that, Gregory asked immediately, one of your lovers?

Marya stiffened. She felt the frown lines reassert themselves.

No, she said. Not really.

SO THEY SET out early the following morning, Marya and Gregory, on their ambitious bicycle ride. They even told a few friends about it—boasted of it, warily, self-mockingly—anything to get them away while the Dean and the Provost and one or two others decided their fates for them. (“Odd, how we use words like ‘fate,’ ” Gregory observed, “when we mean only good or bad luck.”) Gregory’s bicycle was a handsome ten-speed English racing bike with smart blue reflectors that spun about, affixed to the spokes of the wheels; Marya’s was a fairly shameful old thing—a mere three-speed with a worn seat, slightly rusted pedals, a frayed wicker basket into which she usually stuffed books and papers. She didn’t yet own a car: if she lost her job here, she’d buy one at once, she’d need it to move away in, maybe rent one of those U-Haul trailers and pile in her things. . . .

“Are you thinking about it?” Gregory said reproachfully. “If you are, stop.”