Next year The Meridian was to celebrate its thirty-fifth anniversary but it still seemed young, precarious, even in a way provisionary. Eric had started it in the (cramped, inadequate) kitchen of his Morningside Heights apartment when he was taking classes at Columbia and teaching part-time at Cooper Union. He had a wife, a small baby, friends dropping by who stayed for hours, occasionally for days. But he borrowed money from his family to start a journal of “politics and the arts.” At the time he’d had no exceptional ambitions or sense of destiny but he certainly had strong opinions; he was known for his strong opinions. It became his passion to see if he could marshal the evidence to substantiate his opinions. He thought of himself in those days as a soldier in an undefined and undeclared war within the territorial boundary of the United States.

His wife, he told Marya, had dissociated herself from the magazine long before the two of them were legally separated. (“She stopped loving it,” he said. “I think I see her point.”) Eric’s family continued even now to think of the magazine as a youthful gesture of Eric’s, an ongoing irritant and embarrassment. (Eric’s father had been a prominent Duluth businessman and philanthropist, a registered Republican all his life; one of Eric’s uncles had been a congressman for twenty-odd years, among the most faithful of the Joe McCarthy men.)

Shortly after Eric’s death a rumor made the rounds that The Meridian would be discontinued. It had been a one-man journal, after all. Another rumor was that Eric’s wife had inherited it and would sell it to pay off its creditors. She was a vindictive woman, Barbara Nichols, wasn’t she?—so Marya was asked. But Marya said truthfully that she didn’t know. She had never met the woman and never would.

MARYA, IN HER borrowed cabin in Quebec, had never felt more independent and triumphant than on the day of her thirty-fourth birthday, which she spent entirely alone.

She dared think that if Eric did not divorce his wife within the year without a word from Marya (it was important that it be “without a word”), she would break off the affair. She could live alone without great hardship; she had her own work, her friends and acquaintances, her travel. She had her life. Surely these periodic retreats were proof of her own strength and independence. . . . She recalled her friend Imogene’s belief that you only know how much someone loves you (you only know how much you love him) when the relationship is over, fractured past mending.