She collected anecdotes to tell him, droll little tales, some of them bitter and amusing, some merely bitter; she wanted him to know that she felt no rancor against him—for abandoning her, for leaving her so totally bereft that she wasn’t even (legally) his widow. From time to time, in weak despondent moods, she could feel the tiny thing growing in her womb. But she ignored it. She ignored all notions that did not correspond to her knowledge of herself. She believed she was tough and shallow and unreliable, capable of total self-absorption (didn’t people say that of her?—complaining, chiding, admiring?), and consequently incapable of serious grief.

She was never in her apartment. The “radical” French feminists bored her with their slovenly logic and silly polemics. The lectures at the New School attracted a motley assortment of people, few of them serious students, so far as Marya could judge, but all of them with strong opinions on feminism. (She was angrily denounced by the radical lesbians. But insulted, very nearly assaulted, by charges of “lesbianism” from other quarters.)

Eric would have urged her to laugh at the situation.

You think you have troubles? was his standard comic retort, delivered in a heavy Yiddish accent.

Use your troubles, write about them, expose them, make them serve you. . . . This was an old, old tradition.

THE ETERNAL HOURGLASS of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust. She reread Nietzsche less for consolation than for confirmation of her sorrow.

If the tiny seed in her womb would only grow, and not be washed away in a messy flow of blood (erratic, never predictable, attended now by severe cramps and nausea), she believed she might be saved; her body if not precisely her soul.

Her sleep was light and filmy, insubstantial. Slipping into it she often observed something liquid and phosphorescent swirling down a drain.

She was invited out to Montauk, to visit friends for a few days. On the second day she was bitten by a wasp, or what she believed to be a wasp; the delicate inside of her forearm swelled, and throbbed with pain, and then with itching—Marya had never felt such itching. The wasp’s venom accounted for a mound of flesh the size of a peach, pinkish-red except for a perfect circle of dead-white inside it, and inside that circle, the almost-invisible red dot made by the wasp’s stinger. Marya applied ointment, Marya suffered, everyone commiserated with Marya. In truth the wasp’s sting fascinated her. The frantic itching, the throbbing pain, the swollen hot flesh. In private she scratched and scratched the swelling, abandoning herself to the angry luxury, the intensified pain, until her nails raised welts even on the swelling.

Back in the city, asked how her little vacation on the ocean had gone, Marya mentioned the wasp’s bite: by far the most intriguing thing that had happened to her, physically, in some time.