She had her own life now, she had her own life, fully, again—her classes, in which she was deeply absorbed; her faculty and committee meetings; luncheons with colleagues, or with newly made acquaintances in town; a dinner party now and then; even an ambitious study-discussion group, informally organized by the younger members of the Glenkill school, that met on alternate Thursday evenings to take up the interpretation of “controversial” new ideas (deconstructionist literary theory, radical French feminism, the ethics of nuclear armament/disarmament, the knotty subtleties of the “biological revolution,” American foreign policy in Latin America, and so forth: they were nothing if not happily eclectic). Monica went to chamber music concerts in the area, where she forced herself to listen, to listen hard, and not merely to hear, or to sit and allow her thoughts to wander where they would—in directions melancholy or otherwise; one bright sunny day she drove to Philadelphia to visit the art museum, alone—and ended up feeling rather too much alone, too emptied of all affect, in its eerie Duchamp wing amidst the iconoclastic images of an era long dead and never, for Monica, sufficiently alive. (“What am I supposed to feel?—am I supposed to feel?” Monica wondered, staring at the totally perplexing work of art, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (Large Glass), 1915–1923. The positioning of the finely cracked glass in the room suggested its mysterious worth—its sacred talismanic value—inaccessible, no doubt, to profane eyes. It was of little aid for Monica to read, in dutiful schoolgirl manner, that, in its perfect balancing of “rational and non-rational elements,” the Large Glass ranked as one of the great works of the twentieth century; nor to be cryptically informed, by Duchamp himself, in a quotation affixed to the wall—“There is no solution because there is no problem.”)

Returning from Philadelphia Monica drove some miles out of her way, to pass Black Billy’s Tavern on Highway 29: a tawdry little place by day, hardly worth a second glance. In contempt she saw that a half-dozen cars were parked in the lot, nosed up close to the building; and it was only midafternoon. For the first time she noticed that Black Billy’s was windowless—or, rather, the old windows had been paneled over, covered in what appeared to be aluminum foil.

But it wasn’t worth a second glance, really. Or a second thought.