Her chairman has assigned her six days of classes, including a third-form composition class that met on Saturday mornings at eight o’clock: put her on several committees: named her as faculty adviser to one of the student organizations. By magic she had become “Miss Jensen” to her students, “Monica” to her new colleagues, whose names she prided herself upon memorizing in the first two weeks. She didn’t at all mind that she had, in all, more than one hundred students (which meant, among other things, more than one hundred weekly themes to correct): she was in fact grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate just how hard she could work without even good-humored complaint. She liked being exhausted, it had become a kind of drug to her, like walking for hours—for hours and hours—in Manhattan, up from Eleventh Street to Central Park in a drunken zigzag pattern, not minding the airlessness and midsummer heat and the exhaust of those ubiquitous buses. She loved being so drained of energy, so wrung dry, that, before midnight, she could only set the alarm for six-thirty the following morning and fall into bed. (Where her dreams were hallucinatory, careening and vertiginous, rapid flashes of bizarre images played against the raw insides of her eyelids.)

She was prevented, consequently, from dwelling upon the past, which was after all past. She was prevented from lapsing into self-pity and self-recrimination and self-loathing of the kind she so abhorred in women acquaintances of hers whose marriages had “also” ended disastrously. How did I fail, these stunned women asked themselves, what did I do wrong, how could I have avoided . . . ? I, I, I . . .

After her first week of teaching Monica had been so stupefied with exhaustion she hadn’t been able to complete her grocery shopping at the Olcottsville A & P—she left the part-filled cart in one of the aisles and made her way, blinking and light-headed, out to her car.

When she had free hours, on the weekends in particular, she worked at the house, scouring away layers of grime, washing windows, sanding, polishing, preparing to strip wallpaper, deliberating over which rooms to paint and which simply to close off. And should she borrow money to make improvements and buy furniture, or should she restrict herself to what she could afford, month by month—? She had not felt so powerful a sense of ownership and domesticity since the earliest months of her marriage when the setting—the exact, the absolute setting—for hers and her husband’s passion had come to matter more than the passion itself.