I did laundry, packed clean clothes, went shopping for supplies. I would live at the inn, was my thinking; a place that had been good for me. I liked being there; liked Dottie. I loved Dottie, although I never had figured out why on earth she left my dad.

Zigzagging up from Reading International to Harvard yard, my knapsack pointy with the spines of new hardbacks, I thought: “Why did I do this to myself? Why didn’t I buy detective novels, books a person could read?

A student with windburned cheeks recited a sonnet she’d written. Her eyes were wet. Her throat sounded constricted.

This was my class—forms writing—but Johnny Belize had it for the two semesters I was on leave with my arts grant.

The class, a casual seminar, ran itself. Students and Johnny were gathered in the undergraduate lounge. Johnny listened only now and then. He seemed close to dozing in a leather armchair.

When the student finished reciting, the young man seated next to her lifted himself from his chair. He said, “Well, that was fine, Olivia.”

“The ending has the wrong effect, though, don’t you think?” Olivia said, but with relief in her voice. “Don’t you think the final line’s cheaty? A piece of exposition? Maybe a correlative would’ve been better.”

“One does speculate—how to say it?—about the tonal consequences of unvarying values in that last. And, as you suggested, Olivia, why so much narrative?” asked the young man.

He went on talking that way for a while.

Olivia put pages into her valise and nodded or tipped her head in consideration.

I had come by to check on my student-work drop box—pleasingly empty—and more to say hello to Johnny.

Class broke up. Students stood, gathered notebooks, parkas and gloves, tote bags, satchels.

“War or babies,” someone muttered, moving alongside me in the hall. “Those’re all Olivia can write about.”

I visited my vacant office. The young man who’d talked in class appeared and pantomimed knocking on the already open door.

The office was a narrow room, with two walls traveling a slanted ceiling and two others built with bookshelves— almost emptied by borrowers.

The file cabinets were mine, and of the desktop stuff, I owned the stapler and the crane-neck lamp.

Johnny Belize joined us. He was forty or so. He wore his good wool suit, wingtips with leather laces, one of his good silk ties. He had height, lankiness, drowsy eyes, a kindly face.

“How’s Raf?” he asked me.

“Missing in action again,” I said.

“But of course he is,” Johnny said. “Your bottle!” From the hat shelf in the little coat closet, he slid a pinch bottle of Haig & Haig that I kept for visiting parents, poets, faculty. He held the bottle delicately in his fine-boned hands, as if it were an antique.

“You are a lovely crazy man!” the student said to him.