“Yes.” She hugged him, kissed him. For a moment he thought that she did not know that he was waiting for her to say it, too.

“If I don’t marry you I’m crazy,” she said.

That winter, the next spring, and the following summer, they saw each other every weekend, and late at night during the week. She changed jobs and they had to find new places to meet. They went to parties and down to Joytown, and when they were broke they went to Young Communist League meetings, put their names to nothing, and helped themselves to cake and coffee. She gave him André Malraux to read. One afternoon at a departmental reception one of her professors saw him squeeze her bottom and he laughed aloud; another time, quite late, she was locked out of the dormitory and had to spend the night at his house, and in the morning his parents found him on the couch and her in his bed in his pajamas.

In August she moved out of the dormitory to a room and a half downtown. He contributed to the rent and had a key. She thought it was smug of him, having a woman downtown at his age, and so did he. He had never been happier, and he did not keep it a secret from her. He adored her, she understood that better now. He was willing to do the shopping, pin the hems on her skirts, shampoo her hair, and let her shampoo his. He would not tag along to push a cart for her in a supermarket while she made the selections, or stand around in a department store while she looked at dresses. She could calibrate the strength of his feeling about a thing by the amount of obscenity in his speech, and she learned that he did not like to hear her go beyond “hell” and “damn.”

His method of learning was memorization. He was not a bad student, but through practice he had become capable of retaining thousands of pieces of information that did not interest him. When she told him that the way he worked made her feel like a waste, he did not understand why. She said that it seemed that he could do anything he put his mind to, but she was wrong; there were some things, like mathematics, in which he could not do well. If she felt he was better disciplined, he felt that she had the greater natural intelligence. Her interests were wider-ranged. She did not believe that, and when he began to study for the policeman’s examination she offered to help, to see how he did it.

“Defensive wounds,” she said.

“Cuts on the hands of a victim from trying to fend off a knife.”

“I’m going to skip around,” she said. “How long can you use a search warrant?”

“Ten days.”

“What’s the telephone number of police headquarters?”

“Crown Seven, six thousand.”

“Where is the Eighteenth Precinct station house?”