Managing the courage to dial a listing about a room for rent, he found less gumption when the first speaker told him that she had nothing available for just three months and was otherwise full unless somebody moved out of her building. When he rang the second listing, he got a gruff voice saying the house manager was out for the morning and all the rooms were occupied. There was no third listing to try, nothing else except apartments he could never afford. He sat numbly in the swivel chair behind the news desk, looking out the broad windows.

He wanted to call Ben and started to and then shut down the thought, a knot of hurt in his throat. Anyway, he’d barely be awake this time of day, and likely had his girlfriend wrapped around him if he was. Or at least that was the image that Ronny used to torment himself.

Finally it was time for his last class, a makeup session for a seminar about French women writers, where, while waiting for the professor to show up—everybody complaining mildly that there wasn’t supposed to be a makeup class on reading day—he blurted out his situation to the other students, looking for sympathy. It was all he could do to ease his anxiety. Some of them groaned on his behalf, others ignored him, but, seated across from him at the seminar table, the fellow named Jamal said, “A guy in my boardinghouse needs somebody to take his room over the summer. You could try that.”

Jamal was gangly, tall, hair intensely curly, a scrap of beard on his chin. He was the friendly sort who liked to talk to strangers, though after a semester discussing George Sand and Marguerite Duras, they were hardly strangers anymore. They had sometimes chatted a bit—about family and friends, politics and music, before and after class—and once walked to the snack bar for a cup of watery coffee. When Jamal spoke about the room for rent, Ronny felt a trace of hope and his stomach unknotted a bit. “You’re kidding. Are you sure?”

He had a booming, heavy voice. “This nice old lady owns the house. I’ve lived there for a while.”

“You think she’d let me have the room?”

He snort-laughed, an odd sound. “Why wouldn’t she? She’s in a bind unless she finds somebody to rent it, and it’s hard to keep people for the summer. You want to come meet her after class?”

Of course he did. Already he was feeling lighter. But it would probably cost too much, wouldn’t it? Or would it? Maybe not if it was only a room. Then in walked Professor Mtumbe and they began their discussion of The Second Sex.

After class they walked to the house, only a few blocks away on Cameron Avenue, and Jamal talked a bit about himself, about his opinion of Simone de Beauvoir and the fact that she was less appreciated than her boyfriend, Jean-Paul Sartre. “Women get the worst of the crap, don’t you think? I worry about my sisters.”