“Good. We can use all the estrogen we can get.” She looked at me searchingly for a moment, then seemed to decide that I had passed some sort of test. “So, folks starting out here are usually a bit younger than you, if you don’t mind my saying so. What brings you to our fair campus?”

“Well …” I paused but then thought, What the hell. “I used to teach public school in Cleveland, but I’m from around here. I came back here because I needed a change.”

“Well, you certainly got it, coming here, I would guess.”

I laughed. “I did. But it’s good.” I paused again. “It was time to move anyway. I got divorced a few years ago, my daughter was off to college, and my students were struggling more and more, and … well, that’s it. I have a friend whose son graduated from here. She told me about the opening. I needed to see some hills again. The light is so flat in the Midwest. I missed being able to get to the ocean sometimes, to get to New York. I wanted to come back.”

She kept eating, not speaking, but the look she gave me was understanding, generous even. I had the feeling that people confessed things to her all the time, just came up to her and spilled their guts. “Well. It’s nice here. Pleasant, I should think, after the hard labor in a public school,” she said.

“Everything is so … plentiful.”

She laughed. “That’s the word for it all right. Plentiful. This is a school with a great abundance of all manner of things. As I imagine you’ll find out soon enough.” She laid down her fork. “Listen, a group of the women on the faculty get together once a month for brunch. We talk about what’s going on, hold each other up, dish various students, that sort of thing. Would that appeal to you at all? We’re meeting next Sunday at my house.”

“I’d love that. Really. I hardly know anyone in town and … that would be really terrific.”

“All right, then.” She busied herself rummaging in her bag for a piece of paper on which to note her address. I looked idly around the room while she did this, and my eye fell on a black man eating alone. The only one in the room. I’d seen him around in the couple of days before classes had started, but we hadn’t met. I couldn’t remember his name.

“What’s his name over there? The teacher who’s eating alone?” I asked.

Helen smiled thinly. “Him? That’s Jerome Washington. You haven’t met him yet?”

“No.”