Skype’s slight delay, made worse by the way the internet here cut in and out, gave Eric’s normally calm and reassuring voice an annoyed and impatient edge. “Everything is mortgaged, we need to make money with what we have. Plus.” The screen froze for a moment. “Where will you go?”

“Maybe Dubai,” she said, squinting at the screen. The room behind Eric’s head glowed with an opulent golden light. She could see a bookcase filled with leather-bound volumes, and a sparkling chandelier. What kind of a fool did Eric think she was? “Do you know what I found in that minifridge behind me?”

“Trust me,” he said, and the screen froze again. “You wouldn’t. Like it here.”

“A condom,” she said. “Full of sand. I thought it was a penis, and I screamed, and there was no one here to hear me. Also: the applications,” she said, putting her eye up close to the camera so that all he could see of her was a big, staring eye. “They are crazy.”

“How many?”

“One hundred and twenty-three,” she said. “But I haven’t gotten the mail today. Or yesterday.” She groaned and lay back on the bed, remembering the last time she’d neglected the mail. The mailman had simply left a stack of envelopes on the ground.

“There are bound to be some good ones,” he said. “In a sample that large. Some. Interesting ones. Have you read. Them all?”

“Yes,” she said. “No.” The day before she’d tried to read a few, but stopped after coming across a series of poems that had been conceived, both in manuscript length and creativity of the punishments inflicted upon sinners, as a contemporary Inferno.

“Don’t worry about cleaning fridges or fixing stuff. Mark is working on getting some people out for that. Just read, interview the teachers, and I’ll be there in December to help you make the final decisions.”

“Tell him to get the pool fixed,” she said. Eric was never able to talk long, and she pictured him logging off to take his students—demure, kohl-eyed women—on coffee dates where they asked him about their manuscripts, which he would have mistaken for good because they described a world so foreign, and because the women themselves were so pretty. While Marianne scrubbed odiferous minifridges and took notes on poems (poems!) about serial killers.