He looked a lot younger back then too, she said to me one night over the phone, with an apologetic laugh. I pictured her sitting somewhere secluded in their house, perhaps upstairs in their bedroom, or maybe in her studio, perhaps wrapped in that turquoise Mexican blanket she sometimes draped over herself during meetings. She confided in me that Howard had had a bit of a reputation for sleeping with students.

Not necessarily his own, she clarified, but just . . . other students at the university.

I heard her take a sip of tea, from her favourite fired-clay mug. She said she was always aware of the power imbalance between them, and that bothered her. She also began to feel alienated and judged by the other graduate students.

Eventually it became a really oppressive working environment, really toxic, she said. And then Howard started getting all this flak from the school for his research. All kinds of people were trying to tear him down. And he just said you know what, I don’t need this, and he quit. And I sort of felt like I had to quit with him. We’d become a unit. The thought of staying there and completing my studies without him felt, just, impossible.

For some reason her voice, isolated on the phone, reminded me of that surrealist Méret Oppenheim sculpture of the teacup, saucer, and spoon wrapped in fur. A hard thing wrapped in unlikely softness. I couldn’t remember what the piece was called, but I made a note to find the image and send it to her. I was sure she’d get a kick out of my mental association. She always seemed interested in how the mind worked and drew connections, in slips of the tongue, and what our dreams revealed about us. I suppose rather like the surrealists, she was invested in the world of the subconscious. How, in an instant, the mundane could become extraordinary.

I heard her take another sip of tea and hold it in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. She admitted to struggling, for years, with living under Howard’s shadow. For years, their friends would be his colleagues, or doctoral students from other countries making pilgrimages to their home to meet with him.

I began to feel like his personal assistant, she said. Sorting out his calendar, booking his travel, even answering his emails sometimes. It really got to me.

Her voice was quiet on the other end of the line. She then said that for years she felt she was just a kind of appendage. I asked her if she regretted how things had unfolded, and she said no, she was much happier and fulfilled doing what she did now. She said she was not a fatalist, but believed, with regard to her career, that things had taken the course they did for a reason.