I hung up the phone and held myself very still in the silence. Then I pushed a short burst of air out through my teeth. I no longer wanted to be in my office, I thought as I rose to my feet, at the mercy of whatever memorabilia and the telephone. If I wanted to be alone with my thoughts (and why Professor Pindar wanted to speak to me was one thought that, from the looks of things, circumstances behooved me to address), I would have to go elsewhere. That, and my coffee was now lukewarm. I would have to go and get another one, I thought, and then a movement outside my window caught my eye. It was a group of figures, heading back from the direction of the quad.

That group of graduate students, I thought, once again grateful not to have encountered them in the hallway.

But on second glance I saw that I was wrong. It was not, as I had previously imagined, a “group” of students, but two people walking side by side, and only one of them was a student. The second person was none other than the chair of my department, whom I was due to meet with at three: Professor Pindar. He was gesticulating wildly, his gray curls blowing in the wind. The other person—her substantial thighs clearly outlined in black running pants, her ponytail streaming behind her like a small, bright flag—was Kirstie.

25

It was just like me, I thought, to think the worst of things, to go over every minor thing with a fine-toothed comb. There was no reason to think that whatever conversation Kirstie and Professor Pindar had been having outside was anything but benign. There was no reason at all to believe it had anything to do with me.

Linda was on the phone again at three, but she cupped one hand over the receiver and cast a glance at the closed office door, then she pantomimed knocking, and mouthed, contradictorily, Go right in.

Professor Pindar was bent over a stack of papers on his desk but motioned me into the room with one hand. He was more tired, less vital-looking than he’d appeared when I’d seen him through the window.

“Sit down,” he said, indicating the chair across from him. “I’ll just be a minute. You can move all that onto the floor.”

I sat, noticing as I always did the room’s most prominent decoration, which was displayed above the window in a long glass case: a broken wooden harpoon. Professor Pindar, it was said, was descended from New England whalers, though whether the fragment above the window had actually been wielded by his ancestors or was merely an evocative piece, I didn’t know.