She did not look up as I came in; she seemed to accept my entrance as an inevitable and not particularly interesting matter of course. Her hair, a truer, paler blond than that of the guest lecturer, had been piled on top of her head and secured with a blue plastic clip. At the other pole, a flushed and sturdy foot had surfaced—I could not bring myself to catalogue what lay between.

“Is that my drink?” she said abruptly. “You can set it there.”

She indicated the lip of the tub, where a previous, now-empty glass sat, fogged with condensation.

“I think you may be under the wrong impression,” she said at last, her voice unfriendly.

This was entirely possible, I thought; somewhere along the line I had most certainly erred. There was no logical combination of events that should have resulted in this particular scene. All I could manage, however, was a choked, “Oh?”

“I don’t need your money,” said Kirstie.

My money?

“Maybe that’s how they did it when you were young, but that wasn’t what I meant at all. I may be a graduate student, but I’m not exactly destitute.”

My throat began to close around a dry and increasingly useless tongue. Obviously there had been a case of mistaken identity.

Now she was unwrapping a tiny bar of soap, liberating it from its white paper jacket, and I had a flash of—

“No,” she continued. “I told you because I was under the impression that my pregnancy might interest you.”

Her pregnancy, I thought, and before I could integrate this new idea she went on:

“Yes, I know. You just wanted to deal with it. That’s your only mode, it seems. But you can go ahead and cancel that appointment you made me at that Morgenthaler Clinic. It’s too far away, and I don’t want an abortion from one of your medical school cronies, thank you very much.”

Now she rolled her eyes. “Excuse me, your attending.”

Morgenthaler Clinic, I thought.

She had applied the soap to a washcloth and was soaping her arms and shoulders vigorously, covering them in a layer of white suds, and causing her breasts to dance a lunatic little jig.

After a long pause, she said resignedly, “Yes, I know. Linda told me.

“No, of course not,” she went on, “she was just being gossipy.

“Really, it doesn’t bother me at all—I have tickets to go and see my parents. And I’m really not sure what you could do to help—whether you’re in Jackson Hole or not. It will all be over by then.

“My parents? In Philadelphia. But don’t you think the time for pretending to be interested in my family has passed?”

Still she did not look up, but her motions had an air of finality, she was giving the washcloth a thorough rinse. I supposed she was clean now, gleaming from head to toe.