“Nah.” He shook his head. “That’s drying. Washing’s okay. You can see you’re making progress. And my mind kind of goes blank to the sound of running water. I’ve had story ideas while I wash. In the shower, too.”

On Tuesday, he got up with her for his nine o’clock office hours. The earlier he made it to UCLA, the better his street-parking chances. When he checked his mail slot in the department office for anything that might have come in while he was away, the secretaries fussed over him and made him show off his ring. It was a plain gold band, but he did anyway.

That night, Anna put up a Christmas tree. It was just a little one, plastic, that sat on the end table between the couch and the wall. She hung a few ornaments on the branches and mounted a plastic gold star on top. “No tinsel?” Jerry asked.

“No way,” she answered. “The cat thinks aluminum foil is a food group.” Jerry glanced over at the King of Siam. As far as he could tell, the Siamese thought everything was a food group.

Jerry’d never lived in a place with a Christmas tree before. It made him feel stranger than he’d thought it would. He dug in his boxes till he unearthed the menorah the temple had given him for his bar mitzvah. He found candles at the local Alpha Beta and lit the first one on the night of Sunday, the eighth. He hadn’t bothered while he lived alone. Now he felt the need to remind himself he was Jewish.

And he gave Anna Bridge of Sighs, the latest Robin Trower album. “Happy Chanukah!” he said.

She looked flustered, not an expression she wore very often. “Thanks, but I don’t have anything for you yet,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You do your holiday, I’ll do mine, and we’ll all be happy.”

“Mrp,” she said, but she seemed more happy than not.

The next Sunday was the last night of Chanukah. Jerry and Anna got his dad a big bottle of Chivas Regal. Then they took him to Helen Yee’s. “You guys didn’t have to do any of this,” Hyman Stieglitz said. His present for Jerry was a herringbone tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, so he could look like the professor he was less and less interested in becoming. He’d got a cashmere sweater for Anna.

“We didn’t do it because we had to,” Jerry said.

“We did it because we wanted to,” Anna finished for him. “And the sweater is beautiful. So soft!” It was a brighter green than she usually wore. Jerry thought she looked nice in it. He wasn’t so sure she agreed. But she was polite at the restaurant, which was all that mattered.