“Maybe I will.” Jerry tried to give the guard five dollars. Walking had to hurt him.

But Paul waved the money aside. “Bank pays me good enough. This, it’s just part of my job.”

Tuesday morning at eight o’clock the following week, Jerry sat with the other TAs to proctor the final and to gather up his sections’ bluebooks. He did some of them in his office. The pile he didn’t finish there, he took home. Grades were due back forty-eight hours after the exam ended, so he had till Thursday at eleven.

He worked on the finals till Anna came home. One of the Bobbsey Twins flunked; the other got a D+. They were cute, but they were stupid. Or, if you looked at it another way, they were stupid, but they were cute.

“Did the prettier one get the D?” his wife asked when he told her.

“As a matter of fact, no. She didn’t know anything. She didn’t even suspect anything,” Jerry said.

“What a shame.” Anna sounded as brokenhearted as Jerry thought she would.

Perhaps as a reward for his not cutting pretty girls any slack, she fixed dinner herself: ground beef, taco seasoning, and rice. Homemade Hamburger Helper. Anything but exciting, but pretty much harmless. Jerry washed the dishes, though. That had hardened into routine.

Then he settled down at the table and started grading more finals. More than half of him hoped Anna would come by and kiss him on the back of the neck again. It made him mad when he was working on his dissertation. Now he would have welcomed any excuse to stop for a while.

Anna stayed away. She and the King of Siam were doing whatever they were doing in the back of the apartment. Jerry yawned. A few minutes later, he yawned again, wider this time. If he drank coffee now, he wouldn’t sleep at all tonight. He turned the radio on to KNX. Listening to the news station might keep him alert. He’d done that a lot as revelation followed revelation during Watergate.

He didn’t pay much attention to the stock market report or the sports news. The local car crashes and shootings didn’t interest him, either. But KNX was a CBS affiliate, and hooked in with the network’s national and foreign correspondents. They did that stuff better than anyone else in town.

On a 5–4 vote, the Supreme Court had decided plays enjoyed the same First Amendment protection against obscenity charges as books, newspapers, and movies did. That seemed reasonable to Jerry. So did the British government’s recommendation of a Yes vote on joining the Common Market.