I was sitting in Jane’s room in the dormitory. She was beyond my understanding, so I liked her. I suppose we would have been friends if either one of us had been capable of it at the time. She was going as a nun and arranged her wimple at the mirror. There was a gallon of horrible red wine on her desk. We were drinking elegantly from stemmed and only slightly greasy glasses.

The guy came in who was taking her to the party. A nice guy, silly-looking, with his bushy hair frizzing out of a white paper cook’s cap. He wore white gloves, a white shirt, white trousers. His tennis shoes shed white dust on the floor. He said he hadn’t had time to wash them so he rubbed them with white chalk. He said he was a tampon. Jane sprinkled red wine over his chest and back for effect.

The door was open. We laughed and gulped at the wine. When I saw Lichtenstein go by in the hall I jumped and dropped my glass and ran out of the room, calling after him. It was his shoulders I’d recognized. He’d shaved his head. He turned around and although his forehead held the same sullen tension, he’d plucked his brows completely off. His lashes were pale. He still wasn’t wearing a shirt. There was a red dot in the middle of his forehead.

“Hi! That dot means you’re a married woman, right?” I asked.

He stared at me as if waiting for me to evaporate.

“Where are Carlotta and Sam? Aram. Whatever. Did they come down off the cold mountain with you?”

His expression changed, his eyes went dark. I smiled, waiting, not expecting his voice to drop to a guttural whisper.

“You know—their baby died.”

It was theatrical and practiced. His eyes bored into me, watching the effect of his words. My first reaction was to refuse him an equally dramatic response. I stared back and stubbornly continued to smile. He shrugged and turned away before I lost it. He banged out through the fire doors at the end of the hall.

I thought I would go home. I walked down to the end of the hall and exited through the same fire doors. The stairs down were lit, but not heated, and I felt suddenly cold. Rennel’s white Rambler was in the parking lot next to the dormitory. It was raining. I thought I would sit in the car and wait till he came and then I would ask him to drive me home. I wanted to get back to the skylight. Inside, the Rambler was warm. The keys were in the ignition. I turned them and the car muttered and shook under me. I flicked the lever on the steering post and the car moved back a ways, slowly. The bumper came to rest against one wall of the dorm. I sat and looked at the thin lights of the dashboard. There were those stupid pedals to fool with, too. I flicked the lever again. The car jigged forward and started to climb somebody’s Volkswagen. Fresh, I thought.