After that she saw him around more. They talked and she found him sensitive and intelligent; he saw things straight. He moved into her room, and managed to take the stairs away from the wall they were fastened to and turn them around so that the bed could be moved and faced toward the window. It was for her the metaphor of Duke in her life: He had turned her view from the steps to the window, where she could watch spring arrive on the bare-branched tree it framed. They listened to Bob Dylan records in that room; they tripped on mescaline and watched the bricks shifting in and out of the brick wall beyond the tree; they read poetry; and he started to write a book while she went to classes.

He was her first love partner; she thought they would spend their life together. She had no doubt of his talent and that he would be a writer like her father.

Then she saw some of what Duke’s real world was like when she went with him to Tennessee; she could see all the reasons he should try to get away from it and be something else. But she could also see that he wouldn’t.

Jim Frank Dukane would stay what he was—a poor white from Tennessee who had gotten a scholarship to Harvard, dropped out, been reinstated, and dropped out again. He was like some literary Huck Finn, a vagrant of the academic world, a person of sensitivity and brains who alone of all of them had the decency to get out of the system they hated without the courage to quit. Tina respected Duke for his honesty in that sense but despaired of him in another: What would he do with himself besides stay on the fringes and protest?

As she began to fall asleep, Tina thought, Now everything will be different.

The next morning Tina was sick again. She looked haggard and pale, and she asked Duke to throw the I Ching with her. This time it wasn’t like when they threw #55, the sign of abundance called Feng, which Duke said really meant Fuck, so that the throw meant fuck a lot and love abundantly. Now it was the sign of oppression and exhaustion; the image was one of no water in the lake; the judgment, “A man must not lean on thorns and thistles.” Tina, already filled with misgivings, accepted what she saw as the end of her being with Duke.

She remembered her mother, when she had met Duke at Tina’s graduation from Bryn Mawr, asking worriedly what she saw in him and saying, “He has such a thin body—is he healthy? And what will he do with himself? Why has he thrown away the chance to go to Harvard?” Tina was arrogant then, and confident of Duke’s genius.