“Oh, come on, Jason, don’t give me that!” Tina was irritated at the defense of Duke she herself had taken so many times. “I know about the Establishment, the System, and now Academia. It’s a hard thing to square the intellectual purity I’m in with the external forms of Academia. But I am not going to let the externals of any system do me out of what I want and I know what I want—to be a scholar who teaches for a living, not a teacher who passively absorbs other peoples’ culture. Of course it pisses me off that I have to sell myself to the Department as a good investment before they’ll give me a fellowship! They hesitate with women ‘cause they’re scared we’ll quit and get married, as if a woman’s education didn’t become as integral a part of her life as a man’s . . . as if a woman couldn’t marry and have her career, too! That’s the unfair part—but that’s real and I’ve got to live with it and live around it and not let it get me down or take my sights away from what’s really important. But this much I know: I wouldn’t go through this for any piece of parchment in the world. I go through this for Dante.”

“Well, that’s not so quaquaversal, after all,” Jason said, laughing. “You’ve got your sights.” She felt his admiration.

“It makes me very insecure, Jason, because all of us graduate students are in this amazing obstacle race—the paranoia is rampant.”

“It’s no different from the business world or any other world, probably.”

“That’s the sad part: Academia is another hierarchy like the military, and completely political. But what I love in it is greater than the rest and I guess there’s nothing perfect. My father’s always saying we have to love each other’s defects as well as our qualities.”

At the mention of her father, the torrent of Tina’s words quietly subsided.

She was on her way to Angela’s to make arrangements for an abortion; it seemed very unimportant that she should be thinking about graduate school.

“Let’s have an aperitivo before you get on the bus,” Jason said.

“You always know the right thing to say, Jason,” she said, brightening. “That’s because you come from a diplomatic background. And yet you look more and more like a pirate—in fact, you look great. How’s that?”

“Not hard, really.” He grinned. “I took off my glasses and got contact lenses and had my teeth filled with gold.”