I said hello to a couple of casual acquaintances and shook my head “no” to a stranger who made the thumb-through-circled-thumb-and-finger query. You didn’t see that as often as when I was a girl—or maybe it was just I who didn’t see it as often. (There were places on Earth, like Magreb, where you could be killed for making a gesture like that at another man’s wife. I had hated that place, forced to wear heavy robes in the desert heat, just your eyes showing—and my memory, unbidden, supplied the smell, when we rounded the corner in Tangier and came up to the public square, the smell of the previous rent-a-robe customer’s rancid sweat mingling with the sudden stench of putrid flesh, the hands and heads of thieves and adulterers rotting on spikes.)

“Marianne. You okay?”

“Oh, hi, Sam. Just tired.” Samuel Wasserman, historian and kosher loverboy.

“You looked right through me.”

“Brain’s someplace else. Swim?” I took his elbow and steered him toward the shallow end.

The water was too warm, as usual. I could make it cooler, by executive fiat, but I knew that this was what most people preferred. Maybe I could have a new poll commissioned, and fake the results. We started off slowly, side by side.

“How about Purcell’s little surprise?”

I hadn’t talked to Sam after the meeting. “He does have a flair for the dramatic, in his own way,” I said. “Ever have him for economics?”

“No, Biondi and Walpole.”

“Lucky.”

“I have to go talk to him tomorrow. I’m not sure how to act.”

I felt unexpectedly chagrined at that; less special. “Don’t say anything about his being sick, dying. That’s sincere, I think. Just treat him with the deference due an aging academic who could have you shoveling goatshit tomorrow if you cross him.”

“You’re a big help.”

“He’s not so bad outside the classroom. I think there’s a real nice man deep down inside, under about seventy years of intellectual scar tissue. New New wasn’t exactly a hotbed of laissez-faire capitalism.”

“You have to wonder how he got so high up.”

“Personality.” We reached the other end and I kicked off. “Race!” Sam wasn’t much of a swimmer, but twelve fewer years and long arms and legs can make up for lack of skill. At midpool he churned by me like a badly designed kitchen implement.

We swam a few more laps and then sat drying, talking about Purcell and other absent colleagues. I guess I was half expecting, half hoping for, a sexual proposition, which I could gracefully decline or at least postpone. But he was just passing time. Maybe waiting for me to leave, it finally occurred to me, so he could go express his interest in someone else. I told him Dan was probably waiting up and went off to get dressed.