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the car into it—even leave some blood—and take off to Europe and be free. I thought it out to the last detail.”
    Karen would claw the edges of books and magazines with her fingernails, leaving them mangled. I would hear this crackling sound and it drove me nuts and the sight of the clawed edges of books I loved made me want to scream and run. Her hermetic mother, who lived with Karen’s father in the big house overlooking the water in Portland, had long fingernails and in fact, resembled a claw herself. She was a dark woman with a studied beauty and black hair; the house was filled with brown and black wood and sculpture. She detested what the world had come to. Over martinis Mrs. Epson grieved the loss of a time when “a faggot was a little piece of wood” and “gay” meant “gloriously happy.” She said to me that Karen was a “steel hand in a velvet glove.” She told us that she’d voted for Jimmy Carter because Betty Ford had danced with a Puerto Rican. “Intermarriage is like marrying a person to an ape,” she said. By her third martini, Mrs. Epson advocated capital punishment for all blacks (could Jews be far behind?). She spent her days reading about the lives of serial killers. If Karen responded to anything her mother said with a hesitant quibble like “I don’t know,” Mrs. Epson would storm out of the room screaming that Karen didn’t love her and lock herself in the bathroom. Karen, terrified that her mother would kill herself, pleaded with her for hours until Mrs. Epson unlocked the door.
    Karen would have nightmares of her mother making her psychotic, of prohibiting her from making any contact with the world except herself. And that was exactly what Mrs. Epson had tried to do to Karen, as my father had tried to do to me. That was my bond with Karen.
    Karen and I clung to each other in the early days of the college. We were planning our courses. I was actually teaching Karen about the literature she would be teaching, and her adoration of me gave me the support I needed to enter a classroom, bolstered as I was by rum and tranquilizers.
    I invited Karen to my apartment to “study.” In fact, we were more like two freshmen college students, cramming like crazy to prepare for the students we would be teaching. I gave Karen assignments of novels to read, and unlike in graduate school when she used Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, she read everything I assigned her, thoroughly confident that if these were books that I liked, she would like them too. Soon we were fucking and the faculty all knew about it.
    We got “engaged” while she was still living with her husband. I bought her a gold ring with a carved jade stone; she wore it when she visited me and left it in my apartment when she left. Soon, I insisted she move out of Victor’s house.
    Two weeks later, I parked the car in the college parking lot, and staggered out into the sun. One of my students, David Browning, headband, ponytail, in his thirties with a wife, kids and hash on a farm, waved. He was my favorite (at night in the pub after class, he said, “Man, in the long run the headband just doesn’t make that much difference, you know?”) Since he was close enough in age to be almost a rival, we usually circled around each other. Now I walked toward him, at the back of his beat-up truck.
    â€œAre you okay?” he asked.
    â€œNo.”
    I paused.
    â€œKaren’s husband committed suicide last night.”
    He tilted his flask toward me. I drank. He took a swig.
    His tortured eyes seemed right now. We stood together. I drank once more, and he said, “Anything I can do …” I walked towards the campus.
    Two weeks after Victor’s suicide, a furious member of the faculty, an old-line physics teacher—curiously, a Dutchman too—spotted Karen shopping for me at a men’s store and, his face red hot, his eyes bulging, his