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whining. A sudden suspicion came over Paula. This couldn’t be—she glanced at Melanie and got her answer—oh, God, it was. This sopping-wet freckle face was David’s latest.
    “‘Since that respects of fortune are his love, I shall not be his wife,’” she read, her voice choked with tears.
    Oh, don’t say that, Paula thought. Do yourself a favor. Get off stage and get married.
    Reading ahead a little, she saw that they were mercifully close to Cordelia’s exit. After that, she and Melanie, as Regan and Goneril, were left to confer in private.
    “‘Sister, it is not little I have to say of what most nearly appertains to us both,’” Melanie read. She was looking at Paula significantly.
    Is she on to something? Paula wondered.
    They were near the end of the page when Melanie read, with a special and private emphasis intended for Paula’s ears alone, “‘…then we must look from his age to receive not alone the imperfections of long-ingrafted condition, but therewithal the unruly waywardness that infirm and choleric years bring with them.’”
    Oh, my God, Paula realized, she’s talking about Riddiford.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she sought a certain spot in the dimly lit house.
    And there she saw Lauren sitting, her long legs demurely crossed and her hand drifting idly in her endless hair.

7
    James Taylor Riddiford, Flint Professor of Drama at Blake University and chairman of the department, lived with his wife and two children two towns west of the college. Although he was forty-six, he was not yet graying noticeably, but the bulk of his body had come to occupy an anatomical middle ground staked out by his navel. Lately he had developed a habit of wiping his face with his hand, whether or not he was perspiring. It was a gesture of exhaustion and exasperation, and an unconscious revelation of his state of mind. Anything could make him do it, like the sight of his wife’s hair, which she was allowing to go gray without the slightest interference, in the typical indifference to appearance of an academic wife.
    Ellen Riddiford had no idea that her hair reminded her husband of the fur on their dog’s belly, nor that he was tired of her, and of the whole world of the college, for that matter. James was sick of all academics, with their pinkies poking out from the stems of little sherry glasses. He was sick of faculty meetings. He was sick of his wife’s talk about her introductory Latin courses. And sick at heart when the coeds appeared on campus in the spring, in their tight little shorts.
    After certain classes—the ones with a nymph in scant denim sitting in the front row—James would retreat to his office, close the door, and sit wild-eyed in his chair like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, which the Flint Chair in Drama had proven to be. It was the steeliest and most cruelly cunning of traps: permanent job security.
    Every day at work James had moments when his hand went involuntarily to his face and drew the shade. It usually happened whenever Anderson, the would-be playwright in the department, came in with another excerpt from the libretto of that so-called opera he was collaborating on with some snippy little bald faggot from the music department.
    “Listen to this,” Anderson would say with a scoutmaster’s enthusiasm, and James would respond by saying, “Hey, how about that,” or “Not bad.” While he churned inside. The mediocrity of his colleagues often turned his frustration into self-loathing: they were so cheerfully accepting of their limitations. How limited must he be to have to count himself among them?
    Worse than Anderson’s intrusions were James’s encounters with Mr. Cherry. Cherry was one of those faggots who found everyone and everything that wasn’t faggoty distasteful if not untouchable. To keep the world at arm’s length Cherry used a cigarette holder so that he made James think of a lighthouse standing cold and slippery in the dark, the ember of his