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magnitude of the loss, the pain as sharp as if it had happened just the day before.
    She did not know the city as it was supposed to be known. She did not live as expected. What was expected were lengthy walks among the sycamores, not forgetting that this was hallowed ground. What was expected were conversations that lasted long into the night, watched over by the ghosts of pale scholars and exasperating pedants. In flagrant violation of entitlement, she returned to cheerless rooms in which there was a bed she could scarcely bear to look at. For her, Cambridge was remembering that sordid kissing behind an office door had once been elevated to the status of a sacrament (she who had now been excommunicated); or it was the bitter thrill of a sunset that turned the bricks and stones of the city, and even the faces on the streets (those entitled scholars), a rosy-salmon color that seemed the very hue of love itself. Cambridge was sitting in a bathtub in a rented apartment and making experimental slits along the wrists, slits immediately regretted for the fuss they caused in Emergency. (And mortifying that she should be just one of so many who’d had to resort.) Her skirts hung from her hipbones like wash on the line, and in September, when the weather turned colder, she wore knee-high boots that ought to have been stupendously painful to walk in and weren’t.
    She was living then on Fairfield Street, in a set of rooms that had a bathtub on a platform in the kitchen (majestic locus for sacrificial rites). She had matching china and expensive crystal from another lethal ritual and the subsequent marriage that had corroded from the inside out, like a shiny car with rust beneath the paint job. (Though she had, in the end, crashed that car head-on.) These she had placed on a shelf in a cupboard in the kitchen, where they gathered dust, mute testament to expectation. She ate, when she ate at all, on a Melamine plate she’d bought at Lechmere’s, a plate that held no associations, a dish no lover or husband had ever touched. In the mornings, when school started up again, Linda stood by the door and drank an Instant Breakfast, pleased that so much could be taken care of in so little time. She went out in her miniskirts and boots (staggering now to think of wearing such clothing in front of seventeen-year-old boys), and got into her car and merged into traffic going north to a high school in a suburban town. Within the privacy that only the interior of a car can provide, she cried over her persistent and seemingly inexhaustible loss and often had to fix her face in the rearview mirror before she went into the classroom.
    On the holidays, she went to Hull as if threading a minefield — fearful at the entry, mute with gratitude when the fraught journey had been negotiated. And occasionally she was not successful. Against all better judgment, she would sometimes drive by Thomas’s family home, trying to imagine which car was his (the VW? the Fiat? the Volvo?); for he, like her, was necessarily drawn back for the holidays. But as much as she feared or hoped for it, they never met by accident, not even at the diner or the gas station. (To think of how she would tremble just to turn the corner into the parking lot of the diner, hardly able to breathe for wondering.)
    To ward off men, who seemed ever-present, even on that mostly female faculty, she created the fiction that she was married (and for the convenience of the lie, to a law student who was hardly ever home). This was a life she could well imagine and could recreate in detail at a moment’s notice: the phantom (once real enough) husband returning home after a grueling stint in moot court; a blow-out party at the weekend, during which her husband had become deathly ill from bourbon and cider; a gift needed for a professor’s wedding. Cambridge was leaving these lies behind and arriving home to quiet rooms, where there was time and space to remember, the space and time seemingly as