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glass,” a voice says from close behind me. “It could break and you’d fall to your death.”
    I turn, wincing at the image of my broken body—the second I’ve entertained today—and force my face into a smile to greet Mara Silverman, wife of Gene Silverman, the head of the film department.
    “Hello, Mara.” I tilt my head to receive a kiss on the cheek. “Actually I’d just end up on the balcony, but thanks for the warning.”
    The balcony, which runs along three sides of the building, has a Plexiglas railing so as not to obstruct the view. There are two metal doors to it, one each at the east and west corners of the room, but they’ve been locked tonight because of an incident at a party last year when a distraught sophomore tried to climb over the railing and was saved from ending her life only by one of her friends, who hung on to her feet until security arrived.
    Mara’s cheek—colder even than the glass—grazes mine, and then she pulls back as if stung by the contact. Or maybe she’s just afraid of getting lipstick on the collar of her buttercup yellow Chanel suit. As usual, she’s overdressed for the event. She looks as if she’s dressed for a country club dinner or a formal bar mitzvah instead of a film show in downtown Manhattan. What’s painful is knowing how much time and money she probably spent picking out the outfit and having it altered to perfectly conform to her size-four figure, then having her shoulder-length black hair touched up to hide the gray, blown, and set, her nails manicured, and even her feet, which are hidden in tasteful Ferragamo pumps, pumiced and pedicured. I know because I once made the mistake of accepting an invitation to a “girls’ day out” with Mara, and this is what we did.
    “Is Gene here?” I ask, looking hopefully around for her husband.
    “He’s still downstairs with all those Hollywood people.” Mara shudders and takes a sip of her sparkling water. Mara never drinks. “But I felt claustrophobic so I came up here. Can we move away from these windows? I don’t like heights. Didn’t one of those suicides happen here?”
    “No, that was at the NYU library.” I follow Mara a safe distance from the windows. “They’ve had to glass in the atrium at Bobst. They should make these railings higher, too. That’s why the doors are locked.”
    A waiter with a tray of miniature quiches approaches us, but Mara waves him away as if he were a homeless person begging for money. No, that’s not fair. Mara would give money to the homeless person way before she’d allow dairy to pass her lips. “So far, though, Hudson’s been relatively lucky in that department—” I begin.
    “Imagine not knowing your child was in that much trouble. I bet they’re mostly children of divorce.”
    I’ve heard Mara’s views on divorce before. On our girls’ day out she talked of little else. She told me she “didn’t believe in it,” as if divorce were a figment of the popular imagination like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.
    “What if you knew your husband was cheating?” I’d asked, knowing full well that Gene was infamous for sleeping with his students.
    “Men,” Mara had said, crossing her legs and nearly kicking the pedicurist in the head. “What can you expect from them? They think with their penises. The trick,” she said in a stage whisper that only the women under the hair dryers would miss, “is to never let on that you know.”
    I had stopped feeling sorry for her, but it was too late. By then I was the only professor or faculty wife who had spent any time with her and so she always latched on to me at college functions. I resign myself to spending the next quarter hour with Mara and ask after her son, Ned. She treats me to a rundown of Ned’s college application procedure, which sounds as if Mara herself had been the one actually applying. After she has recited his application essay to Cornell verbatim, I remark that it’s a shame he hadn’t wanted to