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feel jealous of her husband, she would like company. I swallow the last sip of my champagne cocktail, making a silent promise to myself not to get sucked into Mara’s games again, and hold up the empty glass between us. “Can I get you something from the bar?”
    “No,” she says, “I can’t mix alcohol with the medication I’m on.”
    Her eyes are darting back and forth nervously. In addition to her fear of heights and flying, Mara admitted to me at the salon that she’s an agoraphobe—clearly panicked to be left alone in the growing crowd.
    “I think I’ll get some air.” She edges away from me toward the door on the west side of the balcony.
    “President Abrams has ordered the doors to be locked…” I begin, but Mara has already summoned a security guard (the one posted, in fact, to keep people off the balcony) to open the door for her. It doesn’t take long for the guard to yield to the incipient hysteria in Mara’s voice. She slips out onto the balcony, keeping her back pressed up against the window and staying as far as she can from the railing. The folds of her yellow knit suit creased against the glass make her look like a rare butterfly specimen splayed between sheets of wax paper—caught between her warring fears of the crowd inside and the sheer drop from the balcony.
    When I turn from her, I feel curiously flattened and exposed as well, as if my motives for putting up with Mara Silverman were as transparent as the glass itself. “Just because you slept with a married professor once upon a time doesn’t mean you have to make up for all the wronged faculty wives of the world,” my friend and colleague Chihiro Arita has told me. I wish Chihiro were here tonight, but she’d opted to take her twelve-year-old niece to an anime film instead. “Give me katana swordplay over faculty politics any day,” she’d e-mailed me last night when I asked whether she was coming.
    I look for Robin and see he’s still in his crowd of admirers, but when he sees me he waves for me to come over. As I approach the group, though, one of the white suits peels away—like a petal falling off a chrysanthemum. I’m so pleased with the image that I’m reaching into my purse for pen and paper when I realize that the man is headed straight for me.
    “Dr. Asher, isn’t it?” he asks, thrusting forward his hand.
    “Yes,” I admit, submitting my hand to his firm grip. Everything about this man looks firm, in fact, from his flat stomach and well-developed chest muscles under a close-fitting black T-shirt and gleaming white cotton jacket to his tanned bare skull. “I’m sorry,” I ask, when he releases my hand, “have we met?”
    “Leo Balthasar,” he says, as if I’m supposed to recognize the name. He draws a business card from the breast pocket of his jacket. Leo Balthasar, I read, Producer, Lemon House Films.
    “I’m sorry,” I say, “I don’t get to the movies much.”
    He throws back his head and laughs as if I’d said something very witty. The top of his skull shines in the yellow candlelight. Without turning his head, he reaches out to intercept a passing waiter’s tray of champagne flutes and procures us each one of the orange-tinted cocktails.
    “Have you had one of these Goddesses, yet? Cyril Graham claims to have invented it on a cruise with Jackie Onassis in the Greek isles.”
    “Ah, so you’re a friend of Cyril’s…”
    “That’s who told me about you. He said you were the one to get on board the sonnet project. Said no one had a better feel for Shake-speare’s sonnets.”
    “That’s hardly true,” I say, sipping my champagne. “There’s Helen Vendler, for instance—”
    “You,” Leo Balthasar says, leaning in closer and holding his glass of champagne up to my face like an orange exclamation point, “are the one Cyril Graham wants on the project.”
    “And what project is that?” I ask, trying not to appear as clueless as I feel.
    “The Shakespeare project. A film based on