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to the movies, and remaindered; at the time I was on page three hundred or so of my Wonder Boys.
    Because WordFest had been conceived by Walter Gaskell, the first party was always held at the Gaskells’, an eccentric, brick Tudor affair, a crooked witch’s hat of a house set back from the street in a leafy pocket of Point Breeze that had been carved, Sara once told me, from the estate of H. J. Heinz. There were vestiges of a massive old wrought-iron fence along the sidewalk, and in the Gaskells’ backyard, beyond Sara’s greenhouse, lay a pair of rusted rails, buried in the grass, the remnants of a small-gauge railroad that had been the childish hobby of some long-dead Heinz heir. The house was much too large for the Gaskells, who, like Emily and me, never had children, and it was filled from crawl space to attic with the inventory of Walter Gaskell’s collection of baseball memorabilia, so that even on those rare occasions when I went over to see Sara and we had the place to ourselves, we were never alone; the grand, dark spaces of the house were haunted by the presence of her husband and by the fainter ghosts of dead ballplayers and tycoons. I liked Walter Gaskell, and I could never lie in his bed without feeling that there was a coarse thread of shame running through the iridescent silk of my desire for his wife.
    I’m not, however, going to say that it was never my intention to get involved with Sara Gaskell. I’m a man who falls in love so easily, and with such a reckless lack of consideration for the consequences of my actions, that from the very first instant of entering into a marriage I become, almost by definition, an adulterer. I’ve run through three marriages now, and each time the dissolution was my own fault, clearly and incontrovertibly. I intended to get involved with Sara Gaskell from the moment I saw her, to get involved with her articulate fingers, with the severe engineering of combs and barrettes that prevented her russet hair from falling to her hips, with her conversation that flowed in unnavigable oxbows between opposing shores of tenderness and ironical invective, with the smoke of her interminable cigarettes. We had an apartment we used, in East Oakland, that belonged to the college; Sara Gaskell was the Chancellor, and I met her on my very first day on the job. Our thing had been going on for almost five years now, according to no discernible progression other than the one leading from the crazed fumbling of two people’s hands with a key in an unfamiliar lock to the installation in the Guest Apartment of cable television so that Sara and I could lie on the bed in our underwear and watch old movies on Wednesday afternoons. Neither of us wanted to leave our spouses, or do anything to disturb the tranquil pattern of what was already an old love.
    “So is she pretty ?” whispered Miss Sloviak as we came scraping up the flagstone steps to the Gaskells’ front door. She gave my belly a poke, reproducing perfectly the condescending but essentially generous manner of a beautiful woman with a homely man. “ I think she is,” I was supposed to say.
    “Not as pretty as you,” I told her. Sara wasn’t as pretty as Emily, either, and she had none of Emily’s delicacy of skeleton or skittish grace. She was a big woman—tall and busty, with a large behind—and as with most redheaded women what beauty she possessed was protean and odd. Her cheeks and forehead were wild with freckles, and her nose, although cute and retroussé in profile, had a way of looking bulbous when viewed straight on. By the age of twelve she had already reached her present height and bodily dimensions, and I believe it was as a result of this trauma—and the demands of her professional position—that her everyday wardrobe consisted almost entirely of control-top panty hose, plain white cotton blouses, and shapeless tweed suits that spanned a brilliant spectrum from oatmeal to dirt. She imprisoned her glorious hair