'Fifteen dollars to make: said Choo, blowing horns of smoke from both ofhis nostrils. 'No more. Fifteen dollars. You're the one being hustled, my friend.'

'Now, how would you know that? That ain't true, man. That ain't true at all.'

'I come from the factory where they make your shoes. Where they used to make your shoes. We don't make anything now,' said Choo, and then cried 'PRADA!" hooking another group ofwomen, an expanding group, which kept growing, as if he'd thrown a trawler's net over the sidewalk. Come from a factory? How can you come from a factory? But there was no time for further inquiry; now, on Levi's side, a group of Goth girls. They were black-haired and white and skinny, linked to each other by strange metal chains the kind of girls who haunt the Harvard T-stop on a Friday night with a bottle of vodka tucked in their huge pants. They wanted horror movies, and Levi had them. He did some brisk business, and for the next hour or so the two salesmen did not talk to each other much, unless one needed change from the other's fanny pack. Levi, who never could bear bad vibes, still felt the need to make this guy like him, like most guys liked him. At last there came a lull in trade. Levi took his opportunity.

'What's your deal, man? Don't take this strange, but ... you don't seem like the type of guy who would be doing this kind of thing. You know?'

'How about this?' said Choo quietly, again alarming Levi with his easy use ofAmerican idioms, albeit dipped in that exotic accent. 'You leave me alone and 1 do my very best to leave you alone. You sell your movies. 1 sell these handbags. How would that be?'

'That's cool,' said Levi quietly.

'Best movies, top movies, three for ten dollars!' called Levi into the street. He dug into his pocket and found two indiVidually wrapped Junior Mints. He offered one to Choo, who declined it sniffily. Levi unwrapped his own mint and popped it into his mouth. He loved Junior Mints. Minty and chocolatey. Just everything you want from a candy, basically. The last of the peppermint slipped down his rhroat. He tried really hard not to say anything at all. And then he said: 'So you got a lot of friends here?'

Choo sighed. 'No.'

'No one in the city?'

'No.'

'You don't know anyone?'

'I know two, three people. They work across the river. At Wellington. In the college.' 'Oh, yeah?' said Levi. 'Which department?' Choo stopped organizing the money in his fanny pack and looked at Levi curiously. 'They're cleaners: he said. 'I don't know which department they clean.'

OK, OK, you win, bro, thought Levi, and crouched down to the DVDs to pointlessly rearrange a row of them. He was done with this guy. But now it was Choo who seemed freshly interested.

'And you -' said Choo, pursuing him. 'You live in Roxbury, Felix tells me.'

Levi looked up at Choo. He was smiling, at last.

'Yeah, man, that's right.'

Choo looked down at him like the tallest man who had ever lived. 'Yes. That's what I heard, that you live in Roxbury. And you rap with them too.'

'Not really. I just went along. It's good, though -it's got that political vibe. Real angry. I'm learning more about the... like, the political context, that's what I'm into right now: said Levi, referring to a book on Haiti he had borrowed (though it was as yet unread) from Arundel School's '27-year-old library. It was the first time Levi had ever entered that cloistered, dark little space without the propulsion of a school project or imminent exam.

'But they say they never see you there, in Roxbury. The others. They say they never see you.'

'Yeah, well. I pretty much keep myself to myself.'

'I see. Well, maybe we shall see each other there, Levi: said Choo, and his smile grew wider, 'down in the hood.'

IO.

Katherine (Katie) Armstrong is sixteen. She is one of the youngest students attending Wellington College. She gtew up in South Bend, Indiana, where she was by far the brightest student in her high school. Although the gteat majority of kids from Katie's school either drop out or go on to attend Indiana's fine instate institution, no one was too surprised to discover that Katie would be attending a fancy East Coast school on a full academic scholarship. Katie is proficient both in the arts and sdences, but her heart -if this makes sense -has always resided in the left side of her brain. Katie loves the arts. Given her parents' relative poverty and lirnited education, she knows that it would probably have made more sense for her family if she'd tried for medical school or even Harvard Law. But her parents are generous, loving people, and they support her in all her choices.

The summer before Katie turned up at Wellington, she drove herself half crazy wondering whether she would end up an English major or an Art History major. She's stiII unsure. Some days she wants to be an editor of something. Other days she can imagine running a gallery or even writing a book on Picasso, who is the most amazing human being Katie has ever come across. At the moment, as a freshman, she is keeping her options open. She is in Professor Cork's Twentieth-Century Painting seminar (for sophomores only, bur she begged) and two literature classes, English Romantic Poetry and American Post-Modernism. She's learning Russian, she helps man the phones for the eating disorder help-line, and she's doing the set design for a production ofCabaret. A naturally shy girl, Katie has to overcome a great deal ofnerves, every week, simply to enter the rooms where these various activities take place. One class above all terrifies her: Dr Belsey's class on SeventeenthCentury Art. They are spending most of this semester on Rembrandt, who is the second most amazing human being Katie has ever corne across. She used to dream about one day attending a college class about Rembrandt with other intelligent people who loved Rembrandt and weren't ashamed to express this love. She has been to only three classes so far. She did not understand much. A lot of the time she felt the professor to be speaking a different language from the one she has spent sixteen years refining. Afrer the third class she went back to her dorm and cried, She cursed her stupidity and her yourh. She wished her high school had given her different kinds of books to read than the ones she has evidently wasted her time on, Presently, Katie calmed down, She looked up some of the mysterious vocab from her class in Webster's. The words were not there. She did find 'liminality', bur she still didn't understand the way Dr Belsey was using it. However, Katie is not the type of girl to give up easily. Today is the fourth class, She is prepared, Last week, they were given a worksheet with photocopies of the two pictures that would be under discussion today. Katie has spent a week staring at them, thinking deeply about them, and has made notes in her notebook.

The first painting isJacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1658, Katie has thought about the vigorous impasto that works counter-intuitively to create that somnolent, dreamy atmosphere, She makes notes on the angel's resemblance to Rembrandt's pretty son, Titus; on the perspective lines that create the illusions of frozen movement; on the personal dynamic between the angel and Jacob, When she looks at this painting she sees a violent struggle that is, at the same time, a loving embrace, It reminds her, in its homoeroticism, of Caravaggio (since beginning at Wellington she finds a lot of things homoerotic), She adores the earthy colours -Jacob's simple damask, and the angel's off-white farm-boy smock. Caravaggio always gave his angels the darkly resplendent wings of eagles; by contrast, Rembrandt's angel is no eagle bur he's no dove either. No bird Katie has ever seen really has these imprecise, shabby, dun-coloured wings. The wings seem almost an afterthought, as if to remind us that this painting is meant to be of matters biblical, other-worldly. But in Rembrandt's Protestant heart, so Katie believes, the battle depicted here is really for a man's earthly soul, for his human faith in the world. Katie, who lost her faith slowly and painfully two years earlier, finds the relevant passage in the Bible and adds the following to her notes: And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the break of day ... And he said, Let me go for the day breaketh. And the angel said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

This painting Katie finds impressive, beautiful, awe-inspiring -but not truly moving. She can't find the right words, can't put her finger on why that is. All she can say, again, is that this is not a faith battle she is looking at. At least, not of the kind she herself has experienced. Jacob looks like he wants sympathy, and the angel looks like he wants to give sympathy. That's not how a battle goes. The struggle isn't really there. Does that make sense?

The second picture, on the other hand, makes Katie cry. It is Seated Nude, an etching from 1631. In it a misshapen woman, naked, with tubby little breasts and a hugely clistended belly, sits on a rock, eyeing Katie clirectly. Katie has read some famous commentaries on this etching. Everybody finds it technically good but visually disgusting. Many famous men are repulsed. A simple naked woman is apparently much more nauseating than Samson having his eye put out or Ganymede pissing everywhere. Is she really so grotesque? She was a shock, to Katie, at first -like a starkly lit, unforgiving photograph of oneself But then Katie began to notice all the exterior, human information, not explicitly in the frame but implied by what we see there. Katie is moved by the crenulated marks of absent stockings on her legs, the muscles in her arms suggestive of manual labour. That loose belly that has known many babies, that still fresh face that has lured men in the past and may yet lure more. Katie -a stringbean, physically -can even see her own body contained in this body, as if Rembrandt were saying to her, and to all women: 'For you are of the earth, as my nude is, and you will come to this point too, and be blessed ifyou feel as little shame, as much joy, as she!' This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience -these are the marks of living. So Katie feels. And all this from cross-hatching (Katie makes her own comics and knows something of cross-hatching); allthese intimations of mortality from an inkpot!

Katie comes to class very excited. She sits down excited. She keeps her notebook open before her, determined this time, determined to be one of the three or four people who dare to speak in Dr Belsey's class. The class, all fourteen of them, are arranged in a square, the desks fitted together so that everyone can see everyone. They have their names written on pieces of paper that are folded in half and stood atop their desks. They look like so many bank managers. Dr Belsey is speaking.

'What we're trying to ... interrogate here,' he says, 'is the mytheme ofartist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human. What is it about these texts -these images as narration -that is implicitly applying for the quasi-mystical notion of genius?'

An awful long silence follows this. Katie bites at the skin around her cuticles.

'To reframe: is what we see here really a rebellion, a turning away? We're told that this constitutes a rejection of the classical nude. 0 K. But. Is this nude not a confinnation of the ideality ofthe vulgar? As it is already inscribed in the idea ofa specifically gendered, class debasement?'

Another silence. Dr Belsey stands up and writes the word LIGHT very large on the blackboard behind him.

'Both these pictures speak of illumination. Why? That is to say, can we speak of light as a neutral concept? What is the logos of this light, this spiritual light, this supposed illumination? What are we signing up to when we speak of the "beauty" of this "light"?' says Dr Belsey, employing quoting fingers. 'What are these images really concerned with?'

Here Katie sees her opportunity and begins the slow process of thinking about possibly opening her mouth and allowing sound to come from it. Her tongue is at her teeth. But it is the incredible-looking black girl, Victoria, who speaks, and as ever she has a way of monopolizing Dr Belsey's attention, even when Katie is almost certain that what she is saying is not terribly interesting.

'It's a painting of its own interior: she says very slowly, looking down at her desk and then up again in that stupid, flirry way she has. 'Its subject is painting itself. It's a painting about painting. I mean, that's the desiring force here.'

Dr Belsey raps on his desk in an interested way, as if to say, now we're getting to it.

'OK: he says. 'Expand.'

But before Victoria can speak again there is an interruption.

'Umm ... I don't understand how you're using "painting" there? I don't think you can simply just inscribe the history ofpainting, or even its logos, in that one word "painting".'

The professor seems interested in this point too. It is made by the young man with the T-shirt that says BEING on one side and TIME on the other, a young man Katie fears more than anybody else in this whole university, much more than she could ever fear any woman, even the beautiful black girl, because he is clearly the third most amazing person she has ever come across. His name is Mike.

'But you've already privileged the term: says the professor's daughter, whom Katie, who is not given easily to hatred, hates. 'You're already assuming the etching is merely " debased painting". So there's your problematic, right there.'

And now the class escapes Katie; it streams through her toes as the sea and sand when she stands at the edge of the ocean and dozily, stupidly, allows the tide to draw out and the world to pull away from her so rapidly as to make her dizzy ...

At three fifteen, Trudy Steiner hesitantly put her hand up to point out that the class had gone fifteen minutes over. Howard collected his papers into a neat pile and apologized for the overrun but for nothing else. He felt this had been the most successful session to date. The class dynamic was finally beginning to come together, to gel. Mike, in particular, impressed him vety much. You need people like that in a class. In fact, he reminded Howard a little ofHoward at the same age. Those few, golden years when he believed Heidegger would save his life.

Everybody began packing away their things. Zora gave her father the thumbs-up and rushed off; because of a scheduling glitch she always missed the first ten minutes of Claire's poetry class anyway. Christian and Veronica, who were sitting in as entirely unnecessary teaching assistants (given the small class number), passed out worksheets for the following week. When Christian reached Howard's end of the table he crouched down in his creepily limber way to Howard's level, and with one hand reslicked his side parting.

'That was amazing.' 'Went well, yes, I thought: said Howard, and took a worksheet from Christian's hands.

'I think the worksheet prompted a dialogue: began Christian cautiously, awaiting confirmation. 'But it's sincerely the way you then take that dialogue and refashion it -that's the ignition.'

Howard both smiled and frowned at this. There was something strange about Christian's English, despite the fact he was apparently an American. It was as ifhe were being translated as he spoke.

'Worksheet definitely set us off,' agreed Howard, and received waves of grateful protest from Christian. It was Christian himself who had made these worksheets. Howard always meant to read them more thoroughly but would, this week as ever, end up skimming the pages the morning before the class. They both knew this well.

'Did you get the memo about the faculty meeting being postponed?' asked Christian.

Howard assented.

'It's January tenth, first meeting after Christmas. Will you need me to be there?' asked Christian. Howard doubted this would be necessary. 'Because, I did all that research, re, the limits of political speech on campus. I mean, not that it matters especially... I'm sure you won't need it... but I think it'll be helpful, although we would need to know the content ofProfessor Kipps's proposed lectures to be quite certain: said Christian and began to pull papers from his satchel. As Christian continued speaking at him, Howard kept an eye out for Victoria. But Christian went on too long; Howard watched with dismay her long-legged coltish stumble out of the door, pressed in on both sides by male friends. Each leg was perfectly wrapped, separated and fetishized in its tube of denim. Her ankles clicked together in those tan leather boots. The last thing he saw was the perfection of her ass -so high, so round turning a comer; leaving. In twenty years of teaching he had never set eyes on anything like her. The other possibility, of course, was that in fact he had seen many such girls over the years, but it was only this year that he noticed. Either way, he was resigned to it. Two classes ago he had stopped trying not to look at Victoria Kipps. There's no point in trying to do impossible things.

Now young Mike came up to Howard, confidently, like a colleague, to ask about an article Howard had mentioned in passing. Freed from the strange bondage of looking at Victoria, Howard gladly directed him to the journal and the year. More people left the room. Howard bent down under his desk to avoid conversation with any other students and pushed his papers back into his satchel. He got the nasty sensation that someone or another was lingering. Lingering always signalled a cry for pastoral care. I was wondering if we could just maybe meet for a coffee some time... there's some issues I'm having that I'd like to discuss... Howard grew more intensely involved with the clasps of his bag. Still he sensed lingering. He looked up. That strange ghost girl who never said a word was making a performance ofpacking away her one notebook and pen. Finally she made it to the doorway and began lingering there, leaving Howard no choice but to squeeze by her.

'Kathy -everything good?' asked Howard, very loudly. 'Oh! Yes ... I mean, but I was just ... Dr Belsey, is it the -the -same room ... next week?' 'The very same,' said Howard, and strode through the hallway, down the wheelchair ramp and out of the building.

'Dr Belsey?' Outside, in the small octagonal courtyard, it had begun to snow.

Great drifting sheets of it divided the day, and with none of the mystique snow has in England: Will it settle? Will it melt? Is it sleet? Is it hail? This was just snow, period, and by tomorrow morning would be knee-deep.

'Dr Belsey? Could I have a word -just for a sec?'

'Victoria, yes,' he said, and blinked the flakes from his eyelashes. She was too perfect set against this white backdrop. Looking at her made him feel open to ideas, possibilities, allowances, arguments that two minutes earlier he would have rejected. Just now would be a very good moment, for example, for Levi to ask for twenty dollars or for Jack French to ask him to chair a panel on the future ofthe University. But then -thank the sweet Lord -she turned her head away.

'I'll catch up with you,' said Victoria to two young men who were walking backwards in front of her, grinning and packing snowballs in raw, pink hands. Victoria fell into step with Howard. Howard noticed how her hair kept the snow differently than Howard's own hair. It sat neatly on top ofher head like icing.

'I've never seen it like this! ' she said gaily as they passed out of the gate and prepared to cross the small road thatled to Wellington's main yard. She had placed her hands in a funny position, in the back pockets of her jeans, her elbows jutting backwards like the stumps of wings. 'It must have got going while we were in class. Bloody hell. It's like movie snow!'

'I wonder whether movie snow costs a million dollars a week to clear.'

'Blimey -that much.'

That much.'

That's a shitload.'

'QUite.'

This, only the second private conversation they'd ever had, was the same as the first: dumb and oddly charged with humour, Vee smiling toothily and Howard unsure if he was being ridiculed or flirted with. She had slept with his son -was that the joke? If so, he couldn't say he found it too amusing. But he had taken her lead from the start: this unspoken pretence that they had never met before this semester and had no connection other than that of teacher and student. He felt wrong-footed by her. She was unafraid ofhim. Any other student in his class would be trawling their brains right now for a brilliant sentence, no, they would never have approached him in the first place without some sparkling opener prepared earlier, some tedious little piece of rhetorical flash. How many hours of his life had he spent smiling thinly at these carefully constructed comments, sometimes bred and developed days or even weeks before in the nervous hothoused brains of these ambitious kids? But Vee wasn't like that. Outside ofclass she seemed to take pride in being somewhat moronic.

'Umm, look -you know this thing that all the college societies have, this stupid dinner?' she said; tilting her face upwards to the white-out skies. 'Each table has to invite three professors -mine's Emerson Hall, and we're not too formal, it's not as poncy as some of the others ... it's all right, actually -ntixed, women and men it's quite chilled. It's baSically just dinner, and there's usually a speech -a long dull speech. So. Obviously say no if that's not the sort of thing you do... I mean, I don't know -it's my first one. Thought I'd ask, though. No harm in asking.' She stuck her tongue out and ate some snowflakes.

'Oh ... well -I mean, if you'd like m* to go, I will, of course: began Howard, turning to her tentatively, but Vee was still eating snow. 'But ... are you sure you wouldn't feel ... well, obligated to take your father, maybe? I wouldn't want to step on any toes: said Howard rapidly. It was a tribute to the power of the girl's charm that it didn't for a moment occur to Howard that he had obligations of his Own.

'Oh, God, no. He's already been asked by about a million different students. Plus I'm a bit stressed that he'll say Grace at the table. Actually, I know he will, which would be ... interesting.'

She was already developing the woozy transatlantic accent of Howard's own children. It was a shame. He liked that North London voice, touched by the Caribbean and, if he was not mistaken, equally touched by an expensive girls' school. Now they stopped walking. This was Howard's tum-off, up the stairs to the library. They stood facing each other, almost the same height thanks to her towering boots. Vee hugged herself and plaintively pulled her lower lip under her large !Tont teeth, the way beautiful girls sometimes pull goofY faces, without any fear that the effects will be permanent. In response Howard put on an extremely serious face.

'My decision would depend very much ...'

'On what?' She clapped her snowy mittens together.

'... on whether there will be a glee club in attendance.'

'A what? I don't know ... I don't even know what that is.'

'They sing. Young men,' said Howard, wincing slightly. 'They sing. Very close harmony singing.' 'I don't think so. Nobody mentioned it.' 'I can't go to anything with a glee club. It's very important. I had an unfortunate episode.'

Now it was Vee's tum to wonder if fun was being made of her. As it happened, Howard was serious. She squinted at him and chattered her teeth.

'But you'll come?'

'Ifyou're sure you'd like me to.'

'I'm completely sure. It's just after Christmas, ages away, basically -January tenth.' 'No glee club,' said Howard as she began to walk away. 'No glee club!'

It was always the same, Claire's poetry class, and it was always a pleasure. Each student's poem was only a slight variation on the poem they had brought in the week before, and all poems were consistently met with Claire's useful mix of violent affection and genuine insight. So Ron's poems were always about modem sexual alienation, and Daisy's poems were always about New York, Chantelle's were always about the black struggle, and Zora's were the kind that appear to have been generated by a random wordgenerating machine. It was Claire's great gift as a teacher to find something ofworth in all these efforts and to speak to their authors as if they were already household names in poetry-loving homes across America. And what a thing it is, at nineteen years old, to be told that a new Daisy poem is a perfect example of the Daisy oeuvre, that it is indeed evidence of a Daisy at the height of her powers, exercising all the traditional, much loved, Daisy strengths! Claire was an excellent teacher. She reminded you how noble it was to write poetry; how miraculous it should feel to communicate what is most intimate to you, and to do so in this stylized way, through rhyme and metre, images and ideas. After each student had read their work and it had been discussed seriously and pertinently, Claire would finish by reading a poem by a great, usually dead poet, and encourage her class to discuss this poem no differently than they had discussed the others. And in this way one learned to imagine continuity between one's own poetry and the poetry of the world. What a feeling! You walked out of that class if not shoulder to shoulder with Keats and Dickinson and Eliot and the rest, then at least in the same echo chamber, in the same roll-call ofhistory. The transformation was most noticeable on Carl. Three weeks ago he had attended his first class wearing a comic, sceptical slouch. He read his lyrics in a grumpy mumble and seemed angered by the interested appreciation with which they were met. 'It's not even a poem,' he countered. 'It's rap.' 'What's the difference?' Claire asked. 'They two different things,' Carl had argued, 'two different art forms. Except rap ain't no art form. It's just rap.' 'So it can't be discussed?' 'You can discuss it -I ain't stopping you.' The first thing Claire did with Carl's rap that day was show him of what it was made. Iambs, spondees, trochees, anapaests. PaSSionately Carl denied any knowledge of these arcane arts. He was used to being feted at the Bus Stop but not in a classroom. Large sections of Carl's personality had been constructed on the founding principle that classrooms were not for Carl.

'But the grammar of it,' Claire had explained, 'is hard-wired in your brain. You're almost thinking in sonnets already. You don't need to know it to do it -but that doesn't mean you're not doing it.' This is the kind of announcement which cannot help but make you feel a little taIler the next day when you're in the Nike store asking your customer if they want to try the same sneaker in a size II. 'You'I1 write me a sonnet, won't you?' Claire had asked Carl sweetly. In the second class she asked him, 'How about that sonnet, Carl?' He said, 'It's cooking. ['II let you know when it's ready.' Of course he flirted with her; he always did that with teachers, he'd done it all through high school. And Mrs Malcolm flirted right back. In high school Carl had slept with his geography teacher -that was a bad scene. When he looked back on it, he considered that incident the beginning of when things began going very wrong between him and classrooms. But with Claire you got just the right amount of flirting. It wasn't ... inappropriate -that was the word. Claire had that special teacher thing he hadn't felt since he was a really smaIl boy, back in the days before his teachers started worrying that he was going to mug them or rape them: she wanted him to do well. Even though there was nowhere this could go, academically speaking. He wasn't really a student and she wasn't really his teacher, and anyway Carl and classrooms did not mix. And yet. She wanted him to do well. And he wanted to do weIl for her.

So in this, the fourth session, he went and brought her a sonnet. Just as she said. Fourteen lines with ten syIlables (or beats, as Carl could not help but think of them) a line. It wasn't such a fabulous sonnet. But everybody in the class made a big fuss like he'd just split the atom. Zora said, '] think that's the only truly funny sonnet ['ve ever read.' Carl was wary. He was stiIl not sure that this whole Wellington thing wasn't a kind of sick joke being played on him. 'You mean it's stupid funny?'

Everybody in the class cried Noooo! Then she, Zora, said, 'No, no, no -it's alive. ] mean, the form hasn't restricted you -it always restricts me. I don't know how you managed that.' The class enthusiasticaIly agreed with this judgement, and a whole crazy conversation began, which took up most of the hour, about his poem, as if his poem were something real like a statue or a country. During this Carl looked down at his poem every now and then and felt a sensation he'd never experienced in a classroom before: pride. He had written his sonnet out sloppily, as he wrote his raps, with a pencil, on scrap paper crumpled and stained. Now he felt this medium was not quite good enough for this new way of writing his message. He resolved to type the damn thing out sometime if he could get access to a keyboard.

Just as they were packing up to leave, Mrs Malcolm said, 'Are you serious about this class, Carl?' Carl looked around himself cautiously. This was a strange question to ask in front of everybody.

'I mean, do you want to stay in this class? Even if it gets difficult?'

So that was the deal: .they thought he was srupid. These early stages were fine, but he wouldn't be able to manage the next stage, whatever it was. Why'd they even ask him, then?

'Difficult how?' he asked edgily.

'I mean, ifother people wanted you not to be in this class. Would you fight to be in it? Or would you let me fight for you to be in it? Or your fellow poets here?'

Carl glowered. 'I don't like to be where I'm not welcome.'

Claire shook her head and waved her hands to disperse that thought. 'I'm not making myself clear. Carl, you want to be in this class, right?'

Carl was very close to saying that he truly did not give a fuck, but at the last moment he understood that Claire's eager face wanted something quite different from him.

'Sure. It's interesting, you know. I feel like I'm ... you know ... learning.'

'Oh, I'm so glad: she said and practically smiled her face off. Then she stopped smiling and looked businesslike. 'Good: she said firmly. 'That's decided. Good. Then you're going to stay in this class. Anybody who needs this class: she said fervently, and looked from Chantelle to a young woman called Bronwyn who worked at the Wellington Savings Bank, and then to a mathematician boy called Wong from BU, 'is staying in this class. OK, we're done here. Zora, can you stay behind?'

The class filed out, everybody a little curious and jealous of Zora's special dispensation. Carl, as he left, punched her gently on the shoulder with his fist. Sunshine broke out over Zora. Claire remembered, recognized and pitied the feeling (for it seemed, to her, a long shot on Zora's part). She smiled to think of herself at the same age.

'Zora -you know about the faculty meeting?' Claire sat down on the desk and looked up into Zora's eyes. Her mascara had been ineptly applied, lashes welded together.

'Of course,' said Zora. 'It's the big one -it's been postponed.

Howard's going to come out all guns blazing about Monty Kipps's lectures. Since no one else seems to have the balls.'

'Hmm,' said Claire, made awkward by the mention of Howard. 'Oh, that, yes.' Claire looked away from Zora and out of the window.

'Everybody's going, for once,' said Zora. 'It's baSically got down to a battle for the soul of this university. Howard says it's the most important meeting Wellington's had in a long time.'

This was the case. It would also be the first interdisciplinary faculty meeting since all the mess of last year had come into the open. It was more than a month away, but this morning's memo had set the scene all too clearly for Claire: that chilly library, the whispers, the eyes -averted and staring -Howard in an armchair avoiding her, Claire's colleagues enjoying him avoiding her. And this was not to mention the usual tabling ofmotions, blocked votes, rabid speech-making, complaints, demands, counter-demands. And Jack French directing it all, slowly, very slowly. It didn't seem to Claire that, in this vital stage of her psychic recovery, she should have to contend with such intense spiritual and mental degradation.

'Yes ... Now, Zora, you know there are people in the college who don't approve of our class -I mean they don't approve of people like Chantelle ... people like Carl, being a part of our community here at Wellington. It's going to be on the agenda at that meeting .. There's a general conservative trend sweeping this university right now, and it really, really frightens me. And they don't want to hear from me. They've already decided I'm the communist loony-tune anti-war poetess or whatever they think I am. I think we need a strong advocate for this class from the other side. So we're not just arguing the same stupid dialectic over and over. And I think a student would be much more appropriate -to make the case. Somebody who has benefited from the experience of learning alongside these people. Someone who could ... well, attend in my place. Make a barnstorming speech. About something they believed in.'