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hope.”
    1 The Theban Mysteries

“If I regret anything at all, it’s the way we wasted our time and skills. All the false alleys, and bogus friends, the misapplication of our energies. All the delusions we had about who we were.”
    — JOHN LE CARRÉ
THE SECRET PILGRIM
Two

    S EVERAL evenings later a rather frightening thing happened. They had gone out to dinner, during which they again had one of their desultory conversations. Kate had observed: “I think we overestimate the importance of sex.” Reed had looked at her warily. She had been given lately to such pronouncements, and this time, as usual, his face had reflected his unsureness of how to respond.
    “I don’t really mean sex,” Kate had not too clearly continued. “I mean sex as a substitute for whatever else is wrong; and, I suspect, in the case when something else is wrong, only friendship counts. And the only reason friendship counts is because we can use conversation to discover our lives.”
    “Pretend I’m a friend. Pretend we’ve only justmet, and you’ve decided to consult me because I have an understanding face.”
    “You do have an understanding face, and I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m talking about, so your understanding face will get us nowhere. I guess I mean I don’t really care about sex or what comes of it, I don’t even think about it. It’s just a way to stop thinking about other things. The general sense of discontent. You know.”
    Reed smiled. “My students always say
you know
, when it’s perfectly clear that I don’t know and am doubtful whether they do either.”
    “In this case,” Kate said, “you
know
. I’m saying it isn’t about you, and there isn’t really anything else. It’s just me. The hell with me. Tell me about law clinics, about the one you’re starting at Schuyler Law.”
    Reed looked at her for a long moment and then complied. “Well, as we were saying the other day, the chance to do a clinic at Schuyler Law came at just the right time. Blair Whitson, a young law professor there, the one whom you’re going to teach the law and literature course with, seems to have become something of a minor revolutionary, which he wasn’t when we first met. Anyway, when he suggested that I start a clinic at the school, it seemed a welcome change. I’d recently gone to my dean and others, people at my law school in charge of such things, to try to start a clinic, a prison project, perhaps connected to a project for battered women, but they were a bit too Ivy League to be willing to support it, or maybe they just didn’t want anotherclinic, or maybe they didn’t want a regular faculty, nonclinic person, starting a clinic. Anyway, they turned me down. So this Schuyler offer was doubly welcome: help a friend and have a new adventure; sounds like an ad.”
    Kate smiled encouragingly.
    “I’ve thus decided,” Reed continued, “that Schuyler Law School shall have a clinic, helping those once convicted but who have some real reason to believe that their convictions were improperly obtained or that their sentences are illegal in some way, or who have stories of mistreatment by prison staff. There are even those who are improperly in prison, or at least believe they are.”
    “Why improperly?” Kate asked.
    “Many reasons. Sometimes it’s a case of noncitizens having served their term and being held because they are illegal immigrants who can’t be deported because their home countries won’t take them. Then there are all the women who need help, some of whom have killed battering husbands, either before the battered woman syndrome became accepted, or whose lawyers had never heard of it.”
    “It certainly sounds nobler than teaching law and literature together. Whatever made your friend Blair think that might be a good idea?”
    “First, I persuaded him, because when you’re on leave you do much better, I’ve noticed, if you have some regular, not too demanding, commitment. And persuading him