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roommate saying that Tom called three times last night, wondering where I was. I e-mail him and say I've been spending the night at my friend Theresa's mother's house. "Theresa's in D.C.," I type, "but her mom's a therapist and helping me through all this."

    The odor specialist I've called signals his arrival with three loud knocks on the apartment door. The ad in the phone book claimed they could identify and remove any smell—from cooking, pets, corpses.

    The specialist is wearing a uniform with suspenders and white shoes. He takes a quick tour around the apartment. "I don't smell anything," he reports.

    "Really?" I say. I softly exhale and secretly try to smell my own breath.

    "Then again," he says, opening a kitchen cupboard, "I wouldn't be the guy to smell it. My sense of smell isn't so hot. My brother, though—he's really good. He'd probably smell something."

    He recommends that if the odor continues to bother me, one option is to close the windows, turn up the heat so as to extract the smell from the walls, and then open the windows again to let it out.

    "Even now, in winter?" I ask.

    "Yup," he says. "You might have to check into a hotel or something while the windows are open."

    I thank him and write him a check, knowing it will bounce.

    Sarah calls. "Sweetie, are you okay?" She's the only woman I let call me that. She's been away for a few days and didn't get my message until now.
    "Has it only been a few days?" I say.

    She asks for the full story, from beginning to end. I give her an abridged version; I'm aware of the minutes ticking, the phone bill adding up to an amount I know she can't afford.

    "I know I'll run into him again." Saying it, I realize this is true. "You won't," Sarah says.
    I tell her I'd love to believe that's true.

    "Well, you said he didn't even know what part of town he was in, right?" "Yeah."
    "And think of it this way: the last thing he wants to do is return to the scene of the crime. He's going to stay as far away as possible."

    "You think so?"

    "I know so," she says. Sarah is the smartest person I know.

    "How are you doing?" I say. I'm growing tired of every conversation being about me, about him. After Sarah's older brother died, all our conversations were about her. I preferred it that way.

    "Fine," she says. "Great." She tells me how she's spent the last few days with the family she nannies for on an island off Galway where nothing's changed for hundreds of years. "The
    people speak and dress the same way they did a century ago," she says. "When you visit, we'll go."

    I have no money for a trip. "That sounds wonderful," I say.
    I go to my job at the Learning Center where I tutor foreign grad students and undergraduate athletes. I like it much better than my old job in oral history. I'm paid by the university to see ten art history students privately for one hour each week; of the ten, I like six. I adore three.

    My first student of the day is a star basketball player who looks too short to be good at basketball. She's trying to write a paper on a picture by Picasso. In the painting, a girl is looking at herself in the mirror but sees a different reflection. I get annoyed trying to explain the painting to her. Rules seem to have gotten me nowhere, so I decide to no longer follow any of them. I take a pen, and while she's sitting across from me, I write a five-paragraph essay.

    "There," I say, and hand her what I've written.

    The basketball players wearing a baseball cap that says "Bad Hair Day." She looks at the pages and then at me.

    "That's really cool that you can do that," she says.

    "It's always easier when it's not your own paper," I tell her. "No, I mean, it's cool that you can do that for me."
    "I shouldn't have," I say, and lean in toward her. "Please don't tell anyone." "What's there to tell anyone?" she says, and smiles.
    My second student is from Hungary. He's a triple major who likes to eat cheese. One of his majors is art history; the others are German