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felt…shy around women. Nor has he needed the dean to point out the moral implications of the power gap between teacher and student. So he’d managed to get past those…awkward spots with literary talk. Each friendly, formal professorial chat layered a barrier between him and the problematically attractive student until neither of them could have begun to dismantle that protective partition. By then it was way too late, too embarrassing and daunting, to face each other on any other terms—as male and female, for example.
    How hard it is to remember their names, which proves that they meant nothing, nothing worth risking his job for, nothing that would have been worth his sitting here now, sweating lest some disgruntled loony rise out of his past to share her undying shame at having traded sex with him for an A in Beginning Fiction. But what Bentham’s saying is that nothing has to happen. Any spark can set off the tinderbox of gender war. Best not to make eye contact or shake a student’s hand. Every classroom’s a lion’s den, every teacher a Daniel. And every Tuesday afternoon, Swenson’s job requires him to discuss someone’s tale of familial incest, fumbling teenage sex, some girl’s or boy’s first blow job, with the college’s most hypersensitive and unbalanced students, some of whom simply despise him for reasons he can only guess: he’s the teacher, and they’re not, or he looks like somebody’s father.
    Silence. Long silence. Dean Bentham glances coyly over at Jonathan Edwards’s portrait, then flashes a grin at his audience and says, “Unlike your distinguished forefather, I don’t mean to scare you. But one needs to know it’s warfare, lest we poor settlers be…ambushed. Clearly there are still witch-hunters ready to burn one at the stake for the sin of smacking one’s lips over the wrong Greek torso. Well, fine. Sermon ended. By the way, I have no fear that anything like this will happen here at Euston.”
    A pall creeps over the chapel, as if Bentham has been describing some fatal new epidemic that chooses its victims at random, as if he’d come here to preach the bad news of an angry God torching their miserable anthill. Then, inexplicably, everyone applauds.
    Swenson and Sherrie duck out before they can be trapped in the quicksand of collegial conversation. But by the time they find their car, the mournful professors have clustered outside the chapel. The obvious thing to do right now is to peel out of the lot, spraying gravel like buckshot, scattering those gloomy groupings. But first Sherrie has to inspect her face in Swenson’s rearview mirror.
    â€œChrist,” she says. “A giant pimple in the middle of my forehead. I could feel it growing every time Bentham opened his mouth. Look, Ted. Right here. See?”
    â€œI don’t see it,” Swenson says.
    â€œYou’re not looking,” says Sherrie.
    Exiting the parking lot, he threads his way through the campus, hopping over the speed bumps, crawling through the gates and the two blocks that comprise lovely downtown Euston. Then, only then, he hits the gas, and bingo, they’re free—oh, the mystical ecstasy of taking off in the car!
    How powerful, how safe he feels to have Sherrie sitting beside him, encapsulated, while the world slips by. Okay, a little piece of the world. Fine. All right. He’ll take it. So what if it’s one of those autumn evenings that drop so alarmingly fast, furry dark curtains behind which nature can work all night, freeze-drying the landscape? So what if he knows the drive so well that the sights—how the sky expands as you round the second curve, stretching wide enough to display the blackened teeth of the mountains—the sights that used to thrill him have come to seem menacing and oppressive? He can’t imagine how he could have been thrilled by the sight of mountains beneath which he will