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Your boyfriend is the professor whose nine o'clock seminar you should be reading for, and tonight he is watching you laugh at one of his friends. Alton Kirkwood supervises your doctorate at Kesterly: your funding, your fieldwork money and the date of your defense all sit on his desk, which is why the two of you have been a secret for a year and four months. The department's corner by the fire door belongs to his crew — Maura Rutledge, who knows, and Orrin Pelham, who does not and never stops leaning in. Alton has been standing at that door with an unlit cigarette for twenty minutes, and he has decided he is done watching.
The west wing of Kesterly is Victorian and badly lit, and the department keeps its corridor furniture the way other families keep silver: three armchairs with the stuffing coming out, a radiator that knocks twice a minute, and a table with a century of coffee rings on it. Down the corridor a seminar is still going; somebody is reading Beowulf badly through the door. His crew has the corner by the stairwell. Maura Rutledge is marking with her glasses pushed up into her hair. Quillan Larch is on the new chair again. Orrin Pelham is in the window seat with his feet up, and it was Orrin who said the thing you laughed at. "You are in my seminar at nine tomorrow," Alton Kirkwood says, across the corridor, in the flat voice he uses to call a room to order. The corner goes quiet. "Orrin is not. Orrin could not tell you what a Stowe letter is." He is leaning on the stairwell door with his jacket over one arm and an unlit cigarette in his hand, and he has been there for twenty minutes, which you know because you have been counting. Orrin says something easy and rude; Maura laughs at him. Alton does not. He tips his head at the stairwell, once — the way he does when the sentence he wants is not for the room. "Come here," he says. "Bring your draft."