“Why is it—?” I stopped, on the verge of saying what I should not. I still respected her, even if she didn’t understand how utterly narrow her worldview ultimately was. “Why is it—?” I began and stopped again. “Why have you only ever assigned me certain topics?” I broached it anyway.

She nodded, with a slow intake of breath. “I had never thought about it in that way. I thought you were doing what you were interested in.”

“Not to the exclusion of other concerns,” I replied. “At the moment I’m bored by politics. I’m bored explaining things to people who think they know everything, when all they’ve ever done is sit behind a desk in school or an office.” I stopped, realizing I was answering with a negative. Telling her what I didn’t want to do, because I knew only that satisfaction was not available to me in that realm.

“So what are you interested in?” she challenged.

“Art. If someone makes art of politics I will engage it. But only as art, not as some politically correct mission. What I need to know about politics I know. What I need to know about art seems bottomless.”

“How do you propose to go about that?”

“I realize it sounds foolish. But do you know why I’m sitting here right now? It’s because some teacher made me read Oedipus when I was twelve or thirteen, and first learning to read in that way that gives more complex pleasure than story. But the strange and liberating way of seeing that challenges you to look at something foreign beyond what you believe you already know, until it dawns on you: I am that.”

“You’re Oedipus?”

“No, but I read Sophocles: A man unknown to himself, bright, angry, outcast, and blessed gets singled out by the gods for a trial no one should endure, and others could not withstand, or think they could not. Abandonment. Guilt. Shame. Loss. Exile. Friendlessness. Poverty. Blindness. Yet he endures, he endures, through the devotion of the one person who loves him in this world. Not for what he is, but for who he is. That is the only thing between him and death. This is what the gods have devised as his challenge, to know and accept who he truly is — beyond mother, beyond father, beyond status or civilization. Only after he has proven he can endure such a journey do they allow him grace.

“I read that and thought, yes, yes. That’s the story of my life. All of it. And also how to live it. I accept.”

Bea had been nodding, but shook her head slowly. “Life finds us wherever we are, even those behind desks. It’s fine to close a chapter in your life, though. You are at the crossroads now, which I can see hurts in the way everything that makes us human hurts. So never mind work. You will come back to that or not. Tell me how you are in your life.”

I recounted the past few months, and she nodded empathetically, asking whether I was dating.

“No. I’m not ready for that.”

An inscrutable expression crossed her face. “No. You are not even within your own self again yet, which, of course, can never be the self that was.”

“I am moving ahead.”

“Good,” she replied, finishing her salad, “so long as you understand the contents of your heart, if you’ll forgive the advice.”

“Bea, I’m sorry. You know I take anything you say seriously. I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m sure you will find your sense of equipoise again.”

“The film went well at least,” I offered.

“I mean the kind of peace that comes from within. Managing pain is not the same as being free of it. Just because you don’t want to peer to the bottom of darkness doesn’t make it disappear. It only makes us unaware of our course through it, which everyone who would do anything, as you implied, has to thread. But there I go, giving advice again. ” Her voice trailed off. “I should get back to the office. Call if you change your mind, or if there is anything you need. You know that, I hope.”

“I do, and I don’t take it for granted.” I thanked her for the coffee, and the advice, and the feeling of understanding her friendship always inspired even when we disagreed.

It was six o’clock then, and my head hummed with the restored sense of possibility that comes from being in the company of those who see us, as I left to catch the train uptown to meet Anna.

At Grand Central the subway lurched to a halt in the tunnel, due to track construction, and remained there as six thirty struck and passed. There was no reception in the tunnel, leaving me unable to inform her I would be late.

The woman next to me saw me fidgeting, and gave a compassionate smile. She was reading a book of poetry, which led me to smile back at her, as she brushed a strand of red-dyed hair from her eyes.

I tried to make out the cover of the book she was reading, but the script was Cyrillic. It looked somehow familiar, though, and I asked what it was. “Pushkin,” she answered. That made me happy. “I once knew a girl in college who read Onegin to me in the original so I could hear its music.”

“An opera, or a chamber suite?” she asked; then, seeing the contemplation on my brow, “Was it a great love affair, or more ephemeral?”

“A love affair.”

“You haven’t had your great one yet.” I grew self-conscious. I did not have a type, but she fit neatly within my template of attraction. If not for the previous night I might have allowed myself to take it as a sign.

However, I knew better than to allow myself to get excited about someone I met on the subway. That would only open the door to trouble. People have agendas, or worse, they do not know their own agendas.

“Are you late for something?” She turned to me again, as the train finally started moving toward the station. I looked at my watch: it was six forty-five.

“I may have missed it.”

“It’s too late for me to go to class, too,” she said. “Would you like to have coffee?”

We were at 68th Street, and as we walked up the stairs chatting, she told me she was doing a postdoc in evolutionary linguistics. “Don’t you think it’s fascinating how you can tell the whole story of humanity through language?” she asked.

I cursed myself for the night before as I asked an anodyne question about whether her family were scientists.

She blushed until her cheeks were the same color as her hair.

“I’m the only person in my family to go to university,” she answered, adding she was also the only woman in her extended family who had not had a child before twenty-two.

When I asked why she had not, she told me she had wanted to study, but married at twenty-one. When her husband disapproved, she left him to come here alone.

We surfaced from the subway awkwardly.

I rang Anna, but there was no answer. I began leaving a message, but before I could finish I received an incoming text: “How dare you stand me up,” she wrote, full of outrage.

I called again, but she sent me straight to voicemail. I believed in generosity in my dealings with lovers — even former would-be lovers — but her self-importance made me regret again getting involved.

“It was not meant to be,” Irina said, when she saw my plans had fallen through. “So—?”

My emotions were chaotic; the last thing I could risk, I told myself, was trouble. I did not know whether she was or not, only that I had a way of drawing to me those who had grown up under dictatorships, in exile, in pain. Girls who had seen people die. Literally. Spiritually. And who had been told they were difficult, ugly, stupid. Too smart for their own good. I did not know what she was about, but the cost of finding out might prove too high. It was the subway. Allure and danger were everywhere.

“It was nice chatting with you,” I said, as we parted uncertainly.

But as she walked away, I regretted being closed to experience. She reminded me of people I knew with integrity, resilience, unjaded knowingness.

But as she disappeared I thought of Genevieve and felt what every fanatic, every tyrant, every sad sap in the whole history of the whole world knew instinctively, as he conspired to lock up his wives and daughters behind moats, under custom, under prejudice, under law: When you have lost your woman you have lost your way of life.