He’d wanted to leave the city earlier, and had received overtures from Wickfield over a year before Kate would seriously discuss it. When he’d first been approached by Laurence Beetleman and others from Wickfield to see if he’d consider becoming dean, he’d mentioned it to Kate, but she’d argued against it. He had tenure in the music department at NYU, she was teaching part-time there, too, and more importantly, there was her whole network of artists and galleries. She’d always talked about her studio when they discussed it, mourning in advance the thought of leaving a space that she’d had for so long, which was entirely hers. It predated their relationship by a year, a loft space in an old industrial building on the edge of Williamsburg that she’d found right before that neighborhood skyrocketed.
She’d extol the light if he suggested that she could find another studio, but he knew that most of her attachment had to do with having been in the space for so long and having so many memories attached to it. She’d taken him there when they were dating, running ahead of him up the dangerously narrow flight of stairs, sliding back the battered metal door with a great flourish, looking for his reaction.
While he’d noticed the concrete floor flecked with paint and the long, battered worktable crowded with pots and brushes, and the three easels holding canvases in various states of completion, his eyes had been drawn relentlessly back to her. Beautiful in her strange hodgepodge of skirts and peasant blouse, an auburn-haired gypsy with clacking metal bracelets that she tossed on the table so they wouldn’t get in the way of her work.
She’d insisted on painting him, making him perch on a chair near the window and hold his face just so, tilted toward the light. Asking him questions and scolding him when he automatically moved his head to look at her as he answered.
“Stop looking at me, I want your profile,” she’d instructed, brow furrowed with concentration. She’d been so fierce in her work, so beautiful.
“I’d rather look at you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” Her laughter came easily, ringing in the room and making him smile and bringing more scolding. “Stop that. No, no—look away from me! I want you in repose, not staring with a fool’s grin like some Sears Portrait.”
“I can’t help it, you’re making me laugh.”
Once, after they’d been dating for several months, they’d made love in her studio, moving against each other on an old blanket laid across the stained concrete. He could still recall the sunlight dappling her breasts and the feel of the sable brush they’d taken turns tracing over each other’s body.
A sudden honk startled Ian, and he realized he’d fallen thoroughly into memory and was sitting at a green light. He stomped on the accelerator and the old car lurched forward. When the lane changed to two, the SUV behind him roared around his left side, the irate driver communicating his displeasure by leaving the Volvo in a cloud of exhaust.
Annoyed at being lured into unproductive reflection, Ian focused on driving, pulling onto campus in record time. There was a spot assigned for him in the newer parking lot. Just one of the perks of the job and as he parked the car, Ian’s feeling of satisfaction returned, heightened when he made the brisk walk across campus to the beautiful Beaux Arts building that housed the offices for the College of Arts and Sciences.
His office was on the fifth and top floor in a suite at the end of a long hallway tiled in squares of ocher and black. The brass nameplate on the solid wood door was new, and Ian felt a peculiar mixture of pride and embarrassment, flashing back to his first day as an undergrad, so glad to be there and yet so self-conscious about being the new guy on campus.
His secretary sat behind a boxy wooden desk that he knew to be a smaller version of the one in the inner office, as if she were in training to be dean.
Mildred Wooden was small, round almost to the point of being cherubic, and of indeterminate middle age. Ian could have been convinced she was forty-five or sixty-five. Her bob of perfectly smooth ash blond hair was cut too short to flatter her round face, and she favored boxy suits in harsh colors like puce and orange. She moved her small, bejeweled hands when she spoke, and reminded Ian of a tropical bird.
“You have fifteen calls already this morning, Dean Corbin,” she said in greeting, bobbing up from her seat to wave a handful of papers at him.
Ian took them from her into his office while she flapped along behind him chattering on about a faculty meeting and other commitments. He barely heard her, focused instead on the view out the two large windows that dominated the back wall of the office.
Here was the University of Wickfield depicted on postcards undergrads sent home to their parents. The rolling green lawns and massive brick and stone buildings, the bell tower where generations of students had carved their names, the avenue of stately elm trees that had been saplings when President McKinley visited Wickfield, and the gentle curve of the river just visible at the farthest edge of campus that Ian could see. He knew that at this very moment more than one pencil-thin scull was slicing cleanly through its silver surface.
In the far right corner of his window he could see an edge of the field where the new Performing Arts Center would be built. This was why he’d been wooed, and allowed himself to be wooed, away from NYU. The chance to be part of something like this center came once, if it came at all, in a career. The building would be a design masterpiece, something that would stand for generations, and he would be part of the creative process.
Of course, it was still in the planning stages. They wouldn’t break ground, wouldn’t even be able to name the place, until funding was secure. Finding the money and convincing the rest of the university community to back this project would be his biggest challenges this year, but just the thought of being able to look out this window and see the product of his hard work excited him.
“Would you like me to call Mrs. Corbin to let her know about the reception?”
The question doused his sense of satisfaction like a splash of dirty water. Mildred Wooden paused in the doorway waiting for an answer, fidgeting now with the chain of multicolored pebbles supporting her reading glasses.
Ian turned his bark of startled laughter into a cough just in time. Ask Kate to attend two events in one week? The old Kate, yes, she’d loved socializing, but not the new one.
Ever since the assault, she couldn’t bear to be around crowds. She also couldn’t bear to be touched. He understood this rationally. It had made complete sense to him after what happened, and he’d been so careful in those first few months not to so much as brush casually against her.
But that was eight months ago. Eight damn months and he couldn’t even move his hand toward Kate, much less touch her, without that shuttered look coming over her face and her body stiffening in a way that told him without words that he wasn’t wanted.
It was hard not to take that personally. It was hard not to think that this withdrawal from the world was also a withdrawal from him.
The secretary he’d inherited from his predecessor was still fidgeting in the doorway. “No,” he said at last to Mildred Wooden. “I’ll call her myself.”
Chapter Three
A new semester meant a fresh start. Barbara Terry repeated this like a mantra as she walked along Penton Street, killing time before her class. Last semester was a thing of the past and she couldn’t change it, couldn’t make those C’s into A’s, couldn’t go back in time and choose to study instead of attending those frat parties.
A new year meant a new beginning. She’d let herself get distracted last year, new to college, new to an independent life. Saturday night parties became Friday and Saturday nights and even Thursdays sometimes. She’d told herself that she’d catch up on studying, that everybody’s grades slipped their first semester, that she had time to make things right.
Time had crept up on