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apartment at the El Monterey, and each time she’d made herself attuned to his presence, listening closely and responding in ways that let him know she understood who he was and what he meant as he rambled across subjects that interested him, from the Port Huron Statement of the SDS to the optical fundamentals of the phase microscope. In all her years as a teacher, she’d known no student whose mind was as overwrought. He reminded her of a boiling pot—hot water always about to spill over, and the perpetual manufacture of distillate. It did occur to Mastroianni, when she found him as much as an hour after school still waiting for her by her office door, that his need for her, though not necessarily unhealthy, was suggestive of a wounded psyche. As a trained Jungian, she had theories about this young man so earnestly moral and consistently distraught about the shape of the world, and, having met his father at an open-house, and having noted that John William was an only child whose mother was living in New Mexico, she had the sort of fodder for conjecture—including the dream journal he’d kept for Dreams and Literature—that Jungians, by definition, require. “What a terrifying loneliness he lived with,” she told me. “I suppose I must have offered the attentiveness he’d been waiting for all his life.”
    After the paper on gnosticism, though, John William stopped visiting at the El Monterey and became stiffly cordial in her presence. In other words, after her F, their special relationship was over. I commiserated with Althea about this result and said I understood her regrets. I told her I’d had my own bad moments. I said I’d had young people attach themselves to me and in one way or another hadn’t been what they desired. “While this is well done, you haven’t followed the assignment,” followed by an F—I assured her I’d written approximately the same, similarly alienated students. But isn’t such terseness, finally, just the shortcut of the tired English teacher with her stack of student essays on a Saturday, naturally exasperated by forty-seven pages? Just that and not a personal betrayal? Althea Mastroianni in the courtyard of the El Monterey, retired now and wearing summer sandals: “In the end, I wasn’t a good mother surrogate, and I suppose I made things worse for John William by taking our relationship as far as I did, by letting him in the door of my apartment and then spurning him at the very moment when he was trying to tell me about gnosticism.”
     
     
     
    W HY WERE WE FRIENDLY , John William and I? I had more than an inkling of his disturbance, after all, and from the beginning he derided and provoked me. Nevertheless, about a month after our adventure at the Seattle Center, I followed him up Mount Anderson, my first glaciated peak. We made it up on the wings of youth, but thereafter got confused in the clouds, and, coming off the summit, missed Flypaper Pass, and so ended up on the Linsley Glacier, which not only terminates in vertical wet rock but is impassable when its crevasses are open, unless you’re a technical climber and properly equipped, but we were just two sixteen-year-olds carrying candy bars and a hash pipe. Down we went, I would have to say merrily, leaping cracks and circumventing chasms as if our lives were charmed, progressively brazen until, near twilight, we came to an ice canyon broader than a city street. “What now?” I asked.
    John William got down on one knee. The gap in front of us was like something from a fable, with no light in it after the first twenty feet—a maw, then nothing but a chill. “Screw it,” John William said. “Let’s die young.”
    “Great solution.”
    John William put his head and arms in the canyon and dug the toes of his boots into the snow. “Come on,” he said. “If we make it, good. If we don’t, we’re out of here—absconded.”
    “Here’s where we go separate ways, rich boy.”
    “We’re not going separate