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where it was. We’d agreed it was wiser not to.
    I put the guitar away and left the apartment again. I took a few textbooks with me, thinking I might sell them back today, and drove to campus. Wisely or not.
     
    A FEW OF THE food carts were still open on library mall, selling North African chicken stew or plastic clamshell boxes of pad thai or curry and rice to the stragglers who’d missed lunch. I was headed past the fountain toward the English building. Finals were almost over, and people were still lolling on the lawn with their books open and eyes closed, or hitching their bags over their shoulders and heading to the Union for a beer. The University of Wisconsin was a great school for studying by the lake while drinking a pitcher of beer. Deep down we all thought an excess of both balanced out.
    I crammed myself into an elevator with a group who all seemed to know one another. They were mostly very pale girls with rings in their noses and tattoos looped around their skinny biceps.
    On the top floor there was a communal office near the bathrooms. I peered in before knocking to be sure he was alone, and he was. He was at his desk, glasses on, reading papers. His head was propped on one fist. As I watched he reached out blindly for the coffee cup near the edge of his desk. I waited to see if he’d knock it over, but his hand closed around it and he took a sip.
    He glanced up when I knocked, looked happy and then almost instantlyshocked to see me there. I hadn’t thought it was so daring to drop by without calling first. I could always say, quite truthfully, that I was a student. Not his student. But I was enrolled.
    As he came to meet me at the door he glanced out into the hallway. When he saw it was empty he drew me in and to the side, where you couldn’t see through the window, and kissed me. He pushed me back against the wall, his fingertips on my neck, glancing over my jawline, my earlobes, my collarbone. I have a weakness for men who use their hands when they kiss, and he had figured this out pretty fast. His beard was coming in, and it rasped against my chin. He smelled of soap, and, I realized, skeptically, something sweet. I stopped kissing him and pressed my nose behind his ear.
    “Don’t say it,” he warned me. “My manly axle-grease shampoo was out so I used Alison’s designer stuff. I think it’s vanilla. Or ginger. Something muffiny.”
    I stepped back and looked at him. I didn’t think it was as funny as I was supposed to, but how could I? What I disliked wasn’t the fact that he used his wife’s shampoo but the specificity of his wife, whom I forced myself to perceive as a vague, cloudy presence of no reality, like someone who has always just left the room. We rarely spoke of her, so I could usually ignore her existence.
    “You’ve ruined muffins for me,” I told him. I was half-joking.
    He raised his eyebrows apologetically and sat down behind his desk, gesturing for me to take the chair before it. “What brings you here? I thought you were working tonight.”
    “ ‘What brings me here?’ ” I repeated incredulously. I couldn’t tell if he was jokingly acting like my professor or if he just slipped into the habit in this environment. So I sat in the chair and said, “I haven’t talked to you in a few days. I’m quitting the restaurant. I’m working for a woman with ALS.”
    “Lou Gehrig’s?” he asked. Show-off, I thought. “That was fast.”
    “Yeah, I know. It was a lot quicker than I was expecting. I only interviewed the other day. I made sure all my shifts were covered at the restaurant so I get an okay reference, though.”
    “Good idea,” Liam said, absently. He was peering down at a paperon his desk. I decided not to answer. Finally he realized he’d been silent for several seconds and looked up again. “What do you do?”
    I gestured helplessly. “I didn’t do anything today,” I said. “But tomorrow I start doing just about anything and everything. It should be