Chapter One

Chapter one
professor Blau!" the student cried out, bounding up the steps. A frenetic session of handshaking ensued, but Ruth could see by Ben's warm vague smile that this young man had him at a momentary disadvantage.
The student, or ex-student, was sandy-haired and sunburnt. His aviator sunglasses hung from a braided leather cord around his neck. Now he was telling them about his year as an intern in a senator's office and how he'd gotten into the Stanford program. Remember Alison, his girlfriend? She was in med school and they were getting married in December. Here he glanced shyly at Ruth.
A pause. The preliminaries had been gotten through, and Ruth knew all too well what would happen next. The student would ask Ben's advice and Ben would dispense it. Ruth would stand there, trapped and excluded, shifting from one foot to the other in an ecstasy of boredom. Twenty minutes, forty minutes. At some point the conversation would begin to wind down. After a long diminuendo of farewells the student would excuse himself. But even then, the danger would not have passed. It had happened more than once that even as Ben's interlocutor had turned and taken several steps away, Ben remembered some final piece of advice-a colleague to look up, a course to avoid-and actually called the student back. The coffin sprang open and the grinning corpse of the conversation sat bolt upright.
Now was the moment to slip away. She smiled her quick sideways smile at Ben, who was too involved in talk to notice, and withdrew to the stone railing. Looking down, she saw a scene of young people standing in conversational knots. This place, known as Nirvana, was the graduate-student bar, a beer-disp