Ben nodded. “People hang on in Avicenna. This town is a La Brea tar pit for academic types.”

“I’m hip. They come out to do graduate work and wind up shoplifting. Dealing. All the cabdrivers came out on the G.I. Bill in 1961 and flunked their orals.”

“Of course,” Ben said softly, “there’s a point in your life when everyone starts to look familiar.” Farrell looked sideways and saw him scratching and rubbing at the base of his throat—another habit of the bored, kindly, sardonic boy strayed from nowhere to slump next to him in assembly. Ben said, “I wish I’d flunked my orals.”

“You can’t fail tests,” Farrell said. “You don’t know how.”

“Didn’t know why, more like it.” Ben was leaning forward, writing what looked like Sia over and over in the water with his toes.

Farrell said, “You like it here?”

Ben did not turn. “I’m a hotshot here, Joe. They work my ass off, but they know who I am. They’ll give me tenure next year, and associate, and let me do about what I want to do. Because I mean business. Because I’m a goddamn firstclass scholar of Icelandic literature, and there are maybe three others this side of the Rockies. I am aces around here.”

“Then why are we both talking funny?”

Ben gripped the side of the pool, staring down between his legs into the water. He said without expression, “I like two of my undergraduate students and one graduate. No, all right, two graduates. I’m starting to cheat on my office hours, and I’ve been getting into fights with people at committee meetings, when I show up. There’s this book I’m supposed to be writing, about style and diction in the later skaldic poetry. There is one hell of a big feud going on in the department, and most of the time I can’t remember whose side I’m supposed to be on. Sometimes I can, and that’s worse. It’s really not too much fun.”