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obnoxious, insisting that Gilchrist hire him to teach the seminar sessions of his famous Psych & Lit course.
    Gilchrist asked a few innocuous questions about the subject matter then grew bored with Okun’s answers and silenced the grad student by hiring him on the spot.
    Okun, almost as quickly, regretted the decision. The professor turned out to be more reclusive and odd and aggressively prickish than rumored. Narcissistic and anal expulsive, Okun observed (he too, like Gilchrist, was dual-degreed: psychology and English lit). He gave the man wide berth and had to improvise his professor-handling techniques like a doctor developing new antibiotics to meet particularly virulent strains of bacteria.
    Gilchrist was impossible to outflank. Okun was not surprised to learn that he was more savvy than he seemed and had pegged Okun early as having designs on his job. But by now, after two semesters of continual jockeying if not outright combat, Brian Okun, chic, moody, himself brilliant, an enfant terrible of the Modern Language Association, Brian Okun had nothing but wounds to show from the run-ins with his scholastic Wellington.
    Today, for instance—the phone call.
    The professor had left for San Francisco last week toread a paper at the Berkeley Poetry Conference and had been expected back tonight, in time for tomorrow’s lecture. Gilchrist had called however to say he would be staying another week to do research at San Francisco State. He abruptly told Okun to have another professor prepare and deliver his lecture tomorrow.
    The session was entitled “John Berryman: Self-Harm and Suicide Through the Poet’s Eye.” Okun considered himself a Berryman scholar and fervently wanted to deliver that lecture. But Gilchrist was on to him. He ordered Okun, with a tinny insulting laugh, to find a full professor. He used that phrase.
Full professor
, a painful reminder of what Okun was not. Okun agreed, extending his middle finger to the telephone as he did so. Then he hung up and the interesting philosophical dilemma occurred to him.
    Okun now paced—to the extent he was able to do so in a cluttered eight-by-eight room. As his mind leapt backward, zigzagging through time, he found he was picturing vague scenes of Victorian tragedy (Charles Dickens had given a lecture in this very building as part of his U.S. tour in the 1860s, a fact Okun had collected and cherished) but the image that he arrived at was not from one of Dickens’s books; it was of a girl wearing a white layered nightgown, her long hair spilling like dark water on the pillow. A girl with a pallid face. Mouth open in relaxation, revealing charming prominent teeth. Lips curling outward. Eyes closed. Her name was Jennie Gebben and she was dead.
    At only one point since his graduation from Yale had Brian Okun ever doubted that he would be a Nobel Prize winner. There was some question as to whether he would win for nonfiction writing—some quantum-leaping analysis of, say, the relation between Yeats’s haywire obsession with Maude Gonne and his art. Or whether he would produce a series of showy, anxious quote Updike Coomer Ford quote
New Yorker
novels ridden with quirky characters and heavy with the filigree of imagery and dialect-laden talk. Either was fine. Only twenty-seven,on the verge of doctorhood, Brian Okun felt mastery of his scholarly self.
    He also believed however that his right brain needed more life experience. And like many graduate students he believed that life experience was synonymous with fucking. He intended to fill the next five years with as many female students as he had the stamina to bed and the patience to endure afterward. Eventually he would marry—a woman who was brilliant and homely enough to remain utterly devoted to him. The nuptials would have happened by the time the Swedish girls, hair glowing under the blaze of the burning candle wreaths, woke him up in Stockholm on the morning of the award presentation.
    But these dreams were