“I told you. I did. But he doesn’t know who I am. I’m sure he’ll talk to someone he feels comfortable with.”

“I’m sorry, Adam.” It was almost a whisper, and she averted her eyes when she said it. “I just want to get this done, and that’ll be it.” Then she looked up into his eyes and brought her raised face up to his with great earnestness and said, “Oh, Adam, I really am so grateful to you. You’re so wonderful.”

With that, she drew closer and put her hands on his shoulders and brought her face up to his and her lips toward his lips—and detoured at the last instant to his cheek, upon which she planted a kiss.

“Oh, Adam,” she said again, “thank you. Thank you for doing this for me. When I get back, I’ll call you. Okay?”

Now she was turning away to head to the door of the Saint Ray house. A kiss on the cheek? But then she looked back with the sort of smile that tells you so much. She seemed on the verge of tears…that would flow from the eyes of love…Tears…Tears of joy? But what exactly were tears of joy?

Tears for the protector? He had quite an interesting theory he was developing about how all tears, at bottom, have to do with protection. We cry at birth because we come naked into this world and we need protection. We cry for those we love who were desperate for protection and didn’t get it in time. We cry with gratitude for those historic souls who have protected us at critical moments, with great risk to themselves. We cry for those who are voluntarily heading off into the valley of the shadow of death in order to protect us and who will need protection themselves as they do so. We cry for those who needed protection so very much and, with it or without it, have fought the good fight against great odds. All tears had to do with protection. No tears have to do with anything else.

The whole theory had matured nicely in these few minutes—moments?—in the dark on Ladding Walk. Could bliss come any better than this?…afloat in one of the loveliest and most prestigious university settings in the world, gazing down upon old bricks laid in a herringbone-and-diamond pattern created by the sorts of masons who no longer exist in our world, buoyant on the verge of two triumphs…conquests of the heart and of the head…a second major contribution-in-embryo to psychology—was there any greater happiness? Yes! The sublime was called Charlotte Simmons.

Charlotte stood alone in the cavernous entry gallery of the Saint Ray house, waiting. Over there was the staircase with its massive, majestically carved and curved railing. The lumpy coats of paint made this triumph of American woodworking seem even shabbier tonight than it had in the dim light of the frat party.

The odd-looking guy who had let her in—his ferocious pair of eyebrows had grown together above his nose, and his hips were wider than his shoulders—had gone off to fetch Hoyt. The guy’s uncool, un–Saint Ray appearance triggered a vaguely unpleasant recollection she couldn’t pin down. So did the odor of the place—full-bodied, putrid, with a thin sweetness running through it, like a wooden floor rotting because of leaking radiators. It had in fact been marinating for many years in spilled beer.

A mere transient sensation. Mainly she was feeling guilty about the way she had treated Adam…and awed by the prospect of seeing Hoyt…Why hadn’t she told him the truth about the jeans? Maybe because she didn’t even want herself to know what she had done this morning…gone to Ellison, the high-end clothing store, and bought a pair of Diesels. Eighty dollars!—and she’d had only $320 left for the entire semester. Now she was down to less than half of her entire allowance—all so she could go “thank” Hoyt Thorpe! Why hadn’t she at least given Adam a decent kiss on the lips, a mercy kiss—the way Beverly bestowed her mercy fucks, or so she claimed—instead of that pathetic little vesper-service peck on the cheek? Why hadn’t she let him come inside to meet Hoyt? Hoyt!—a grown man, not a boy! She kept trying to figure out what it meant—beat up the governor of California’s bodyguards when they attacked him—what had Beverly called it—the night of the…some kind of fuck?…and then utter bewilderment. The governor of California…She could see his florid face and thick white hair as she watched him on television last spring—the Dupont commencement address…which had given her strength, renewed her courage after Channing’s raid on her house after commencement…out in the Grove, did Adam say? Adam—

Worse guilt. Now she knew exactly why she wouldn’t let Adam come in. Hoyt would see her in the company of a dork—Adam!—who was merely trying to bring her into what she had dreamed of, a cénacle, as Balzac had called it, a circle of intellects equipped and ready to live the life of the mind to the fullest…and here she was in the…First Circle of Hell, the entry gallery of the Saint Ray house.

Somewhere beyond the entry gallery, frat-boy voices exploded with laughs and mock cheers and then calmed down. Evidently some sort of game was in progress. Somewhere else, perhaps upstairs, somebody was playing a rap song with a snare-brush drumbeat and a saxophone in the background.

Hoyt appeared. He came toward her, limping. He had a bandage plastered down one side of his jaw almost to his chin. His eye on that side was black and puffy. There were stitches above the eye that closed what must have been a gash. His nose and his lower lip were swollen.

As he limped closer, he appeared quizzical, as if he had no idea who she was. But when he reached her, he smiled and said, “I must look great,” and started a laugh—abruptly halting it with a wince that squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he was smiling warmly and blinking, and tears showed up in the corners of his eyes. He pointed to the side of his rib cage. “Sorta fucked up.”

So moved was she by the dreadful wounds, the awful beating he had taken for her sake, that she barely noticed the incidental bit of Fuck Patois.

He cocked his head, looked into her eyes with the smile of one who has lived…and said, “So you’re…Charlotte. At least I know your name now. If you wanna know the truth, I never thought I’d see you back in this house again.”

“Me neither.” Her voice was hoarse all of a sudden.

“I never even got to ask you why you ran away.”

Charlotte could feel her face turning red. “I didn’t. I—they pulled me.” She almost swallowed the words, she felt so ashamed.

Hoyt started to laugh, then winced with pain again. “Don’t make me do that,” he said. “It didn’t look to me like anybody was pulling you. By the time you got to that door, you were practically knocking the door down. You were sprinting, is what you were doing.” Confident smile: “Like what did you think I was?”

It dawned on her that he wasn’t talking about the tailgate but the night of “We’ve got this room.” She had no idea what to say. Her face was ablaze with embarrassment.

Hoyt delivered a philosophical-sounding sigh. “H’it don’ matter none. That was then.”

H’it don’ matter none? Was he mocking her accent? She didn’t know what to say to that, either. So she just blurted out, “I came to thank you. I’m so sorry about what happened to you. I feel like it was my fault.” She lifted her hand as if to raise it and caress the battered side of his face, but then she withdrew it. The sight touched her all over again. He had gone through all that for her. “I wasn’t even there when it was over. I feel so bad about that, too. I just had to come…thank you.”

“It wasn’t—” He abandoned that sentence and paused—for an eternity, it seemed to her. Finally: “You don’t have to thank me. I did it because I wanted to. I wanted to kill that asshole.”

“I hope somebody told you I called yesterday? All they said was that you couldn’t come to the phone. They didn’t tell me about…any of this.”