cartilage put an end to his skiing, Earl put his Tahoe house on the market without

consulting her. Sheila, her close friend and college roommate, who had advised her not to

marry an older man, now urged her to maintain her own identity and not be in a rush to

grow old. Pam felt fast–forwarded. Earl`s aging fed on her youth. Each night he came

home with barely enough energy to sip his three martinis and watch TV.

And the worst of it was that he never read. How fluently, how confidently he had

once conversed about literature. How much his love ofMiddlemarch andDaniel Deronda

had endeared him to her. And what a shock to realize only a short time later that she had

mistaken form for substance: not only were Earl`s literary observations memorized, but

his repertory of books was limited and static. That was the toughest hit: howcould she

have ever loved a man who did not read? She, whose dearest and closest friends dwelled

in the pages of George Eliot, Woolf, Murdoch, Gaskell, and Byatt?

And that was where John, a red–haired associate professor in her department at

Berkeley with an armful of books, a long graceful neck, and a stand–up Adam`s apple,

came in. Though English professors were expected to be well–read, she had known too

many who rarely ventured out of their century of expertise and were complete strangers

to new fiction. But John read everything. Three years before she had supported his tenure

appointment on the basis of his two dazzling books,Chess: The Aesthetics of Brutality in

Contemporary Fiction andNo Sir!: The Androgynous Heroine in Late Nineteenth–Century

British Literature.

Their friendship germinated in all the familiar romantic academic haunts: faculty

and departmental committee meetings, faculty club luncheons, monthly readings in the

Norris Auditorium by the poet or novelist in residence. It took root and blossomed in

shared academic adventures, such as team teaching the nineteenth–century greats in the

Western civilization curriculum or guest lectures in each other`s courses. And then

permanent bonding took place in the trench warfare of faculty senate squabbles, space

and salary sorties, and brutal promotion committee melees. Before long they so trusted

each other`s taste that they rarely looked elsewhere for recommendations for novels and

poetry, and the e–mail ether between them crackled with meaty philosophical literary

passages. Both eschewed quotations that were merely decorative or clumsily clever; they

settled for nothing less than the sublime—beauty plus wisdom for the ages. They both

loathed Fitzgerald and Hemingway, both loved Dickinson and Emerson. As their shared

stack of books grew taller, their relationship evolved into ever greater harmony. They

were moved by the same profound thoughts of the same writers. They reached epiphanies

together. In short, these two English professors were in love.

«You leave your marriage, and I`ll leave mine.»Who said it first? Neither could

remember, but at some point in their second year of team teaching they arrived at this

high–risk amorous commitment. Pam was ready, but John, who had two preteen

daughters, naturally required more time. Pam was patient. Her man, John, was, thank

God, a good man and required time to wrestle with such moral issues as the meaning of

the marriage vow. And he struggled, too, with the problem of guilt at abandoning his

children and how one goes about leaving a wife, whose only offense had been dullness, a

wife transformed by duty from sparkling lover into drab motherhood. Over and over

again John assured Pam that he was en route, in process, that he had successfully

identified and reconnoitered the problem, and all he needed now was more time to

generate the resolve and select the propitious moment to act.

But the months passed, and the propitious moment never arrived. Pam suspected

that John, like so many dissatisfied spouses attempting to avoid the guilt and the burden

of irreversible immoral acts, was trying to maneuver his wife into making the decision.

He withdrew, lost all sexual interest in his wife, and criticized her silently and,

occasionally, aloud. It was the old «I can`t leave but I pray that she leaves» maneuver.

But it wasn`t working—this wife wouldn`t bite.

Finally, Pam acted unilaterally. Her course of action was prompted by two phone

calls beginning with «Dearie, I think you`d like to know...” Two of Earl`s patients under

the pretense of doing her a favor warned her of his sexual predatory behavior. When a

subpoena arrived with the news that Earl was being sued for unprofessional behavior by

yet another patient, Pam thanked her lucky stars she had not had a child, and reached for

the phone to contact a divorce lawyer.

Might her act force John into decisive action? Even though she would have left her

marriage if there had been no John in her life, Pam, in an astounding feat of denial,

persuaded herself that she had left Earl for the sake of her lover and continued to confront

John with that version of reality. But John dallied; he was still not ready. Then, one day,

he took decisive action. It happened in June on the last day of classes just after an ecstatic

love fest in their usual bower, an unrolled blue foam mattress situated partially under the

tent of his desk on the hardwood floor of his office. (No sofas were to be found in

English professors` offices; the department had been so racked by charges of professors

preying on their female students that sofas had been banned.) After zipping up his

trousers, John gazed at her mournfully. «Pam, I love you. And because I love you, I`ve

decided to be resolute. This is unfair to you, and I`ve got to take some of the pressure

off—off of you, especially, but off me as well. I`ve decided to declare a moratorium on

our seeing one another.»

Pam was stunned. She hardly heard his words. For days afterward his message felt

like a bolus in her gut too large to digest, too heavy to regurgitate. Hour upon hour she

oscillated between hating him, loving and desiring him, and wishing him dead. Her mind

played one scenario after another. John and his family dying in an auto accident. John`s

wife being killed in an airplane crash and John appearing, sometimes with children,

sometimes alone, at her doorstep. Sometimes she would fall into his arms; sometimes

they would weep tenderly together; sometimes she would pretend there was a man in her

apartment and slam the door in his face.

During the two years she had been in individual and group therapy Pam had

profited enormously, but, in this crisis, therapy failed to deliver: it was no match for the

monstrous power of her obsessional thinking. Julius tried valiantly. He was indefatigable

and pulled endless devices out of his toolkit. First, he asked her to monitor herself and

chart the amount of time she spent on the obsession. Two to three hundred minutes a day.

Astounding! And it seemed entirely out of her control; the obsession had demonic power.

Julius attempted to help her regain control of her mind by urging a systematic

incremental decrease of her fantasy time. When that failed, he turned to a paradoxical

approach and instructed her to choose an hour each morning which she would entirely

devote to running the most popular fantasy reels about John. Though she followed

Julius`s instructions, the unruly obsession refused containment and spilled over into her

thoughts just as much as before. Later he suggested several thought–stopping techniques.