Mudwoman. Joyce Carol Oates

already had the number in her cell phone memory. He was breathing—panting—as if about to say more but broke the connection instead.

      Meredith he’d called her. Beyond that, M.R. scarcely heard.

      How they’d met, M.R. could not clearly recall. How they’d parted, M.R. hoped to forget.

      It had been a time when M.R.’s (secret) lover had abandoned her.

      Sent her into exile she’d joked. Sadly joked.

      Somewhere in the hinterland of north central New Jersey he’d sent her—this prestigious Ivy League university floating like an improbable island of academic excellence amid vestiges of quaint-Colonial American history and a hilly-rolling ultra-affluent rural/suburban landscape which, until M.R. was invited to be interviewed for a position in the philosophy department, she had not visited and had not envisioned. Reporting back to her lover This can’t be a real place! It is too perfect.

      She hadn’t quite been willing to think that Andre Litovik wanted her—hoped her to be—gone.

      Not permanently gone—only just a respectable distance from Cambridge, Massachusetts. From his house on Tremont Street, and his household. From his family.

      Nor had she been willing to think that really it was a good idea—a very good idea—for M.R. to leave the force field of her lover, a gravitational pull roughly equivalent to that of the planet Jupiter. With her instinct for self-effacement M.R. had planned to seek a teaching position in the Boston area, to be near Andre, at one or another far less distinguished university or college, which would have fatally sabotaged her career at the start; with her Harvard Ph.D. and early, much-admired publications in moral philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, M. R. Neukirchen had been an extremely attractive candidate, and female.