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It was true that Eva’s male colleagues had by now ceased to joke among themselves that a hopeless crush on Professor Mueller ought to be included among the requirements for the major in philosophy, but this was not because the students no longer fell in love with her. They did, at a rate which had of course slackened over the years but was still not inconsiderable. It was an irony—of course quite lost on Eva, who was steadfastly oblivious to the dramas in which she figured—that many who sat raptly listening to their professor’s lectures on the “futility of the passions,” on the need to transform the passive emotions directed towards objects and people outside ourselves into the active emotions of the intellect, were swollen with an advanced case of that same passive desire whose elimination was being eloquently, even passionately, urged upon them.

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

REGGIE
Now see you gonna laugh. Cause you thank everythang I do is funny. It ain’t funny. It’s meant tah teach ya. How I speak? That’s meant tah teach you too. You get older ‘n leave this place...one thing ya gonna remember is the music of ya daddy’s voice. The memory ‘a what made ya. How ya people survived. An’ these little games we play? These little hand games? That’s your history too… ‘cause ya grandmama sat ya mama down when she was smaller ‘n you ‘n they played these games ‘n had the best time that ever was. Then, ya mama taught me ya know that? Shoot, I ain’t wanna learn no little girl games. Imma man! (Laughs.) What I look like playin’ some little girl hand game! But, then we had you. And I taught you. That’s a road map. You ever get lost, you find ya way back home (points to his chest) from them. Understand? And one way or another... I’ll come get you.

He had that look on his face again. She remembered it now. It was that troubled look he had six months ago when his snakes got sick. “Angelica,” she remembered him saying softly, almost in tears, “they’re dying, they won’t eat, they’re as limp as noodles, all of them.” What was he going to do? He was supposed to deliver their venom to the lab days ago. They had been calling, reminding him, demanding, threatening to go with another venom vendor. They’d tell the other labs about him, ruin his hard-earned reputation.

He was screwed without his snakes. And what’s more, he really loved them.

Angelica always wanted him to look at her that way, with that much attention and intensity that would show he loved her that much too. That he needed her around. And finally here it was.

“No more pills, Angelica. You’re going to end up killing yourself.”

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

ANTHONY
I’m sorry, sir.
I don’t think I understand.

MATT
She took her kid and left in the middle of the night.
To go where?
She’s in the middle of the desert.

ANTHONY
Sir, if I may.

MATT
You may.

ANTHONY
Her leaving
What does any of that have to do with us?

MATT
What does that have to do with us?
We did that, Anthony.
We broke that family up.

A moment.

MATT
Do you not understand that?

ANTHONY
It doesn’t matter what I understand, sir.