One night, at a fund-raising dinner for the dental school, one of the guests at their table, a man named Jim Breakstone, a successful personal injury lawyer, asked Larry what he did for a living. When Larry told him that he taught political philosophy, Breakstone replied: "A sweet racket. I envy you."

"What do you mean, racket?" Larry asked. 

"I mean you've got the dream deal. You work six, maybe seven, months a year, no pressures, no responsibilities, just talking all day to young people who can't even tell you you're full of crap. Pretty nice, if you ask me."

Larry didn't answer, but merely shot Breakstone a look of contempt, and didn't speak to him again through the remainder of the evening. On the drive home, he castigated him to Deborah, non-stop, all the way from the Loop to their house in Evanston. 

"That uncouth bastard, a fucking personal injury lawyer, thinks I have a racket. He should only know how hard I work at perfecting my lectures! Or the amount of time I put into grading my students' papers. I'd like to see him try to write my book on Hobbes!" And on and on, for 15 miles. This was the first Deborah had heard that her husband was writing a book on Hobbes. At Larry's death, no trace of the manuscript was found.

Larry's last years of teaching were his worst. He chose not to learn how to use a computer. He loathed the new regime in universities — the rise of feminism, multiculturalism, affirmative action — and he couldn't stop himself from making sly remarks in the classroom about how these changes were lowering the standards of higher education. One of his remarks — he claimed John Locke was not "what one might call a strong gynocentric thinker, he didn't even know where the gynocentre was" — was reported to the department chairman, a Latina named Mary Rodriguez, who took it to the dean. The result was a letter of reprimand from the president of the university, an African-American. Larry responded to this letter by turning in his resignation, at the age of 62. 

Not that retirement changed his life all that much, at least not outwardly. But Larry had begun to turn more and more in on himself. He began watching day-time television, and would report to Deborah when she returned from work who had been on Oprah that morning. The backseat of his car was piled up with books and CDs. He would sit in the room he called his study and listen to Glenn Gould play The Goldberg Variations over and over. At night, he watched baseball or basketball games. He and Deborah had long ceased going to bed at the same time. He was always a restless sleeper, and had in recent years begun to snore. Deborah wanted to suggest that they sleep in different rooms — every day was a full day for her, and she needed her sleep — but she hadn't the heart to do so, thinking it would only mean another rejection for him. She began to pity this man she had once loved.

Now that Larry is dead, Deborah tries to remember why she let things drift. Could she have roused her husband to shed his bitterness, resentments, trivial envy? Would the threat of divorce have stirred and re-ignited his lost ambition? Although she had never allowed herself to think about divorce, there were countless times when she wished she had no connection with Larry. Going out with other couples, which they did less and less, was always worrisome. He would get going on one of his obsessions — the dopeyness of feminism, the emptiness of African-American Studies programmes, the awfulness of rock 'n' roll, the ignorance of the young — and invariably take things a step too far, coming across as a crank. Deborah waited at such moments to find a place to barge into her husband's tirades to change the subject as smoothly as possible, which wasn't always easy.