As a graduate student in political philosophy at the University of Chicago,  Larry had come under the influence of a teacher named Hans Morgenthau. A German émigré, Jewish, of the school of Realpolitick, Morgenthau, a conservative thinker who had nonetheless opposed the Vietnam War, put Larry in touch with an important undersecretary at the State Department named George Ball, who also opposed the war. Morgenthau suggested Larry drop out of graduate school and become George Ball's protégé, and from there work his way up through the ranks of the State Department and into a life of high-level diplomacy. But Larry and Ball found too many things to disagree about, or so Larry claimed. He talked about being let down, betrayed, hinting that anti-Semitism held him back at State. After three years living in Washington, it became clear that a diplomatic career wasn't going to work out. They returned to Chicago, where Larry re-enrolled in graduate school, but now with much diminished, even shrivelled expectations. 

As a graduate student, he took his time, a little more than six years, finishing his course work and writing a dissertation on Machiavelli for his PhD. Deborah was by then in private practice. They had some help from Larry's father when they bought a small house in Lincolnwood. Larry was kept on for six more years as a teacher in the political science department at Chicago, but he wrote almost nothing during this time. He complained a lot about the ignorance of his students, and even more about the wretchedness of his colleagues. When his six years were up, Chicago — no surprise here — did not offer him tenure. 

Larry was lucky, or so everyone but he thought, to land a job at Northeastern, teaching political philosophy, but he didn't look at it this way. A city college, tucked away in the residential Albany Park neighbourhood, Northeastern was a place where most students worked full-time at other jobs and were aiming for degrees they hoped would give them a leg up in the job market. Despite his not having written anything since his dissertation, Larry's PhD from Chicago carried some cachet at Northeastern. Still, it was a great comedown from his dreams of an important job at the State Department to be teaching Hispanics, Palestinians and middle-aged Jewish housewives about the subtleties of Rousseau, John Locke, and Montesquieu. But Larry was by then in his middle-thirties with nowhere else to go. 

Deborah wonders if she should have said something to him, told him to get off his duff, he had a good mind and was still young, what could possibly be the point of his settling for a life of indolence and complaint? But she never did. She had just established her academic connection at the University of Illinois, her children were growing up — her own life was full, so full that not even an unhappy husband could drag it down. 

Soon Deborah began to wonder if her Larry's early promise was real. She can scarcely remember. Marrying in one's early twenties, as she had done, is of course an act of foolishness, though in her generation everyone seemed to do it. She had married a man she then thought of as attractive, not unkind, with prospects of doing serious work. Did she love him? Or did she instead feel a touch sorry for him, as she might for a relative with a serious handicap?

The rapture had long ago departed from the marriage. Larry's diabetes, which worsened over the years, put him all but out of business in the rapture department. She, Deborah, had lots of chances for love affairs — she travelled four or five times a year to academic dental conventions and conferences around the country — but chose not to venture into that land-mined field. Larry, meanwhile, seemed more interested in sex from the voyeuristic angle. She was always catching him staring at bosomy young women; when they went to movies with what she thought of as painfully slow-motion fornication scenes, she didn't know where to put her eyes, but noticed her husband staring at the screen with great concentration.