“Anyway. We told ourselves she must have known what she was getting herself into. We told ourselves she was an adult, and sure the rumors were widespread, sure they were widely believed, but they were also just that, rumors. The porn wars were over and porn had won and we were porn-positive, we were sex-positive, we probably wouldn’t have even called ourselves feminists. Who were we to judge.” The tenant walked over to the chair she’d been sitting in and began to lower herself, changed her mind, stood back up. “At first,” she said, “at first they seemed happy. He started going out a little bit less and she started going out a little bit more. Once a month, twice a month, we’d see them at a party together—she’d always be wearing something ridiculous. Once, this was in March or April, nowhere near Halloween, she came in a kind of—classy cowgirl costume, patterned dress, lace trim, hat and boots and a ribbon around her neck.” She shook her head. “But so anyway they’d show up, arm in arm, and she’d be wearing something ridiculous and she still wouldn’t drink, just sit on the couch and sip from a cup of tonic water all night while he took shots with former students. Now I tell my undergrads, told my undergrads, If a grad student wants to hang out with you, that’s a sign, a sign you should definitely not hang out with them, but back then”—she shook her head—“it didn’t occur to us, how inappropriate it was, this guy at parties with people a decade younger than he was, people whose grades he had recently been, in some cases still was, responsible for. We thought it meant we were—mature, sophisticated, I don’t know, adult.” She lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the one she had finished, left the butt in a plastic cup to smolder. “Anyway, we thought it said something good about us, his being at our parties, rather than something evil about him. But okay this girl—so at parties she’d sit on the couch and she wouldn’t really talk to anyone, just sit and sip and watch, but also she didn’t seem unhappy. She had this smile like she was”—the tenant made air quotes with the hand that wasn’t holding the cigarette—“ ‘happy, with a secret.’ I heard that somewhere. I’ve always liked it. ‘Happy, with a secret.’ The safest way to be happy, if you think about it. If you keep it a secret, the happiness, it’s harder for someone else to, you know”—the tenant shrugged—“take it from you.”