Becoming the poverella was Olga’s greatest childhood fear. That she should become this woman who despite her character, her intelligence, her work, constricts her existence to the shallow contentment of marriage — this is the betrayal. “What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life,” Olga thinks. The novel she hated in high school is the one she now begins to write in her head, though it contains touches of the “vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” she admired. For a moment she narrates her movements in the third person — then stops, fearing madness. “Don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip,” she reproaches herself. “Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He’s gone, you’re still here.”