Joking to the Clarks that she figured The New Yorker had bought her two stories “merely as an income tax deduction,” she was pleased that one was about to be published.108 “A Season’s Romance” is about Adele, an earnest and impecunious art history graduate student who is swept off her feet by Matt, a brassy, middle-aged, twice-divorced American ad man who treats her to the luxe life in Europe. Back in New York, she feels disconnected from her friends and unable to continue her studies, but she can’t marry her lover because his office is moving him to Texas. Elizabeth mined her own experience as an impoverished graduate student with increasing distaste for her studies coupled with a desperate need to remain in New York. Once again the story features a man in a “cheap bachelor apartment,” but no lovemaking takes place there. (In contrast to Mary McCarthy’s graphic stories about young women’s involvements with older men, Elizabeth always avoided describing the mechanics of sex.) “A Season’s Romance” is curiously bloodless, more like a sociological case study than a persuasive narrative. During these years, Elizabeth seemed wedded to a detached, observational approach. Katharine White queried her about several aspects of the initial draft, including a certain peculiarity about “the romance itself.” It struck her that Matt “behaves with so much respect and tenderness, as if he were merely a suitor.” While the couple seemed to have been living together in Europe, they didn’t appear to be intimate in New York, “where only nightclubs and taxis are mentioned.”109 The published version has Matt telling Adele that he feels uncomfortable having such a well-bred woman as his mistress: riddle solved. And yet the reader is hard put to discover a true connection between the couple, perhaps because we see the affair only from Adele’s point of view.

In December, she received a “first reading agreement” from The New Yorker; the magazine would have first refusal rights for her submissions, which would be paid by the word, plus an extra 25 percent and an annual cost-of-living increase. Money was always on Elizabeth’s mind. Although she regretted having bought a “monstrous” TV on sale—she and Cal were now ignoring it in favor of their classical FM radio station and phonograph records—she felt “a sort of nagging obligation to the beastly TV [sic], merely because I paid money for it.”117 To friends (who would have understood the implicit comparison with radio), she explained that the problem with TV was that “it involved a surrender of one’s sight. . . . the total self goes into a TV program; and they are grotesquely bad. . . . Worst of all . . . no matter how big your house is, one TV set ruins its charm, just as if you had a built in odor of some kind.”118