By my penultimate year in grad school I’d run out of philosophy classes to take and had started picking my way through the rest of the course catalog, reasoning that I was doing myself a favor by broadening my horizons. I went first to our pet subjects, math and quantum physics. Nobody looked askance when I took an artificial-intelligence seminar. Nor did they take notice when I signed up for Greek. Film theory raised some eyebrows; but it was after I wangled a spot in an undergraduate photography studio that my so-called advisor not-so-politely suggested that I’d veered off course.

Chastened, I next semester enrolled in a political theory class given jointly with the law school. While meandering through the law library stacks I came across a pretty woman in a black cashmere coat, her brow furrowed in the unmistakable distress of a first-year. I asked what the problem was, and she showed me: the call numbers had switched mid-shelf. Having become something of an expert on the Harvard system, I escorted her to the right place, and she repaid me with a date.

We were halfway through dessert before she realized I wasn’t a law student at all.

No, I wasn’t.

“That’s good. Lawyers are assholes.”

I pointed out that in three years’ time, she would be a lawyer.

“Then I’ll be an asshole,” she said.

She picked up the check.

At first blush, we made an odd couple. Yasmina came from Los Angeles, where her family was prominent in the Persian Jewish community. Back in Tehran, they had owned several carpet and furniture factories, amassing a minor fortune before the Islamic Revolution forced them to flee. Servants, a chauffeur, two vacation homes—this was a life known to Yasmina only in pictures, as she had been born in Rome, where her parents lived while awaiting U.S. visas.

Once in California, her father tried to stick to what he knew, opening a furniture store with borrowed money. But he’d learned his trade on the streets and in the souk, and Americans found his aggressive brand of salesmanship off-putting. The store floundered, and the family suffered through moves every three months, each apartment crummier than the last. Despondent, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, he had a sign printed up that read GOING OUT OF BUSINESS—EVERYTHING MUST GO! He stuck it in the window and the inventory cleared within a week.

Now there were seven such stores, with seven such signs, scattered across the greater L.A. area, all of them going out of business continuously for the last twenty years. The Eshaghians once again lived in a big house, drove big cars, and lacked for nothing. Yet the fear of losing everything, instantaneously, clawed at them day and night. No place felt safe, no matter how democratic its elections or how free its markets. They obsessed over money: talking about it, equating it with moral worth, pestering their children to marry into it. They drove Yasmina bananas. In a sense, I owe them thanks, as it was their needling that drove her into the arms of a penniless Gentile philosopher.

But that’s not giving either of us enough credit, because in fact we had more in common than met the eye. Both of us admitted to feeling like outsiders at Harvard. Having snuck past the bouncer, though, we both wanted to make the most of our time inside. We visited Walden Pond to see the leaves turn; we followed the Freedom Trail and sucked down clam chowder. On Saturday mornings we would take long walks through the leafy neighborhoods surrounding Radcliffe Quad, stopping in at open houses to pick up tear sheets, pretending to be a young couple in search of their first home. Yasmina liked to stand in these living rooms, remodeling them in her mind—but respectfully, with an eye toward preserving the details that gave them character. Afterward we would get coffee and donuts and sit by the river, watching the scullers: pale young men moving in unison, bright boats against steely water. The Head of the Charles Regatta was by far our favorite weekend of the year. Standing there, cheering on the Crimson, we allowed ourselves the fantasy that our presence in the crowd signified more than high test scores and the need for demographic completeness; we shed our motley, inglorious pasts and became, briefly, full-fledged members of the American intellectual elite, part of a long line stretching back to John Harvard himself.

Plus, our sexual chemistry was fantastic. That explains a lot.

If not for her, I would have ended up homeless much sooner than I did. I was lucky enough to meet her right before losing my standing, and while the cynical might regard my decision to move in with her as one of expedience, at the time it felt like love.

In fairness, I never took her or her support for granted. The opposite: I felt indebted and strove to justify myself by assuming all the housework. I shopped for groceries. I picked up her dry cleaning. I went to the library, checked out Joy of Cooking, and read it cover to cover (knowledge whose application entailed considerable trial and error, and once triggered the hallway sprinklers). Yasmina loved to throw parties but was more or less hopeless in the kitchen, coming to rely on me and my ever-expanding culinary repertoire, which soon included Thai and Mexican, her favorites, as well as a slew of Persian dishes: kebabs, crispy rice, unpronounceable stews.

Playing houseboy allowed me to ignore my professional collapse. More than that, though: I liked doing chores. Their simple physicality was weirdly freeing. It turns out that there is no one more mundane, no one more housewifely, than a thwarted academic. Funny—and unsettling, as I realized how easily I could have gone another route. Had I never left home, who knows what would’ve become of me? Office flunky, fertilizer salesman, account manager for the slaughterhouse. I began to sympathize with my mother, to understand what it’s like to see one’s world reduced to soups and saucepans. Martyrdom has its comforts.

And I didn’t object to living in relative luxury. The fact that I paid no rent yet came home to a king-sized bed and walls filled with tasteful nautical-themed prints did not, to my mind, mean that I had sold out. I wasn’t the one turning the hamster wheel. The bed, the art, the panini press—none of it belonged to me. All I had were my books, my clothes, my ideas, and half of Nietzsche. In this way, I justified becoming a yuppie.

Yasmina’s disdain for her upbringing notwithstanding, at heart she’s very traditional. She would roll her eyes at her family, mock their accents and their provincialism, but I knew she still loved them. (Here we have a neat demonstration of the difference between an annoying childhood and an abusive one.) Holding their conventional wisdom in inexplicably high regard, she never could manage to get over the idea that she had to be married by twenty-three or risk dying alone. Most of the women she knew, including her sisters, were, foremost, homemakers. She’d had to fight for permission to go to college out of state. Certainly nobody expected her to go beyond a bachelor’s degree, and while her parents paid her law-school tuition, they refused to believe that she intended to work, viewing the pursuit of a career as a phase she’d grow out of once she met the right man.

I was not the right man.

I never met her family. I never spoke to them. As far as they knew, I didn’t exist. Whenever a relative came to town, Yasmina would dig out an antique silver hamsa and hang it on the nail by the front door. That was my cue to pack an overnight bag and arrange a place to sleep. It was demeaning, the two of us running around trying to cover our tracks like naughty children. Banished to Drew’s sofabed, I would fulminate as he threw darts and grunted sympathy.

Nor had Yasmina met my parents, who never visited me and whom I never went to visit. I’m not sure what she expected if we couldn’t or wouldn’t get everyone in the same metro area. That we loved each other was never in doubt. We made each other laugh; we fascinated each other with our Otherness. But we were destined to fail. We both knew it. To be honest I think we found the sense of inevitable doom rather romantic.

There was one more sticking point. Though she claimed to have fallen for my intellect, I always suspected that deep down, Yasmina had other plans for me. She sometimes referred to a nonspecific point in the future when I “stopped,” the implication being that I would eventually own up to my shortcomings and find gainful employment. And if she wanted to remake me, I must confess that I sometimes felt the same way. She could be overbearingly pragmatic. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married, and if I did, I wondered if it could be to someone who wasn’t a philosopher.

The argument that led to her throwing me out began over something insignificant. I can’t even remember what it was. Isn’t that the way it always is, though? It starts with a dirty plate or the default orientation of the toilet seat, and before you know it you’re at each other’s throats. She accused me of being distant, citing my dissertation as proof that I couldn’t commit. I replied that Hegel didn’t finish The Phenomenology of Mind until he was thirty-six. By that measure I still had six years. For a fuller explanation of what ensued, the reader is referred to chapter one.

It’s a testament to the insularity of life in the academy that I could walk less than a mile off campus and find myself on a street hitherto unknown to me, a charming little cul-de-sac lined with white oaks and red maples. Cars lay buried under snow. A sidewalk in dire need of shoveling fronted a long row of clapboard Victorians—some high-gabled Gothic Revivals, others bracketed simply in the American folk style, all except the last converted to duplexes and triplexes. Number forty-nine’s empty driveway revealed that the house ran quite far back. Soon enough I would discover what those depths held.

Down at the corner, a silent procession of pedestrians and taxis, spectral in the winter haze.

I could not blame my prospective employer for wanting to have her conversation delivered in. Getting to the end of the block would be nightmarish for someone with bad hips or an arthritic knee.

One benefit to being so tucked away: it was quiet. Blissfully so. I grew aware of my own breathing, the fizz of my nylon jacket as I moved my arm to cover a cough. It occurred to me that this would be an ideal place to get some writing done.

I climbed the porch steps and knocked. The curtains in the bay window stirred. I looked over but not in time, and twenty seconds later the front door opened on darkness.

“Mr. Geist. Do come in.”

I stood in the entry hall, my eyes adjusting.

“I would offer to take your coat, but you may want to keep it. I’m afraid the house is rather cold. Before we go any further, let me get a look at you.”

I did likewise. I put her at seventy-five, although it was still too dark to draw firm conclusions. What I could tell was that she had once been exceedingly beautiful, and that much of that beauty had lingered on into old age. Her face was heart-shaped, her eyes quick and moist. I squinted: were they green?

“You appear decent enough,” she said. “You aren’t going to rob me, are you?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Then let us hope that your plans remain unchanged, eh?” She laughed. “Come.”

Down a creaking hallway she went, trailing perfume. She was right about the temperature. New England homes tend to be suffocatingly overheated—anyone who has lived there will understand—and often I came in from the cold to start pouring sweat. Now I zipped up my coat. She paused at the noise, turned with an apologetic smile.

“Ach. I must beg your pardon. My condition is provoked by heat. Bright light can be bothersome as well. I hope you shan’t be too uncomfortable.”

We came to a delicately furnished room. A pair of pale pink sofas faced each other, perpendicular to the fireplace, which was accented by a hearth rug. In the middle of the room was a low glass table, atop it a half-empty china cup and saucer. The curtains were heavy enough to block out all sunlight; two brass floor lamps with chinoiserie shades provided the room’s only illumination.

“You would like some tea, perhaps?”

“That’d be lovely, thanks.”

“Please sit down. I shan’t be long.”

Watching her go, I wondered about this condition of hers. She seemed healthy enough. She walked slowly—not out of difficulty but with grace. It was the walk of someone accustomed to having others wait for her, the speed of dignity. She wore a long floral dress beneath a creamy cardigan, and from the back I saw her white hair tidily pulled into a bun, a pearl hairpin at twelve o’clock. Her sole concession to informality was a pair of slippers that slapped at her heels as she disappeared.

I got up to poke around. Aside from the entry hall, there were two ways out: the one she’d taken, leading, presumably, to the kitchen, and another opening into a still deeper darkness. The living room bowed out toward the front of the house, creating space for a dining-room set that gleamed through the dim.

Most striking was the lack of photographs. Who doesn’t keep a portrait of mother and father over the mantel? Spouse? Children? Friends. Yet there was nothing except a ceramic clock. Indeed, the walls were almost bare. Near the doorway to the kitchen hung Audubon’s famous lithograph of the Carolina parakeet—extinct in nature but alive in art, their greens and reds and yellows so vibrant that one could almost hear them screeching. Near the back hallway was an oil, a nighttime seascape, black sky and black ocean.

I heard her coming.

The sofa cushions gave up a faint breath of perfume as I sat.

She handed me my own cup and saucer. “I don’t know your preferences, so here are lemon and sugar. Should you want milk, I can fetch some.”

“That’s perfect, thank you.”

“You are quite welcome.” She sat opposite me, her posture immaculate. “I hope you found me easily?”

“Yes.”

“And you were not inconvenienced.”

“Not at all.”

“Excellent. I commend you on your punctuality, a virtue in regrettably short supply. Der erste Eindruck zählt. ”

German gets a bad rap for being uniformly guttural and heavy. Her accent was airy, balletic; I still couldn’t pinpoint it. Her English shalls and shan’ts seemed less an affectation than the product of upbringing, and I wondered if she had been raised with British tutors or studied abroad. If so, that would imply a wealthy background. Before I made too many assumptions, though—

“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but I still don’t know your name.”

She laughed. “How extraordinary. I apologize again. My brain must be frozen. I am Alma Spielmann.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Spielmann.”

“And the same to you again, Mr. Geist. You must forgive my abruptness on the telephone. I regret that this is a bad habit of mine. I remember when even a brief call cost a fortune. When I was your age—ach. I don’t want to be one of those old ladies whose stories begin, ‘When I was your age.”’

I smiled. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Oh, there are many places to begin. Yes? No subject is out of bounds to the philosopher.”

“Don’t feel obliged to talk philosophy on my account.”

“I feel nothing of the sort,” she said. “That was the reason I asked you here. I have known a number of philosophers over the years. You might say that I was a bit of a philosopher myself. But they are nowadays quite difficult to come by. Before you, I had calls from two filmmakers, three writers, a linguist, and someone studying forestry. All from Harvard, like you, although you are the first I have troubled to invite. I suppose that is my punishment for advertising in the student newspaper. I mistakenly believed that this would attract a more sophisticated element.”

“What was the problem?”

“They were all dreadfully stupid.”

“That’s too bad,” I said.

“For them, yes, it is too bad. It is a terrible thing to be stupid, don’t you think?”

“... yes.”

“You seem to disagree.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“But you don’t agree.”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure it’s my place—”

“Bah. Please, Mr. Geist. I haven’t asked you here so you could parrot my opinions back to me.”

“Well,” I said, “some people would consider consciousness a kind of curse.”

“And do you?”

“Me? No. Not most of the time.”

“Some of the time, then.”

“I think we all have moments when we’d like to be able to shut off our minds.”

“That is what wine is for,” she said. “Is that what you would like to do, Mr. Geist? Shut off your mind?”

A lump of self-pity rose into my throat, and I almost started blubbering about Yasmina, about my rudderless career, about the fact that I was here singing for my supper. I shrugged again. “You know. Angst.”

I’d been right in thinking her eyes green; but they changed, or seemed to change, when she smiled. “Very well, then. I don’t mind that you are unhappy. It shall make you more interesting to talk to. That was the other problem with your predecessors. They all sounded so improbably cheery.”

I laughed. “I’m sure they thought they were doing the right thing.”

“Yes. This is the American way, after all. But the Viennese do not believe in happy endings.”

“I was wondering.”

“About?”

“Your accent. I thought it might be Swiss.”

She looked offended. “Mr. Geist.”

I apologized—in German.

“Your own accent is good. Clean. I must ask where you learned to speak.”

“I lived in Berlin for six months.”

“Well. I shan’t hold that against you, either.”

“I’ve never been to Vienna,” I said.

“Oh, you must go,” she said. “It is the only real city in the world.” She smiled. “Now. Let us discuss whether it is better to be happy or to be intelligent.”

It was the best conversation I’d had in a long time, precisely because it had no goal other than itself. Three facts about her emerged as we spoke: one, she was ferociously witty; two, she seemed to have read every major work of Continental philosophy published prior to the 1960s; and three, she enjoyed playing the provocateur. As such, we engaged not in a race but a dance, the two of us circling each other, every one of our ideas sprouting ten more. At last she drew up.

“It has been a delightful afternoon, Mr. Geist. For today let us table the debate. Now, I must please ask you to wait.”

While she was gone, I glanced at the mantel clock, astonished to see that two hours had passed.

“For your trouble,” she said, handing me a check for one hundred dollars. “I trust that is sufficient.”

Actually, I didn’t think I deserved anything at all. Something about getting paid for a pleasurable activity feels wrong. Though in no position to argue—it would’ve been impolite, and I needed the money—I did think a bit of feigned reluctance was in order. “It’s too much.”

“Rubbish. I shall see you tomorrow? The same time?”

Without hesitation I agreed. She was so enchanting, so European, that I fought the urge to kiss her hand as she let me out.

“May I ask a question?” I said.

“Please.”

“I’m glad to have met you—very glad. I have to ask, though, how you knew you could trust me. I mean, I hope this isn’t something you do often, open your door to strangers.”

“I find your concern touching, Mr. Geist. You need not worry; I am a good judge of character, even over the telephone.” Her eyes changed. “And naturally, I own a pistol.”

She winked at me and shut the door.