For some time the secret cultivation of her individuality allowed her to postpone acknowledgment of an error that became more serious when it proved to be inexplicable. Her commitment to personal independence, her renunciation of her studies, the drive and complicity of her mother had brought her to a circumstance for which no effort had been required: the ache in her back after sitting for many hours at a typewriter in the office, the five flights of stairs, her irritable, hermetic husband, offended by injustice, his pride wounded by the world’s indifference and countless rejections from publishers. She looked around and couldn’t understand how she’d reached this point, by what sum of errors, as if after a long, difficult journey she found herself in the wrong station, her suitcases on the ground, the train she’d been on disappearing in the distance and no other in sight, and nobody in the station, not even an open clerk’s window where she could consult timetables or buy another ticket. No one else had put the blindfold around her eyes. She didn’t even need the effort of will, the dexterity, to grope at the knot at the back of her head to untie it. The blindfold, loosening, fell off of its own accord. And one day Judith Biely found herself in a room where nothing invited her to stay or seemed to be hers, with an unattractive man who talked endlessly, gesticulating, shaking his head, holding a cigarette between nicotine-stained fingers, scattering ashes, tossing the butts on the floor. The things he said weren’t particularly brilliant; they weren’t even his. They floated in the air, passing from one mouth to another, from one pamphlet to another, enlarged sometimes on posters, shouted in the cold passion of a political discussion in which it was urgent to annihilate the adversary, leaving him with no arguments, condemning him to an inclement darkness. Her eyes saw the man who spoke without looking at her, his hair curling over his forehead, his hands waving away the cigarette smoke in front of his face. She heard his words as a steady buzz, not distinguishing many of them. At that moment she thought she might be pregnant. She’d done the calculations on her fingers, looked at the record of previous months on the calendar. Three, four days late. While the man who was almost a stranger talked, the germ sowed by him probably was growing in her womb, a tiny clot of cells, a seed awakened in the dense blackness of the soil that it will make its way through. The enormous consequence of what? Of something she hadn’t paid much attention to and that didn’t give her much pleasure, only relief at its being over. Calmly she decided to conceal what she had been about to say. She would get an abortion. Soon, right away, in secret, to shorten the sadness, the crushing sorrow. The child she wanted, the robust, noble human being she sometimes glimpsed growing beside her in a vague future, shouldn’t be born from so much wretchedness. She slept badly, and the next day, on her lunch hour, she had a sandwich on the steps of the Forty-second Street library. It was sunny and the air was unusually mild for the middle of March. She looked at the people around her, thinking no one could fathom her secret or share her dejection: typists, salesclerks, girls younger than she, dressed with an assurance she’d lost in the past few years, exchanging looks and laughter with the office workers on nearby benches, the marble steps and iron chairs. She finished her sandwich, closed the thermos of coffee, stood, and brushed crumbs from her skirt. A little while before, when she crossed the avenue, she’d felt dizzy, the beginning of nausea. Now, as she walked down the stairway, she noticed something in her belly, like a mild cramp, the pleasurable discharging of something. With disbelief, with sweetness, with a relief that almost raised her off the ground, she felt that her flow had begun and the yoke of regret and resignation she’d felt condemned to was dissolving, leaving before her a diaphanous future she wouldn’t waste this time. She saw it clearly, effortlessly, just as she could see the traffic on Fifth Avenue, the sun on the windows and steel inlays of a recently completed skyscraper, the errors of a life she was ready to leave behind and the new future before her, all the shadows that had surrounded her with the consistency of walls or tunnels excavated from living rock suddenly dissipated like a cloud blown away by a light breeze.