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as intriguing and enlightening as the most carefully wrought literary work of art. All too often in this century the tools of high aesthetic mastery have been available solely to the elite—and to men. When a juicy woman’s novel such as
Oblivion Falls
catches the fancy of a mass readership …”
    Greg returned with a muffin and a white ceramic mug brimming with cappuccino. I glanced up at him and groaned. “Did I really say ‘juicy’?”
    “You said it, girlie. And in the pages of
The New York Times.”
    “The little twerp caught me at a weak moment. Oh, God. I’ll never get tenure now!”
    “Keep reading. I think you come across fine.”
    “Ummn.” I began to read out loud.
    “According to this accomplished scholar of women’s literature, political and theoretical developments of the final decades of the twentieth century have served to problematize the notion of an irreconcilable split between popular culture and what used to be known as ‘high culture.’ Therefore it would be equally valid to claim great achievement for a popular success such as
Oblivion Falls
, a lusty potboiler of a novel which took on the freighted issues of sex and class, as for any of the more strictly literary works recognized by the many cusp-of-the-millennium ‘Great Books’ lists that have proliferated of late.”
    I raised my head again. “I did not say ‘cusp of the millennium.’ ”
    “Good.”
    “Nor did I say ‘lusty potboiler of a novel.’ ”
    “I didn’t think so.”
    I sipped coffee, then set the cup precisely in the center of my empty muffin plate. “Well, he
did
call me an ‘accomplished scholar.’ And at least I put my eccentric nomination for ‘great book’ into some respectable theoretical framework. Maybe I don’t look like a
complete
fool.” I spread the newspaper on the table and began to smooth it back into its original folds.
    A hand swooped down from above and plucked the paper from my grasp. It was a large hand, brown, and masculine, with wide, flat fingernails clipped extremely short.
    “Mildred Deakin,” said deep, vaguely familiar, tones, “well, what d’ya know?”
    I glanced up.
Jake Fenton:
The name slipped easily into my consciousness, as if it had never slipped out in the first place. Even with the five o’clock shadow—five A.M. , that is, as if he couldn’t be bothered to shave first thing in the morning—Jake was eye candy. After I’d met him at Miles’s party, I’d reread
Endurance
. As I’d recalled, it was everything the cover blurbs had promised:
stripped-down … masculine … urgent
. The claim of
universal
, however, gave me a bit of a problem; I, myself—personally, that is—had never eaten bear, bloody and steaming, raw from the fresh-killed carcass. Jake Fenton’s universals were different from mine.
    The novelist squeezed my arm and smiled at me. Then he slipped into the seat beside me, tapping his forefinger against the portrait of Mildred Deakin I’d failed to notice in my self-absorbed perusal of the Katz article. “This is a face I never expected to see in the pages of the
Times,”
he mused. I, too, studied the black-and-white photo. In the 1950s when this picture was taken, Mildred Deakin had been a fragile beauty.The dark hair was short and sleek. Enormous eyes dominated the small oval face with its charmingly pointed nose and sensitive, dark-lipsticked mouth.
    I glanced at Jake, bemused by his avid attention to the fifties image. “You couldn’t possibly have
known
Mildred Deakin,” I said. “You’re far too young.”
    “No—of course I didn’t.” He dropped the paper abruptly, as if, really, he’d had only a passing interest in the article, and turned to Greg. “Don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Jake Fenton.” The writer gripped Greg’s hand in that firm “see—no weapons” clasp that constitutes male greeting. “And, Karen, good to see you again. I’ve been meaning to call about that tour of the town. Wish I could stay,