QUOTE : In my thirty-fourth year to heaven, I find myself at the copy machine of an exalted, ivy-embroidered university, pressing down on the spine of a memoir by Vladimir Nabokov. The green light under my hands slides over the book’s face, and the spillage from the edges scalds through my shut eyelids. It’s seven-thirty a.m., and I can feel the corpse tint of my face: Frankenstein-monster green. The machine goes whap…whap at slower intervals than the throb in my head, which sounds like thunk. The whaps stab me. The thunks make my eyes bulge in their sockets like a squeezed rubber doll’s. It’s my first year teaching six classes, which has freed me from the deeply respectable but non-writer-esque telecom consulting I could spend eighty hours a week at. Not a new-mom job by any stretch, that work. The sole vestige of the career? I’m on retainer freelancing for a business mag whose editor has left two strongly worded messages on our machine. I’m late with my article on the new Russian perestroika. Whap…thunk. The image of my blond three years’ son this morning, sobbing and holding out his arms to me while Warren strapped him into the child seat, is a hot stove I can’t stop touching. Warren drops him off at daycare now for reasons that are complex.