Too Much Happiness

scarf.”
    And there indeed was the scarf I had knit in Home Economics class, the only thing I would ever knit in my life. I had come close to abandoning it, in this place.
    As I got out of the car Mrs. Winner said, “Mr. Purvis would like to speak to Nina before he goes to bed. If you would remind her.”
    But there was no Nina waiting to receive this message. Her bed was made up. Her coat and boots were gone. A few of her other clothes were still hanging in the closet.
    Beverly and Kay had both gone home for the weekend, so I ran downstairs to see if Beth had any information.
    “I’m sorry,” said Beth, whom I never saw sorry about anything. “I can’t keep track of all your comings and goings.”
    Then as I turned away, “I’ve asked you several times not to thump so much on the stairs. I just got Sally-Lou to sleep.”
    I had not made up my mind, when I got home, what I would say to Nina. Would I ask her if she was required to be naked, in that house, if she had known perfectly well what sort of an evening was waiting for me? Or would I say nothing much, waiting for her to ask me? And even then, I could say innocently that I’d eaten Cornish hen and yellow rice, and that it was very good. That I’d read from
A Shropshire Lad
.
    I could just let her wonder.
    Now that she was gone, none of this mattered. The focus was shifted. Mrs. Winner phoned after ten o’clock-breaking another of Beth’s rules-and when I told her that Nina was not there she said, “Are you sure of that?”
    The same when I told her that I had no idea where Nina had gone. “Are you sure?”
    I asked her not to phone again till morning, because of Beth’s rules and the babies’ sleep, and she said, “Well. I don’t know. This is serious.”
    When I got up in the morning the car was parked across the street. Later, Mrs. Winner rang the bell and told Beth that she had been sent to check Nina’s room. Even Beth was quelled by Mrs. Winner, who then came up the stairs without a reproach or a warning being uttered. After she looked all around our room she looked in the bathroom and the closet, even shaking out a couple of blankets that were folded on the closet floor.
    I was still in my pajamas, writing an essay on
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, and drinking Nescafé.
    Mrs. Winner said that she had had to phone the hospitals, to see if Nina had been taken ill, and that Mr. Purvis had gone out himself to check on several other places where she might be.
    “If you know anything it would be better to tell us,” she said. “Anything at all.”
    Then as she started down the stairs she turned and said in a voice that was less menacing, “Is there anybody at the college she was friendly with. Anybody you know?”
    I said that I didn’t think so.
    I had seen Nina only a couple of times at the college. Once she was walking down the lower corridor of the Arts Building in the crush between classes. Once she was in the cafeteria. Both times she was alone. It was not particularly unusual to be alone when you were hurrying from one class to another, but it was a little strange to sit alone in the cafeteria with a cup of coffee at around a quarter to four in the afternoon when that space was practically deserted. She sat with a smile on her face, as if to say how pleased, how privileged, she felt to be there, how alert and ready to respond to the demands of this life she was, once she understood what they were.

· · ·

    In the afternoon it began to snow. The car across the street had to depart to make way for the snowplow. When I went into the bathroom and caught the flutter of her kimono on its hook, I felt what I had been suppressing-a true fear for Nina. I had a picture of her, disoriented, weeping into her loose hair, wandering around in the snow in her white underwear instead of her camel’s hair coat, though I knew perfectly well that she had taken the coat with her.
    The phone rang just as I was about to leave for my first class on Monday morning.
    “It’s me,” said Nina, in a rushed warning, but with something like triumph in her voice. “Listen. Please. Could you please do me a favor?”
    “Where are you? They’re looking for you.”
    “Who is?”
    “Mr. Purvis. Mrs. Winner.”
    “Well, you’re not to tell them. Don’t tell them anything. I’m here.”
    “Where?”
    “Ernest’s.”
    “Ernest’s?” I said.
“Ernie’s?”
    “Sshh. Did anybody there hear you?”
    “No.”
    “Listen, could you please, please