She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. She was married to another philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, Ben Callard, and they had two young sons.
To celebrate the end of the term, Agnes had made cookies for her students, and she gave an extra one to Arnold, a twenty-seven-year-old with wavy hair that fell to his shoulders, who was in his first year of the graduate program in philosophy. Now the nature of the oddness became apparent. They both agreed that nothing could happen. They leaned out her window and smoked a cigarette. Then Arnold left her office.
The next day, Agnes and her sons flew to New York to visit her parents. Ben had gone to Philadelphia to see his mother, who was recovering from surgery. If she stayed married, she would be pretending. When she landed, she told her parents that she had to get divorced. We never fought. We just got along really well. We talked a lot about philosophy.
The next morning, she took a train to Philadelphia to tell Ben, who specializes in the philosophy of mind, language, and mathematics, how she felt. What should we do? He encouraged her to take time before making a decision; she agreed to try therapy. But the next morning Ben called and said that she was right: they should get a divorce. She was just showing me the same things she had seen.
Once I saw them, it sort of clicked, and everything became very clear. Agnes was extremely upset that the divorce would harm their children, but she felt that the alternative was that she would become a bad person.
