She picked me up one autumn evening in the Wien Reference Room of Columbia’s Butler Library. The year was 1940. I was beavering away at an essay for which, after a momentary glance at what I’d done (not much), she provided the thesis statement that was eluding me, succinctly formulated, even a little provocative, ready to be placed at the head of my shaky introduction, which she then revised with my pen. I asked her if she’d tutor me and she made me her lover. “She” was Joan Adams Vollmer, a sophomore at Barnard College and future common-law wife of William S. Burroughs, killed by his .38 caliber during a drunken game of William Tell eleven years later. “I” was a Columbia freshman teetering on the cusp of a world hitherto only imagined while reading naughty pulp novels from my father’s basement stash in leafy Brooklyn Heights. Joan looked nothing like the ideal of womanhood pictured in my post-adolescent mind’s eye, which I later realized had been assembled from the lingerie sections of store catalogues. …