made some friends. When I talk to Pippa on the telephone she doesn’t seem very happy where she is, though her health is certainly better. I am going to fly down there for Thanksgiving. I don’t know how pleased Margaret will be to have me, but Pippa wants me so I’ll go. If they allow me to carry Cosmo on the plane I might bring him, too.
I’m enclosing a photo that I thought you might enjoy—of a Chippendale bureau that has just arrived, very bad repair, I was told it was stored in an unheated shed up around Watervliet, New York. Very scarred, very nicked, and the top’s in two pieces—but—look at those swept-back, weight-bearing talons on that ball-and-claw! the feet don’t come out well in the photo, but you can really see the pressure of the claws digging in. It’s a masterpiece, and I only wish it had been better looked after. I don’t know if you can see the remarkable graining on the top—extraordinary.
As for the shop: I open it a few times a week by appointment, but mostly I keep myself busy below stairs with things sent to me by private clients. Mrs. Skolnik and several people in the neighborhood have asked about you—everything’s much the same here, except Mrs. Cho at the Korean market had a little stroke (very little, she’s back at work now). Also that coffee shop on Hudson that I liked so much has gone out of business—very sad. I walked by this morning and it looks as if they’re turning it into a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it. Some sort of Japanese novelty store.
I see that as usual I’ve gone on too long and that I’m running out of room, but I do hope that you are happy and well, and it’s all a little less lonely out there than you may have feared. If there’s anything I can do for you back here, or if I can help you in any way, please know that I will.
xv.
THAT NIGHT, AT BORIS’S—lying drunk on my half of the batik-draped mattress—I tried to remember what Pippa had looked like. But the moon was so large and clear through the uncurtained window that it made me think instead of a story my mother had told me, about driving to horse shows with her mother and father in the back seat of their old Buick when she was little. “It was a lot of travelling—ten hours sometimes through hard country. Ferris wheels, rodeo rings with sawdust, everything smelled like popcorn and horse manure. One night we were in San Antonio, and I was having a bit of a melt-down—wanting my own room, you know, my dog, my own bed—and Daddy lifted me up on the fairgrounds and told me to look at the moon. ‘When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.’ So after he died, and I had to go to Aunt Bess—I mean, even now, in the city, when I see a full moon, it’s like he’s telling me not to look back or feel sad about things, that home is wherever I am.” She kissed me on the nose. “Or where you are, puppy. The center of my earth is you.”
A rustle, next to me. “Potter?” said Boris. “You awake?”
“Can I ask you something?” I said. “What does the moon look like in Indonesia?”
“What are you on about?”
“Or, I don’t know, Russia? Is it just the same as here?”
He rapped me lightly on the side of the head with his knuckles—a gesture of his that I had come to know, meaning idiot. “Same everywhere,” he said, yawning, propping himself up on his scrawny braceleted wrist. “And why?”
“Dunno,” I said, and then, after a tense pause: “Do you hear that?”
A door had slammed. “What’s that?” I said, rolling to face him. We looked at each other, listening. Voices downstairs—laughter, people knocking around, a crash like something had been knocked over.
“Is that your dad?” I said, sitting up—and then I heard a woman’s voice, drunken and shrill.
Boris sat up too, bony and sickly-pale in the light through the window. Downstairs, it sounded like they were throwing things and pushing furniture around.
“What are they saying?” I whispered.
Boris listened. I could see all the bolts and hollows in his neck. “Bullshit,” he said. “They’re drunk.”
The two of us sat there, listening—Boris more intently than me.
“Who’s that with him then?” I said.
“Some whore.” He listened for