the baseboard heating click on and off. There was no way he was going to be able to fall asleep, he told himself, and then he did.
Quinn slid next to him under the covers. She smelled like red wine and Marlboro Lights. “You smoked?” Alan asked. They’d quit together recently.
“Shhh,” she said. She was naked, and she slid one of his hands between her legs, then climbed on top of him. Quinn was gray and featureless in the darkness of the room, and Alan, half awake, imagined it was his neighbor, the girl whose name he didn’t even know, moving back and forth on top of him.
It didn’t take him long to learn her name. The following Monday, after Quinn had left for work, Alan walked through the building’s lobby and to the other wing. It was easy to figure out which was her door; she was in apartment 3C. Back down in the lobby, Alan asked the doorman if he could look through the bundle of mail that had just arrived. And there she was on a credit card solicitation: Audrey Marshall, Apartment 3C.
Over the course of that winter he got to know her schedule, when she got out of bed in the morning and when she got home at night. She rarely had anyone over. Once or twice a woman, skinny and with a homely face, came by and they would drink champagne, the other woman talking nonstop while Audrey listened, interjecting occasionally. But she was usually alone, and that was the way Alan liked to watch her.
“What’s so interesting out there?” Quinn asked one night, when he thought she was watching the television.
“I thought I heard someone shouting in the courtyard, but it’s probably just out on the street.”
“Yeah, whatever,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I see you looking out the window all the time. And I can’t remember the last time you actually looked at me for more than a second.”
“We ate lunch together today, remember? We were looking at each other the whole time. I helped you get that sesame seed out from between your teeth.” Alan laughed.
Quinn shrugged from behind her cell phone. This was March, and Alan was pretty sure that Quinn had met someone new, some guy named Brandon who worked at her firm and who was always included in the group of coworkers who were inevitably getting together after work for a drink. It was something about the way she said his name, rushing through the two syllables in sentences such as: “Oh, and of course, Brandon was also there.” Alan wasn’t upset. He wasn’t even jealous, really. He had Audrey.
As winter turned to spring, and spring turned to summer, she cracked her windows, and so did Alan. On quiet summer evenings, when the breeze blew in the right direction, he occasionally could hear music coming from across the courtyard. Audrey listened to classical when she was reading, and she read a lot, usually in the same position on her living room couch as the first time he’d spied on her. Sometimes she read in the bedroom, especially when the weather was hot, since her bedroom, like Alan’s, had a ceiling fan in it. He never saw her fully naked, but he’d seen her in various stages of undress many times, usually as she got ready in the morning for work, or just after she came home, always around six in the evening. One hot night, Audrey left her curtains cracked, and Alan, chair pulled up to his own window in his unlit bedroom, watched through his binoculars as she read a paperback called The Little Stranger. She was naked except for a pair of black briefs. Alan imagined, for a moment, that if he opened his window all the way he could float across the courtyard and into her bedroom.
By late summer, Quinn had moved out—citing Alan’s distance, although Alan had heard through the grapevine that she was now dating Brandon from work—leaving him with less than half the furniture and a monthly rent he couldn’t afford. She’d also left him with more time to focus on Audrey. He’d formed a plan, a way to meet her that would seem natural and that would throw them together for a lengthy period of time. Alan had begun to occasionally follow Audrey when she left the apartment. He now knew where she worked—a small publishing house just over the river in Cambridge—and he knew that on weekends she liked to go