a vague feeling that he would know where he was supposed to live when he saw it, based on an impression, on some distinguishing feature: hand-built bookshelves, a bike rack in the vestibule, a bit of graffiti on an outside wall that he would have no choice but to read as significant. He would spend his whole inheritance, plus the little he had saved in his own bank account, on the rooms where he now lived, stacked three over three, like the layers of a cake. The front door of the building opened into a brief entry hall that disappeared up a carpeted staircase. To its left was a numbered door that opened to reveal the first floor of the house, the bottom layer, which was empty when he’d moved in except for stacks and stacks of newspapers, short and tall stacks, leaning at angles, striated yellow, white, gray, like hacked-out cross sections of earth—stacks in the living room fireplace, on the deep windowsills, the kitchen that overlooked a dried-up back garden. The upper floor had once been a separate apartment; the Realtor had told him the previous owner had occupied both at once, without ever taking the time to integrate them. Bruce often wondered about the man who had lived in this place, his life divided onto two floors. The upstairs door was still numbered; the place where the guy had slept was at a different address than the place where he had made himself breakfast. He must have run up and down the house staircase twenty times a day, or maybe preferred to camp for periods of time in one or another of his apartments, to effect that kind of temporary vacation from his life.
Bruce didn’t feel young. The last time he had seen his father, his father had taken him drinking, something they had never done together. They had sat in a hotel bar on Fifty-ninth; his father had sipped at a beer and, in his way, urged Bruce to get drunk. Bruce accepted the first shot of whiskey out of politeness, or maybe fear: his father was too giddy, the bar too expensive. Bruce had just returned from a trip to Asia, having accepted the invitation of a classmate who had moved to Hong Kong to work for the AP—he answered each of his father’s questions about the boat they had taken into China, the terrifying airport landing, the floodlit racetrack in Happy Valley. Another round, his father would call, just as Bruce had reached the middle of an answer or explanation, and Bruce would have to shake his head no at the waitress, or let her set another shot in front of him and leave it brimming there, untouched. His father’s nails were bitten down; it took Bruce moments to remember that they had always been that way, that his pants had always been stained here and there with ink marks. He both loved and dreaded his father for trying to give him the gift of blankness that night, to narrow his focus to a set of empty glasses, a bed to tumble into gratefully at the end of the night. Though his father wasn’t a drinker himself, Bruce knew that these were the things he wanted for both of them: strong physical sensations, and escape. The things that he had not had to think to rely on when mathematics and his wife were still wholly alive to him.
Thank you, he kept saying to his father, for the drinks; he was forever saying thank you, had been since he was a kid; the impulse toward gratitude for even the smallest, most self-serving gestures was somewhere drifting among the viscous platelets of his blood.
He heard a truck rumbling, far down the street. He smiled automatically. He felt the sweat begin to heat and slick his armpits, and thought of holding the shirt away from his body with his fingers, so he wouldn’t wet it before Charlotte arrived. It still surprised him that she provoked a vanity he hadn’t known in himself. He prepared himself for her, worried over what she might think, threw out his oldest, torn boxers and bought new pairs, joined a regular pickup game at the gym, carried himself taller in those moments before he caught sight of her—then forgot himself so completely during their times together that when he glimpsed himself again, in the mirror over a restaurant’s bathroom sink or in the bits of misshapen glass that Charlotte had pasted to