fit easily into Pyotr’s trunk. He laid the garment bag full length across the backseat.
Bunny had greeted Pyotr tepidly and then wandered off somewhere, and Dr. Battista was still at the lab. Kate suspected him of staying away to make a point. He had acted noticeably aloof ever since the decision about her new living arrangements.
Pyotr lived in one of those big old faculty houses within shouting distance of the Johns Hopkins campus, a white clapboard Colonial with faded green shutters. He parked at the front curb, although a driveway lay to one side. He told Kate that he wasn’t supposed to block Mrs. Liu’s exit; Mrs. Liu was Mrs. Murphy’s live-in attendant.
They moved everything into the house in one trip—Kate lugging the suitcases, Pyotr carrying the carton and the garment bag, which he had draped over his shoulder. On the stoop he set down the carton to unlock the front door. “After we carry things up we go to visit Mrs. Murphy,” he told her. “She is wanting to meet you.”
“Is she okay with my moving in like this?” Kate thought to ask. (Belatedly, it was true.)
“She is okay. Just worries you will say in a while we must move to place of our own.”
Kate gave a little snort. No doubt Mrs. Murphy was visualizing some wifey type in a ruffled apron.
The front hall was dim and musty-smelling. A giant gilt-framed mirror loomed over a claw-footed mahogany buffet, and the doors on either side were closed tightly, which was reassuring. Kate wouldn’t have to greet the two women every time she went in or out. Also the rest of the house was less dark, she could tell. The stairs in front of her glowed with the late-afternoon sunlight that filtered through a window above them, so that the higher she and Pyotr climbed, the brighter it grew.
The hallway on the next level was carpeted, but the top level—onetime servants’ quarters, Kate surmised—had bare pine floorboards and honey-colored wood trim instead of the somber trim of the rest of the house. Kate found it a relief. No door closed this level off, but it was high enough so she couldn’t hear any sounds from below. She could tell she would feel private here.
Pyotr led the way to the right, toward a room down the hall. “This will be yours,” he told her. He stood back to let her enter and then followed her inside.
It had been serving as his study, clearly. A mammoth desk crowded with computer equipment filled one end of it, and a daybed covered in a garish leopard-print velour stood along the opposite wall. Next to the window was a bureau, antique-looking and small but adequate for Kate’s needs, and in the corner sat a dowdy skirted armchair with an ottoman.
“Desk will go to living room,” Pyotr told her. He heaved the carton onto the bureau and went to the closet to hang the garment bag. “Later we get a smaller desk, for if you become a student.”
Kate said, “Oh! Well. Thank you, Pyotr.”
“Mrs. Murphy thinks maybe she can give us desk. She has many extra furnitures.”
Kate set her suitcases down and went to look out the window. Below her lay the backyard, long and green and framed by shrubbery, some of which she thought might be rosebushes. She had never had enough sun before for roses. At the far end of the yard, just inside the picket fence, she spotted a rectangle of spaded earth that must be Pyotr’s vegetable garden.
“Come see the rest of apartment,” he told her.
He returned to the doorway but then stood aside to let her go first, and as she walked past him she became acutely aware of his physical proximity. For all her thoughts about how this apartment would be just another coed dorm, it occurred to her that in fact, she was going to be living alone with a man; and when he crossed the hall to open another door and say, “My room,” she barely glanced in (double bed, nightstand…) before backing away. Perhaps he sensed her discomfort, because he quickly shut the door again. “Bathroom,” he said, waving toward the half-open door at the end of the hall, but he didn’t suggest she step inside. “Is only the one; I am sorry we must share.”
“Oh, that’s okay; at home I share with two people,” she said, and she gave a little laugh, but he didn’t laugh himself.
He led her next to the living room, which contained only