view: whitewashed stone, faintly Beaux-Arts, capped with a widow’s walk. From here, of course, I can set my sights only on the side of the house; through its east windows, I’ve a clear shot into the kitchen, a second-floor parlor, and a bedroom above.
Yesterday a platoon of movers arrived, hauling sofas and television sets and an ancient armoire. The husband has been directing traffic. I haven’t seen the wife since the night they moved in. I wonder what she looks like.
I’m about to checkmate Rook&Roll this afternoon when I hear the bell. I shuffle downstairs, slap the buzzer, unlock the hall door, and find my tenant looming there, looking, as they say, rough and ready. He is handsome, with his long jaw, his eyes like trapdoors, dark and deep. Gregory Peck after a late evening. (I’m not the only one who thinks so. David likes to entertain the occasional lady friend, I’ve noticed. Heard, really.)
“I’m heading to Brooklyn tonight,” he reports.
I drag a hand through my hair. “Okay.”
“You need me to take care of anything before I go?” It sounds like a proposition, like a line from a noir. You just put your lips together and blow.
“Thanks. I’m fine.”
He gazes past me, squints. “Bulbs need changing? It’s dark in here.”
“I like it dim,” I say. Like my men, I want to add. Is that the joke from Airplane? “Have . . .” Fun? A good time? Sex? “. . . a good time.”
He turns to go.
“You know you can just come on in through the basement door,” I tell him, trying for playful. “Chances are I’ll be home.” I hope he’ll smile. He’s been here two months, and I haven’t once seen him grin.
He nods. He leaves.
I close the door.
I study myself in the mirror. Wrinkles like spokes around my eyes. A slur of dark hair, tigered here and there with gray, loose about my shoulders; stubble in the scoop of my armpit. My belly has gone slack. Dimples stipple my thighs. Skin almost luridly pale, veins flowing violet within my arms and legs.
Dimples, stipples, stubble, wrinkles: I need work. I had a down-home appeal once, according to some, according to Ed. “I thought of you as the girl next door,” he said sadly, toward the end.
I look down at my toes rippling against the tile—long and fine, one (or ten) of my better features, but a bit small-predator right now. I rummage through my medicine cabinet, pill bottles stacked atop one another like totem poles, and excavate a nail clipper. At last, a problem I can fix.
Thursday, October 28
5
The deed of sale posted yesterday. My new neighbors are Alistair and Jane Russell; they paid $3.45 million for their humble abode. Google tells me that he’s a partner at a midsize consultancy, previously based in Boston. She’s untraceable—you try plugging Jane Russell into a search engine.
It’s a lively neighborhood they’ve chosen.
The Miller home across the street—abandon all hope, ye who enter here—is one of five townhouses that I can survey from the south-facing windows of my own. To the east stand the identical-twin Gray Sisters: same box cornices crowning the windows, same bottle-green front doors. In the right—the slightly Grayer Sister, I think—live Henry and Lisa Wasserman, longtime residents; “Four decades and counting,” bragged Mrs. Wasserman when we moved in. She’d dropped by to tell us (“to your faces”) how much she (“and my Henry”) resented the arrival of “another yuppie clan” in what “used to be a real neighborhood.”
Ed fumed. Olivia named her stuffed rabbit Yuppie.
The Wassermen, as we dubbed them, haven’t spoken to me since, even though I’m on my own now, a clan unto myself. They don’t seem much friendlier toward the residents of the other Gray Sister, a family called, fittingly, Gray. Twin teenage girls, father a partner at a boutique M&A firm, mother an eager book-club hostess. This month’s selection, advertised on their Meetup page and under review right now, in the Grays’ front room, by eight middle-aged women: Jude the Obscure.
I read it too, imagined I was one of the group, munching coffee cake (none handy) and sipping wine (this I managed). “What did you think of Jude, Anna?” Christine Gray would ask me, and I’d say I found it rather obscure. We’d laugh. They’re laughing now, in fact. I try laughing with them. I take a sip.
West of the Millers are the Takedas. The husband is Japanese, the mother white, their son unearthly beautiful. He’s a cellist; in the warm months, he rehearses