11.

The first apartment she’s shown in the red-brick building is on the sixth floor. It’s a sunny day and the park spreads out below her from two windows. The current tenant has sensibly restricted (himself? herself?) to a single piece of furniture: a giant futon cantilevered into a couch, with wheels set to stay and a robust corduroy cover. She falls in love at once.

That one’s gone, says the harried building manager when he calls her later with good news. She has been accepted & approved. He’s tall and Slavic, this manager, with an indeterminate accent, probably from a vanished country. He has an erect brush of brown hair and is one of those men whose tone comes entirely from their circumstances. He could be kind, he could be cruel, all with the same lack of thought, no flicker to animate those small dark eyes. There is one on the first floor available, he continues.

It’s evening when she goes back. Her son alone in their temporary apartment a block away. It may not be true anymore that they don’t rent to people with children but she can’t be sure. She can’t take anything for granted.

The first-floor apartment is supposed to be a clone of the one on the sixth floor but to her eyes they are entirely different. Boxes and belongings clutter the dim dingy room. The pullout bed a cavern. Outside a swishing and sighing, faint. It is too close, there in the room, to tell if she is listening to the rain, brushing against the windows, or the cars that rush ceaselessly on the road outside.

The next day she calls back with renter’s remorse. It’s too dark, she says over and over. The Slavic manager deals more kindly with her than she might have expected, talks her into it in fact. She tells herself they can always move.