75.

A bigger apartment is available upstairs in her building. She goes to look at it. They need more space she’s aware. The thin life of a bachelor apartment unsuitable for two really. Her boy is growing.

Number eleven is crowded with someone else’s belongings, the two slipcovered, oversize sofas, the table and chairs. There’s an inside room in which, the landlord says, the current tenant is asleep. They tiptoe like unwelcome visitors, at least she does. The sink is minute and encased in a tall cabinet: she sees she will have to stand on a stool to do the dishes. Three steps up to the small bath. Perhaps this apartment by the front door belonged to the caretaker once. How bad can it get. She imagines drunks leaning on the intercom at four in the morning.

The apartment is on the northeast corner of the building, looking out over the street. There will be the constant noise of traffic. She meets the tenant who wants to take her old place, who’s moving in turn from the front. Musical rooms. It’s the noise, the tenant explains, staring. I can’t stand it any more.

But you get used to it, right?

Six years and I never got used to it.

She pretends she can adjust to anything but there’s her son to consider. She goes to see the child at his father’s, sits on a leather sofa, begins seriously to talk about the new apartment, but almost at once her child interrupts.

Yay. Let’s move.

She reminds her boy of the noise, the lack of a window in the one small closed-off room, but her child disregards both of these things.

The child’s father comes into the room, looks round complacently at his yolk-coloured walls. He’s moved himself, she remembers, from the back of his building to its front. She never saw the old place: they weren’t speaking then. I had a real freakout when I was trying to decide about moving in here, he says unexpectedly. My friends told me I was crazy. Then I got in here and I was like, Oh yeah. Light. Air.

She wakes far too early the next morning, in her bed in the middle of the room, that she closes like a drawer in the daytime. This one room has been so many different things. Dining room, living room, study, office, bedroom. The simplicity pleases her. Still it’s true they have outgrown their current space. Her boy’s feet dangling off the edge of the mattress. There will be windows on two sides in the new place, downstairs. Friends can hail them from the street if they want. Traffic swishing outside. Even more places to watch rain as it falls.