The building, a brick row house, was only a few blocks from the subway, and Amy got there first. A rose had been left on the stoop, laid vertically on the slanting top of one of the stubby walls that descended on either side of the steps. Against the soft old auburn sandstone, the velvet petals almost glared. Maybe the person who had bought the flower had reconsidered, Amy thought. Or maybe the person the flower was given to had.
The woman from the university’s real estate office was wearing a tight skirt, which kept her steps shallow. “You said you don’t mind a first-floor unit?” she asked as she walked up. This was their third try.
“It doesn’t face the street?”
“It’s very quiet. It faces away.”
Classes started in a few days. Amy, who was going to be a first-year at the law school, needed to make a decision soon.
A man still grimacing his face awake, his hair wet and just combed, approached. “Unit one?” he asked. He seemed to be the super.
One as in year one, Amy thought, as the super unlocked the front door. When she had first started looking at apartments, she had had the sense, as she ran taps and flushed toilets, that she was mimicking George, the man she was trying to learn to think of as no longer her husband, since soon he wouldn’t be. The way that, if she ever went looking for a used car, she would probably kick the tires because, when she was a child, she had seen her father kick them. Maybe her father hadn’t known why he did it, either. A couple of months ago, at the green market—was it before or after George’s announcement?—she had overheard one woman ask another why the two of them were peeling open the tops of the ears of corn in their hands. The second woman had laughed and suggested, uncertainly, “Bugs?”
“It’s to see if the kernels have been fertilized,” George said when she brought the story home. He always knew, even though he didn’t like it when she expected him to.
In the lobby, a bricked-up fireplace faced a staircase with a stately curvature. Once upon a time the building must have been a single-family residence. Beyond the fireplace was a door freshly painted an institutional green, in the center of which hung a new brass fixture, a combination knocker and peephole. Above the dead fire-place, a mirror reflected a lamp without a shade, which cast a rather stark light, in which the knocker and peephole shone as bright as the buttons on a little boy’s blazer.
“I put in a stronger bulb,” the super said, it wasn’t clear to whom. He said it almost apologetically, nodding at the lamp as he looked through the keys on his ring, turning them over one by one like playing cards.
Because Amy had barked at George’s polite questions lately, he had stopped asking them, and so when the door swung open and she saw inside, she was looking for herself only. She wasn’t going to be giving anyone else a report on the white blankness of the walls. On the strong, almost gasoline-like smell of the recently polyurethaned floor.
Along the left wall ran a strip of moulding at hip height, as white as the wall it divided. Along the right stood a sink, six inches of countertop, a gas stove, and a refrigerator. Past the sink a door led to a bathroom; above the sink were shelves.
The super crumpled a piece of paper that happened to be lying on one of the shelves and shoved it into the pocket of his hoodie.
The saving grace was the light, which fell in through frosted panes in a door in the rear wall. A floor-to-ceiling steel accordion grille barred this door, chopping the light into diamonds. Light also came in through an unfrosted window in the same wall, protected by a cast-iron grille whose bars swooped out, in a belly-like shape, in case anyone ever wanted to install an air conditioner. The door grille, which was inside the unit, had been sloppily painted the same white as the walls, but the window grille, which was out-side, had been painted black.
Through the window a yard was visible: a