'You see, I'm a socialist. You don't get that too much anymore. People don't remember what it meant to be a socialist. I don't charge too much. I charge what I can get and I charge what I need to get.' Mrs. Sanders flipped pages absentmindedly. 'They tried to buy me out a few years ago, they said I could get more. I don't care. I'm an old woman, I have my cats, I have everything I need. We all thought it was going to get better, that's what we were working for. Well, it didn't happen and a lot of us died. I just got older-so far.' She smiled to herself, then switched thoughts, her eyes fiercely upon Christina's. 'Now then, I've seen your type. I know something about you that you don't know yourself. I'm going to put you in one of my quiet top rooms, where I put girls like you. Fifth floor, front. It's got nice light. You almost won't hear the garbagemen, you just sit up there and think whatever you need to think about. The last girl, she moved out so fast, she left a pile of boxes in the closet and maybe she'll pick them up and maybe she won't. I can't be worried about it. Now, just follow me…' Mrs. Sanders stood up and shuffled to the back of the apartment. 'Come on, follow me, bring your bag. Yes, this is the elevator, my elevator, not for the tenants. I'm too old to climb the stairs.' They squeezed into a tiny caged box, and Mrs. Sanders creaked the door shut and pushed her finger against a panel of buttons. It's a city of elevators, Christina thought, as the box slowly rose. 'They said the building was worth almost a million dollars. What do I care? Where am I going to go? I've been here since Eisenhower got elected. I raised four children in this building, two and a half husbands.'
'How do you get two and a half husbands?'
'Oh, the first two were just fine in the romance department, but the last, well, he gets a half. He died of liver cancer. He drank and drank and I never asked him not to.' Her old cheeks lifted with the memory. 'He used to drink and play the trumpet for me, the saddest thing in the world. That would make me cry and love him all over again. When he played the trumpet, he was my king.' The elevator bumped to a stop. 'This is the fifth floor. Get a few groceries every time you go out-that's my advice.' The hallway led gloomily past one door after another, walls streaked with obsolete vitality, yearning unanswered. 'Now then, I have a few rules. I want to get paid every Sunday. Go two days without paying and I put you on my list. Don't get on my list. It's not worth it. People say to me, You can't get me out of here. I always tell them I got the best landlord lawyer in the city, I know all the judges and all the inspectors, I've got fifty years of smarts to get you out. My other rules are no violence, no stealing, no guns, no dealing. A boy here and there, okay, but just keep it quiet. I have liberal attitudes. I think people should enjoy themselves. God gives us more trouble than pleasure. Trouble erases the pleasure, but pleasure also erases trouble-at least for a little while. But no noise.'
They reached a blue door marked 5A, marred with old tape and thumbtack holes. Mrs. Sanders pulled a key from her housecoat. Inside was a plain room, ten by twelve feet, with a small bathroom connected to it. In one alcove of the bathroom stood a tiny stove and refrigerator. Above the sink hung the electric meter.
'Why is the meter there?'
'Only place it would go,' said Mrs. Sanders. 'If you cook a lot, open the bathroom window, even in winter. It ventilates and keeps the smells down. The fire extinguisher is under the sink, and as you can see, there's a fire escape. If there is a fire, please escape. That's what I always say. We had a fire years ago and a Dominican boy died from the smoke. They carried him out naked, like a fallen angel.' She dug into her apron. 'Here're your keys. This building is my building. I want people to be happy. If you can't be happy, Miss Bedford, go live with the unhappy people. Somewhere else.'
The old woman pulled the door shut and Christina set down her bag. The walls had not been patched or painted in ten or twenty or thirty years; the floor was scraped rough and uneven; two of the windows were cracked. It was perfect. The bed sagged in one corner, and a dresser with three drawers sat against the opposite wall. She pulled open the drawers one at a time, inspecting the minute detritus of others' lives: paper clips, a few pennies, something from the inside of a computer, a bead to costume jewelry, a flier from a neighborhood acupuncturist, three pencils with broken points, a fingernail, an obsolete subway token. I like this, Christina thought. She lifted the worn, gray sheets from the bed and examined the mattress. Overlapping stains of different size and origin ringed the parallel ridges; she could identify piss, blood, house paint, crayon, wine, candle wax, cigarette burns, and what appeared to be motor oil. In the closet she found a white pump with the heel broken off; whoever had once owned it had carefully applied white polish over the worn toe. The pump suggested not just the sloppy movement of souls through space but defeat. I need to make this room mine, she thought. She hung her new dress in the closet, set the copy of the Voice on the dresser, re-folded her clothes, and laid them in the top drawer. In the closet she found three large boxes taped shut, each marked property of melissa williams. She lifted one down, smelling its papery mustiness, and set it on the bed. The tape was the cheap kind that is wetted, then stuck on; dried, it had curled and lifted from the cardboard, easy enough for her to peel up. Jumbled inside were letters, photographs, movie ticket stubs, bank statements, a packet of condoms, magazine clippings, several paperback books-seemingly every piece of paper that Melissa Williams had ever touched. Christina put the photos in a pile, then the letters, then the documents. The photos revealed a young brown-haired woman in eyeglasses and baseball cap. Not so pretty, maybe, but fun, willing to drink a beer or two. Up for whatever it was. Alert, yet not sophisticated. Legs a little heavy, didn't wear much makeup. Industrious, needed approval. Melissa, the documents showed, was twenty-seven years old and until two months prior had been working at a company on Prince Street that designed Web sites. She was a graduate of Carleton College and had taken classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her mother had written to say that she was very worried about Melissa's brother, who was found in Seattle unconscious with a needle hanging out of his arm. The letters became increasingly desperate. 'Your brother will kill himself one of these days,' said the last, 'and there is nothing (!) I can do. Only God knows what it took to bring him into the world and now he is going to throw away his life with a needle. Melissa, I know that I have not been the mother you would have wished for yourself. Sweetheart, I know that all of your orderly habits and responsible behavior have been in direct reaction (!!) to me, and that I have forfeited any last favors (!!) I might request of you. But your brother needs you, he needs someone who will take him away from there and bring him home. He will listen to you. I am beseeching you. I am begging you to save your brother's life. From what you tell me, they are very happy (!) with your work at your company and I trust that if you explain the situation they will let you leave for a while and then come back. In any case you are so talented that I know you will have very little difficulty in reestablishing yourself in New York City.'
Christina wished her own mother had been as kind-not a chance. It appeared, in fact, that Melissa, dutiful and concerned, had heeded her mother's wishes. Slitting open one of Melissa's bank statements, Christina could see that Melissa had withdrawn three thousand dollars from her checking account six weeks prior, at the end of July, and that the checking account had registered no activity after then. The account still had eight thousand dollars in it-clearly Melissa W. was as level-headed as her mother said she was. It occurred to Christina that she could walk into a bank with the bank account number and attempt a withdrawal, even without identification as Melissa. But she didn't want to take money from another woman. Besides, men were happy to leak money on women. It was a form of urination or even ejaculation, depending on the amount involved. No, she had no desire to swindle Melissa's money from her, but she did suddenly and happily wish-as if having found a secret friend-to ingest all the stuff in the three musty boxes.
Let's see what Melissa was doing while I was in prison, she thought. Melissa W. had frequented the Angelika Theater on Houston Street; she had received an abortion with no complications in April of 1997; she had subscribed to The New York Times for five months; she had served as a juror for a civil trial; she had registered as a Democrat; she had given money to the National Coalition for the Homeless; she put little Xs on her calendar when she got her period, which was utterly regular until and after the month of the abortion; she had read through the works of Marguerite Duras; according to a sequence of photos, she'd had her hair permed; she had enjoyed a lengthy affair with a divorced filmmaker who ate lunch every day at the Union Square Cafe; she had subsequently received an AIDS test, which was negative; she had witnessed a bicycle messenger be killed by a city bus and composed a notarized summary of what she had seen for a city agency; she had donated blood three times; she had written her company's president and received a raise; in short, Melissa Williams was a hardworking, independent, and reasonably happy young woman who had left town precipitously and who planned, sooner or later, to come back. Her time in New York City, thought Christina, was probably no better or worse than the years I would have experienced if-if what? If she had not spent the night before a big high-school swim meet drinking with her girlfriends. If she had, the next day, finished second and not third in the one-hundred-meter backstroke of Pennsylvania's regional championships, thus missing a swimming scholarship to Stanford, her first choice. If she had not picked Columbia instead. If she had not slept with her religion professor in the fall of her junior year and, having suddenly been dumped by him, gone out one night and seen Rick at the bar of the Pierre Hotel (he'd been wearing a suit and a great tie, and after three drinks, she was more or less ready to climb the Empire State Building). And if
