FROM HIS TOP-FLOOR window the next morning, Thomas saw Owen and Edith climb into and emerge from a black cab several times, watched as her son helped her out the door, his face fixed not on her but on the building. Owen ran his hand over the metal fence that bordered the property, then shook it with controlled vigor, testing its solidity. Edith, dressed in polyester slacks the washed blue of a sun-faded Easter egg, moved with small steps in white Velcro sneakers Thomas had never seen before. She looked vaguely in the direction of his window but lost focus, and Thomas saw her mouth form a new, tight line. Owen held her elbow as they ascended the stone steps: she jerked it away and he caught it again, all without so much as turning his body towards hers.
Later in the afternoon, Thomas snuck down the stairs, stood listening for a time before he knocked. Owen answered, wearing a white cotton V-neck that revealed both his years and the physique that resisted them. He had a rag draped over one shoulder, a measuring tape peeking from his front denim pocket. Surveying the well-earned masculinity, Thomas felt the alarm of a phantom itch on the inert parts of his body.
“Can I help you?” Owen said, blinking out of blue eyes that shone as sharply as his crop of gray-blond hair.
Thomas immediately understood Owen’s identity as a man who’d been attractive and powerful since childhood, and put out his hand in a show of goodwill. “Thomas—” he began.
“Thomas Farber,” completed Owen. “Apartment 3A, correct? How can I help you?”
“Oh, I’m just—just stopping to say hi. Edith and I are—”
“Oh yes.” Owen cut Thomas’s speech short with the flash of a palm. “She’s mentioned you two are friendly, but she happens to be napping right now—a long day at the doctor’s.”
Owen offered a smile that lasted just long enough for Thomas to see his perfect teeth, milky and even, and Thomas recognized it as one picked for the occasion. Behind the muscled breadth of Owen’s shoulders, light poured onto the kitchen table, lingering on a glossy spread of brochures. All Thomas could make out were silver-haired people, photos of trimmed hedges, bodies of water so blue and round they must have been engineered. Four of them lay on the table, which was otherwise uncharacteristically bare.
“I’ll let her know you came by,” Edith’s son said, and closed the door.
Thomas lingered, defeated. He heard the muffled protests of Edith, the aggression evident, and the studied calm of Owen’s speech squashing hers. “You’re making this difficult.”
“I’m not leaving my home.” Her voice yowled, cracking at its edges. “You made her but you won’t make me.”
The next time Thomas saw them, crossing the foyer at the fullest possible distance from each other, Edith’s frame held her left arm like a box of mementos, with fright and care, and Owen let out a low, flat whistle as he unlocked her front door.
NO ONE EXPECTS to find devotion where they do, and Adeleine liked to think she wouldn’t have sought him out, wouldn’t have chosen his life as the one she’d like to inhabit. Whose fault had it been that she’d wandered into the kitchen of her first apartment in New York, a railroad flat with a revolving cast of roommates, and N—— (now a name she tried not to even think) had been standing there making breakfast? Whose fault had it been that his worn T-shirt had hung from his shoulder blades just so, hinting at the unblemished almond skin beneath?
Certainly not hers. Neither could she claim responsibility for the winter, which was already descending, though they shared a few brief moments on the stoop in the sun; for the sense of quiet that surrounded him and nestled comfortably into hers; for the sanctity of his movement when he got up to change the record; for the face he made when he pushed his cock inside her, determined like a person building something slowly by hand. Never had she longed so specifically for a body, spent so much energy imagining the arrangement of the parts she had memorized.