in the middle of making dinner,” I said, not widening the door.
“I’ll be half a minute.”
“My toilet isn’t completely reliable.”
“Please.” She smiled and revealed two rows of evenly set, glistening white teeth, evidence of great luck or money or discipline as a child. The radio was an indistinct babble in the background. Maybe, I thought, I was being irrational and drunk, and there was nothing suspicious about this woman or her request. She bit her lower lip and I stepped aside to make way for her.
Back in the kitchen I found milky water bubbling from the rice pot into a moat around the burner’s flame. This was typical of how ineptly I cooked, because of which I had recently contracted with the woman who cleaned my apartment every other week to make and deliver frozen batches of food—enchiladas, chicken mole, lasagnas—on her workdays. The last of her latest delivery was gone, though, and I didn’t remember when she was scheduled to return.
A minute later Teresa stood framed in the kitchen’s entrance, wiping wet hands on her hips, imprinting black finger marks on her slacks like daguerreotype shadows. “I hate leaving someplace and then realizing I should have used the bathroom. My family never went on vacations, so as a kid I wasn’t trained to always go before getting in the car. A lot of what we do instinctively comes from our nine-year-old self.”
Again I felt a slurred apprehension and concentrated on cleaning the stovetop. The water had evaporated to leave a layer of dried white froth like old sea foam cobwebbed on the beach. From the beginning there had been so much longing that I could hardly bear it. “You remembered to use my bathroom.”
“That’s because of the water. It’s like an alarm clock for me. Did you know that on nights before they were going to wage battle, Native American warriors drank gallons of water so they’d wake up early and get the jump on their enemies?”
I grunted no and pulled from the oven the corned beef, a loaf of grayish meat with a scrim of yellow fat around its sides, as the radio announced that an Amazon-born virus with a thirty-six-hour incubation period had killed twelve people in the last week. Epidemiologists expected it to travel far and wide over the coming months. I flipped on the stove fan and trimmed off the fat and sipped at my whiskey while Teresa picked up a piece of junk mail lying on the counter.
Burning my thumb on the oven pan, I turned to her and shouted, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s my mail.”
“It’s just a PASE brochure.”
“Please leave it alone.”
“Are you a Paser?”
“That’s—Why are you still here?”
“I want to help you clean up.” She indicated the dishes in the sink, torn seasoning packets by the cutting board, blackened hand towels, and a grease-spattered calendar tacked above a sink full of brackish water.
“Why would you do that?”
“To make up for last night. Because I’m nice.”
“I don’t think so.”
She let go of the brochure and lost her veneer of friendliness and the pain in my thumb seemed unimportant. Conrad, when talking on the phone to his first-ever student, would not have vetted her closely, and in the final analysis nobody could safely say what another person wasn’t capable of. She stepped forward and I braced myself, my right hand a foot from the knife block, ready for what might follow, be it loud or quiet, and the moment was starting to feel very drawn out when she leaned in and kissed me. A button of her blouse came undone at the sternum, pressed against my chest.
“There’s no need to be hostile,” she said, pulling back as a thread of saliva bridged our lips, her green eyes as limpid as a secluded pool. She held the intimacy for twenty seconds and I grew painfully erect. “That’s why I came over, so we could be friends.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, wiping my mouth.
“Yes, you do.”
“Women don’t just walk into strangers’ apartments and kiss them.”
“How do you know?”
“Everyone knows.”
“Maybe everyone’s not as smart as they think they are.” She turned around. “At this rate, you have a minute to stop me from reaching the front door.”
She walked carefully, one foot precisely in front of the other, as though on a gymnast’s beam, out of the kitchen. A voice told me to let her go and lock the door behind her and return to my dinner and later fall asleep on the couch. In the morning I would go to work and, except for five or ten solitary adventures, forget Teresa as easily as I’d forgotten all the other women who’d taken friendliness with me only so far. You learn to release because otherwise you’re pulled in directions you can’t go. But even as I registered this warning, wondered if being thin could make so much difference in my attractiveness to women, and thought about newspaper accounts of femmes fatales who seduced men in order to rob them or turn their bodies over to the internal organ black market, as well as about the venereal risks involved in sleeping with someone so brazenly pursuing anonymous sex, I ran to the living room and then the front door and then the common space from which both the stairwell entry and the elevator were visible. I was too late. She’d gone.
When I got to work late the next morning at 9:45, having dozed off just before my alarm sounded and then slept for an hour, most of my coworkers were putting on their coats and crowding around the elevator, making quiet conversation and picking hairs from their clothing. One stood motionless off to the side with his eyes closed, leaning against the wall as if asleep or recovering from a dizzy spell. They were all men.
The office, despite its vaulted ceilings with propeller fans, felt particularly warm and close that day, like a ship hold. My cubicle mate, Max, talked on the phone and stared at the kidney-shaped glass bowl between his desk and mine, in which a Japanese fighting fish swam through Neptune reefs and arched castle gates, trailing a gossamer of skin. I loosened my tie and unbuttoned the top of my starched yellow shirt and, feeling the nausea pangs that stabbed me every morning, held my stomach as if to keep it from swelling back to its former size.
“Max,” I said. He shook his head, switched the phone to his left hand, and wrote “angry girlfriend” on a piece of paper.
Across the room Elizabeth, Mr. Raven’s secretary, waved me over to her desk. I had invited her out to dinner the week before, and although she’d begun refusing before I’d finished asking, it seemed possible as I walked across the houndstooth carpet that she was one of those women with a default no response that, although it cost her a few good dates, saved her from the many undesirable men who saw deliberation as foreplay, and that, breaking character, she had reconsidered me. In a flattering blue pantsuit, she smiled and poured steaming water from a tulip-decorated teakettle into a matching cup.
“Are those new earrings?” I asked.
“You’re late and—”
“They bring out the auburn in your hair. Where’s everyone going?”
“The sexual harassment sensitivity course at the Prescription for a Superior Existence Station,” she said.
“I forgot that was today. Only men seem to be leaving.”
“That’s the directive.” She squeezed a lemon wedge into her teacup, beside which a pewter condiment caddy held honey, sugar, cream, and echinacea powder. “Mr. Raven asked me to remind you that he needs the Danforth file by four o’clock.” Her eyebrows, sharpened and defined and darkened since I’d last seen them, came together as she looked up and curled a ginger lock of hair behind her ear. She had not reconsidered me.
“I emailed it to him yesterday,” I said.
“He must not have gotten it.”
“I’ll