On we trudged in silence, our last walk together. Outside a warehouse on Twelfth Street she took two keys from her purse and twice unlocked the steel-ribbed concrete door, as thick as a sluice gate.

“This,” she said redundantly, “is home.”

I peered into the filthy, foreboding maw of the building. “Home looks far from salubrious,” I said unkindly.

“Where’s Salubrious?” And without waiting for an answer, “Listen,” she went on, impervious to everything but the crosscurrent of her own thoughts, “you want to come up?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you want to see Abdul?”

“The only thing I’d like more than seeing Abdul is not seeing Derek.”

“He talks about you all the time. Abdul. I swear.”

Why? I thought. He misses our little têt-àe-têtes? He’s lonely in an alien land? He enjoys bugging Derek? Hell, I’d enjoy bugging Derek myself… and why not? It was another chance I’d never get again; it would provide a satisfactorily malevolent closure to an evening which, now that I realized romance was thoroughly dead, would afford no other gratification.

We stepped into the cumulative decay of a century’s storage to an elevator that lurched upward through the depressingly yellow light, propelled by the worn teeth of a capricious ratchet. When it clanged to a halt I followed her down a dark corridor where hairy chunks of plaster hung precariously from the ceiling.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I insisted.

“Don’t make such a big do out of it,” Val said. “He won’t bite you.” She pressed a button; a bell rang shrilly. The door opened and I stood face to face with Derek. He stared at me with a glazed and warily belligerent look in his eyes. I thought he might bite me.

Home, as she called it, was a converted bin on the eleventh floor. Amend that—it hardly deserved the adjective—it was not converted to anything. The size of a walk-in closet, it was diminished by its emptiness. The furniture was no more than a smattering of flyspecks on the floor. Patches of damp distemper festered the walls, unrelieved by windows, unadorned by art. Something pale that resembled graveyard ivy drooped from a coffee tin, sharing the top of an orange crate with an electric fan that whirled despondently and wafted strange odors.