Down by the entryway, Lilly had a shopping cart filled with her stuff that she’d wheeled over from her old place. I was on my way to the bookshop, but I helped her with a few things before heading out—partly to be nice, partly because I was curious. Lilly had this contraption that looked like a cross between a drill press and an old-fashioned camera, which she called an enlarger. She told me she was a photographer. For the newspapers? I asked, but she just smiled and shook her head. You see, photography didn’t register with me. I didn’t know anyone who was doing it; that’s how ahead of things Lilly was.

I spent that whole day trying to think up reasons for her being there. It wasn’t an easy neighborhood back then. It was very, very Polish, and as far as they were concerned, a woman without a man was either a whore or somebody’s mistress, which amounted to the same thing. Walking down the street, you’d be invisible or you’d get remarks. You didn’t have to speak Polish to know what kurva meant, the way they said it. But eighteen bucks a month got you two rooms—a big one with a sink and a bathtub in one corner, the toilet in a closet; and a tiny one that barely had space enough for its own door—with water and heat included. That was why I was there, but I was a poet and just the sort of misfit, self-made orphan that kind of setup would appeal to.

When I got back from the bookshop, I knocked on Lilly’s door, just to make sure she hadn’t been thrown into some baba’s goulash, and out she came into the hallway, grinning ear to ear. The door across from hers had a cloth stuffed under it, and she was pointing at it like she’d found the end of the rainbow. Her neighbor was this Chinese guy, the only other tenant who wasn’t a Pole. He’d work through the week, then lock himself in his apartment on weekends. Lilly thought the cloth was there to block out the light. She was going on about her neighbor being a photographer, too, her face lit up like the circus. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he was in there smoking opium. Keeping out the light had nothing to do with it; the cloth was there so that the smell of his little hobby could be kept in.