“Possibly. Depending on the context.”

“Okay, okay. You wait, I come back.”

Raymond van der Holt was enjoying the view of the mountains through his picture window when the Korean hausfrau invaded the frame, again. She was dressed entirely in white this time. What now? He got up, combed his hair again and answered the door.

“Oh, Mrs. Park, I haven’t started on the stories yet. I know, I know. Bad boy.” He slapped his own wrist.

“Is okay.” She pushed a platter of soggy grey discs with green stripes into his hands. “I make the pancake for you. You doing work, you eat the food, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She peered over his shoulder and into his house. “Very nice, your lamp.”

“Right, so it is.”

She stood there for a moment, as if she wanted to be invited in. “Pancake is no MSG. All veggie-table. I not know if you eat the meat.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Park, in fact I do eat the meat.” He took a step back into his house. Hint-hint for bye-bye. “It’s very kind of you.”

“Oh!” she suddenly exclaimed. “I forget soy sauce! I come back.”

“No, no! Please don’t! I have soy sauce. I’m sure it’ll suffice.” He looked down and saw the scaly, unpainted nails peering out her open-toe pumps. “Good night now, Mrs. Park.”

“Gooda night.”

The last woman to step into Raymond’s house had been his secretary, Adele Hollister. He preferred the term assistant, she preferred secretary—in any case, she was a thick-wristed little woman from Mississippi who put three kids through community college with her rigorous transcriptions. She was the one person who could decode his hieroglyphs. In her five years with Raymond, he’d only caught one typo in her work—“maldorous” instead of “malodorous.”

Raymond himself wrote longhand, using black Pilot roller-ball pens on cream-colored loose-leaf Maruman paper from Japan. Adele came in twice a week to transfer his words into a chunky IBM laptop that lived for the most part in the supplies closet. It depressed Raymond to look at that machine—drab, serious, redolent of rote work.

When he first hired Adele, he warned her firmly that she might occasionally encounter rude words and macabre sexual situations. But from the start she was unflappable. She came in at nine in the morning and tapped away till three. She didn’t care what words he used or didn’t use. When she was done, she baked cookies and made a pot of mint tea, leaving the house enveloped in an aromatic dream of mother and maid.