An older man, physically unattractive, yet he exudes a sexual aura rising from his sense of himself, his masculinity. A woman of the identical age is disadvantaged.

“We can visit the Edelstein later if you wish, dear. On our way out.”

Dear. L.K. registers this, uneasy. But she doesn’t object.

Telling him no. She does not care to visit the Edelstein Gallery.

Artists’ studios are on higher floors, Vann says. Space is cheaper to rent there. Okay to take the freight elevator?

The interior of the warehouse is much larger than L.K. would have expected, or recalls; the farther walls are lost in shadow.

The freight elevator is not very clean. There is a smell here of dirt, grime. A badly soiled tarpaulin on the floor that looks, to the casual eye, as if it is covering something the size of a small child lying prone.

In such close, confined quarters L.K. feels self-conscious with her newfound companion, who whistles thinly as if he too feels awkward.

Above the elevator door there are four numerals—1, 2, 3, 4. Yet as the elevator ascends with creaks and clatters, none of the numerals light up.

With forced ebullience Vann tells L.K. about the Durant—how being able to work here “saved his life” when he’d been a young artist in his twenties, with nowhere to go, a succession of poorly paying part-time jobs, including, for a while, a nightmare time in his life after he’d dropped out of Wayne State, working as an orderly at Detroit General Hospital.

“The only good thing about the job,” Vann says, “is I learned to see how life becomes death—that quickly. No mystery to it, just a switch turned off.”

But this isn’t true, L.K. thinks. Death does not come that quickly. And the shadow of death does not fade quickly—it does not fade at all.

How slow the elevator is! She feels a frisson of panic that it will jolt to a stop suddenly; they will be stuck in it together, between floors.

The man’s eyes drift to her. He sees that his words have upset her, perhaps. That was not his intention.

Walking to the Durant, he’d brushed against L.K. several times, accidentally, or so it seemed. Here inside the elevator he stands stiffly apart from her, as she stands at a little distance from him. Her heart beats quickly with exhilaration. Is he afraid of her?

He asks L.K. if she has a “family”—by which, she supposes, he is asking if she is married.

“No.”

So blunt an answer, she feels the need to amend: “Not now.”

Then, trying to keep her voice from breaking, “Not for a while.”

He waits for her to ask if he is married or has a family, but L.K. fails to ask. Quite deliberately she doesn’t ask, and why is that? (Does she not care? Or does she wish to give this man the impression that she doesn’t care?)