Back at Irene’s apartment he wrestles it up the stairs and leans it in the hall while he unlocks the door and thumps it through. It falls to the floor like a body.

Irene is at work at the hospital. He sees her no-nonsense jeans and her sweatshirt on the floor. When Simon began living with her on purpose instead of by circumstance he had begged her to wear a sweatshirt, something loose, something concealing. Who knows, you might find another derelict Indian in the gutter and I don’t want him to fall in love with your tits like I did.

He smiles at her mess, the crumpled pants. While he was still confined to bed he had gotten used to seeing her unzip her pants and relished the way they fell immediately to her ankles, not hampered by thick hips. He smiles because they still bear her impatient footprints from when she kicked them off. The sweatshirt hangs on the iron bed rail, one arm inside out. He shoves the rug all the way in and closes the door. He picks up her clothes carefully and folds them on the edge of the bed, and then sweeps the wood floors and dusts them with a damp mop. From under the sink he takes out the wax and with a soiled towel he waxes the floors.

By the time Irene sighs her way wearily into the apartment, the floors have regained the luster they once had when the brownstones and the neighborhood were new. When it was an idyllic place, barely removed from the bustle of downtown, a refuge for soy and timber merchants, where, in the twenties and thirties, piano music floated from every window in the breezed afternoons and the rudiments of big band music were exciting, startlingly unreal as they emerged from new radios. The music urged husbands from their martinis and club chairs and wives from their stations next to the fireplace. Fires were lit against the summer night chill with slats splintered from packing pallets. This new music inspired them to make love, not fuck, because business was good, the brownstones solid and new. Music had taken the place of the novel, a private world shared by the public. The radio made music common, but it was consumed alone. Everyone who could afford a radio was included and people danced, in their firelit parlors, hidden from, yet a part of, the common gaze.

Irene shuts the door and sets down her bag, looking more like a schoolgirl in her stockings and white frock than a nursing student.

“Whatcha doin? Remodeling the place?”

“Hey, baby. Just cleaning, just sprucing it up a bit.”

“Looks nice,” she mumbles as she sits down on the bed to untie her boxy white shoes. She gets one off and lies back, her feet, one shoed, the other cooling, over the edge of the bed.

Simon kneels and unlaces her other shoe. “See anything new?”

“This place is clean.”