Perhaps thirty seconds later, I looked through the window and saw Miranda and Eglantine for the first time. They were crossing the street with the real estate agent, and I knew immediately that they were prospective tenants for the ground floor of my house. The two women who lived in the garden apartment were leaving for a larger place in New Jersey, and I needed to fill the vacancy. After my divorce, the house seemed to grow. Genie had taken up a lot of space, and Elmer, her spaniel; Rufus, her parrot; and Carlyle, her cat, had occupied territory as well. For a while there were fish. After Genie left me, I used the three floors for my books, thousands of volumes that I couldn’t part with. My ex-wife had resentfully referred to our house as the Librarium. I had bought the brownstone as a so-called handyman special before my marriage when the market was low and have been working on it ever since. My passion for carpentry is a legacy of my father, who taught me how to build and repair just about anything. For years, I was holed up in one part of the house as I sporadically worked on the rest. The demands of my practice squeezed my leisure hours almost to nil, one of the factors that led to my joining that great legion of Western humanity known as “the divorced.”

The young woman and the little girl paused on the sidewalk with Laney Buscovich from Homer Realtors. I couldn’t see the woman’s face, but I noticed that her posture was beautiful. Her hair was short and cut close to her head. Even from that distance, I liked her slender neck, and although she was wearing a long coat, the sight of the cloth over her breasts triggered a sudden image of her naked, and with it a wave of arousal. The sexual loneliness I had felt for some time, a feeling that had on occasion driven me to the voyeuristic pleasures of cable porn, intensified after my father’s funeral, mounting inside me like a keening storm, and this postmortem blast of libido made me feel that I had returned to my life as a slobbering teenage onanist, the tall, skinny, practically hairless jerk-off king of Blooming Field Junior High School.