The cabdriver complained that the chaise stuck out of his trunk. I gave him a quarter when he stopped in front of my house but he wouldn’t help me carry it up the four flights of stairs. He helped me put the chaise on the sidewalk and drove off. I sat down on it and lit a cigarette and watched the people look at me as they passed, wondered how to get it up the stairs. The upholstery was very soft, but the frame was oak and heavy. A dirty little guy came out of the door of my house with a guitar case in his hand. Square grimy hands, thick greasy glasses. A spunky little character with an intellectual air. He stopped on the front steps and grinned at me. I grinned at him.

“That’s quite a contraption,” he said.

“You want to help me carry it up four flights of dark, twisting stairs?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

These days I’m very careful to have no truck with guitar cases.

“It looks like it eats people,” he said. It was as if his smile was built in. We lugged the chaise up to my room. I know now that Sam always stops to help. He helps ladies change tires. He picks up hitchhikers. He lifts the heads of drunks in alleys and takes the hand of the child screaming in the crowd. It’s not from sympathy or charity, but curiosity, and a lust for the something interesting that can be milked from every brush with another person.

But I didn’t know him then. I assumed he was interested in the possibility of being invited to bed. And I was lonely. I had been growing quite morbid up there under the eaves. I’d sit for hours beneath the skylight, tipped back in my wooden chair at an angle that let the cigarette smoke drift up and outside rather than smog the room.

There is something about small, compact men that has always fascinated me. I am a big woman and aware of the incongruity, but it’s there despite me, a solid reality. Small faces hung around large noses, tense compact bodies, a woolly fuzz of the various hairs. I used to think it was simply the Hero’s Friend Syndrome, a cuddly quality. But now I think it has more to do with apparent energies: languid types tend to run big; little men are often either vivacious or fiercely restrained. Maybe this idea stems from the ant, whose disproportionate strength is attributed to the leverage of its short muscles. Or perhaps it’s the sensation of mortality, the impression of fragility and the inevitable end that seeps from small bodies. Other monoliths like myself always make me feel completely indifferent to whether they’ll actually survive through the eons, as they seem to intend.