And I said — sharply — alright Joseph, I hope so. Emily’s bringing you soup and tea she says? Yes, all good and appreciated, thank you, he said. Goodbye now, I said, I hope you get better soon. And I walked away from the low door, more briskly, and sooner, than I’d planned.

I walked up the hill, the dry grass, under the weak winter sun, I strode, I feel I strode. I went straight to my bedroom and lay down and did not come out before I heard Emily ringing the bell for dinner.

HELENA CAME INTO TOWN from Vermont a few weeks ago, she spent the weekend with me. She’d been worried about me, but she had a new thing to be worried about: I was coming down with the flu, and I always decline in the winter.

She went out while I rested on Saturday, and said she’d buy food and make dinner.

My bed in New York is in a room with little natural light, it overlooks the black outside stairwell, and the old yellow wall of the next-door building, but it’s a curved room, being on a corner, its one wall curves around to meet the two walls on each side. I can hear a low traffic sound, the deep hum of the city, a siren sometimes, and the creak of the old elevator, the metallic sound as its door opens or closes. Those are my neighbours, coming in or leaving. That’s all.

My dresser, an old dark wood, has deep drawers laden with my things. I wear very few of them, but there are sweaters and sweaters, old ones, some folded shirts. A large, wood-framed mirror above. My face, every day, in the mirror, wan. I smooth my hair, I see myself smoothing it now, as I’m speaking.

And my bed. My bed feels so large now that I occupy it alone, although I still sleep on the window side, as I did when Howard was here, next to me. Its dark-coloured sheets and my high, thick pillows, I read propped against them, an old lamp on the night-table alongside. I have a woman who cleans my apartment once a week, she does things I find difficult now: she changes my bed linens, she vacuums. She’s started taking my small basket of laundry down the elevator to the laundry room too, to the washers and dryers she operates with my card. For years I did those things myself. I never wanted to replicate my relationship with Emily, who cleaned my home, or with Josias, who did everything else. Howard never complained, he wouldn’t have noticed either way. It felt . . . right, to make this small statement. To myself, who else would care. An empty statement I know, I knew even then. But my statement.

I GOT UP LATER in the afternoon and got ready for Helena’s return. I wondered where she’d been, so many hours away. Perhaps she’d gone to the museum, there was an exhibition of Kerry James Marshall on, a major one, I’d told her about it, although I hadn’t seen it. And then she was home, I heard the key in the lock, that old lock.