While Selma and I were walking in the Uhlheck, the optician was checking the countless lenses in his phoropter. Naturally he couldn’t see with this phoropter that Mr. Rödder would complain about Alaska the next day and lavishly spray the room with Blue Ocean Breeze. He couldn’t see that there would be a change in plans or that my defective, garrulous answering machine would be speechless at the news that Frederik was arriving early, that he was already as good as here. The optician couldn’t see that I would run to meet Frederik or that on the landing we wouldn’t know how or whether we should hug each other. He couldn’t see how Frederik would laugh and say, “You’re looking at me as if I were the devil himself. It’s just me, Frederik. We talked on the phone.”

And if he could see it, he didn’t say anything.

FELICITÀ

“You’re early,” I said to Frederik when we met on the doorstep to my apartment building, and it was the dumbest possible opening sentence.

“I know, I’m sorry,” he said, “something was rescheduled. You’re shivering, you’re trembling, even.”

“It’s perfectly normal. I do this all the time.”

A salt dough wreath fell from one of the apartment doors across the hall and broke into a thousand pieces. Frederik looked at the shards, then back at me.

“Nothing’s fastened very well here,” I said.

Frederik was looking at me with an attention and friendliness that was almost unbearable.

“Come on in,” I said, opening the door.

Two boxes filled with things from my father’s medical office took up nearly all of my tiny entryway. He had spread his possessions widely. A few of his boxes were in Elsbeth’s basement, a few were in my apartment, but most were at Selma’s.

Alaska stood in the entryway, too, and it was as tight as if we’d crowded into a closet. Frederik tried to bend down to Alaska but there wasn’t enough room.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a clear plastic box on top of the cardboard boxes.

“Instruments for the ears, nose, and throat.”

“Is there another room in your apartment?”

“Here,” I said, pushing Frederik into my studio.

I tried to picture my studio the way Frederik was seeing it for the first time: the fold-out couch covered with a blanket for Alaska, the bookcase that had been in my childhood bedroom, the bed that was just a mattress on a slat frame, advance reading copies piled in a corner. Frederik glanced at the shelves and looked away quickly before heading determinedly over to a small photograph on the wall. The photograph was the only thing in the entire apartment I hadn’t dusted.