She reached toward the coffee table for her tumbler, which had gone untouched throughout her lecture. I had already finished mine and felt warm and calm. I remembered that this was my opportunity to respond: having finished all her ‘prongs,’ Michelle was waiting to hear what I would have to say about them. She needed to know—needed for me to show her—that I could be mature, sensitive, compassionate: the kind of man she could grow old with. I told her that she was welcome to sit in on the interview, if she wanted. Then I added: ‘Of course you’ll have heard it all before.’ I said: ‘I’m just going to tell my story.’

3.

I ever tell you how I got this bookcase? It was for my first apartment. I was living with my landlady at the time, a crabby old woman named Fredricka. This was the summer right after college. I’m talking seventy, maybe eighty years old. She stayed up front, in the master bedroom, and I lived in back, next door to the other boarders: Miranda and Janey, recent grads I rarely saw. Easily the worst landlady I’ve ever had.

I knew going in, just from the interview, that Fredricka would have preferred not to have to live with me. ‘I usually don’t rent to boys,’ is how she put it. This was after she had already led me on a tour of her flat and sat me down in the parlor. She was this withered, scowl-mouthed woman, with crazed white hair and droopy blue eyes. As I read over the lease, she explained that no one else had answered her ad. She was willing to make an exception for some boys, of course, but no, quote, ‘undesirable types,’ which for her meant fraternity brats and trust-fund kids, spoiled children who were used to having maids pick up after them all their lives, and who didn’t know how to wash their dishes or sweep their messes. Fredricka hadn’t raised her son that way. Et cetera. I didn’t have a trust fund, or belong to a fraternity, though I doubted these details would have much mattered to her. The clear subtextual caveat of her lecture was, you know, Danger. Keep Out. Abandon All Hope Ye Brats Who Enter Here. I smiled as affably as I could. She didn’t want to live with me? So she did not want to live with me. She wasn’t my ideal roommate, either. The flat smelled like a nursing home, and the creak in her voice—I can’t do the creak. Ye-e-es? No, I can’t. Imagine old vampire movies, that hinge-rich sound when the coffin starts opening. That was her voice. Just unbelievably evil and sour and mean. Yet here we were: I couldn’t afford a place of my own, and she couldn’t afford to be choosy. Very simply, we did not like each other.

The bedroom itself, though, was perfect, and what’s more, it didn’t smell so bad with the window open. For a modest month-to-month rent—utilities included—I could have a private space in a beautiful neighborhood, furnished with a bed, dresser, and desk. All it lacked was a bookcase. I requested a rental application and moved in within the week.