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spoke to her as little else did. “You’ve made me feel less alone,” she said.
    They went out for a drink. The poet was rambling, sweet, and tender, and wept while describing his mother, who had died when he was a child. He didn’t ask Anne any questions about her life, but she didn’t mind. Acting was about listening, one of her teachers had told her: you focused on the other person in the scene and let them dictate to you. You reacted. Even more than that, you let them change you. So there was no need to decide in advance how to say your line. It was all response. This is what she did that night; by listening, she became—or pretended to become—the only woman in the world who understood him. Two days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard grazed her cheek when they kissed; on his breath was the sour smell of red wine. At her apartment, he lay in bed and ranted about the man who was fucking his wife. The next morning he apologized if he’d talked too much.
    “Not at all,” she said. “It was exactly what I needed.” What she needed was the bruise and crash of another body against her own, a collision that made her feel real. She’d wanted to be manhandled, not listened to, or cared for, or even seen.
    “You pretty women are such goddamn nightmares,” a drunk told her one night in a dim bar on Fiftieth Street, where she’d stopped by after a day of temping. She had let him buy her a drink, then turned him down for dinner because she didn’t like the smell of his cologne, and now he was mad. “You’re all the same. Hollow at the core.”
    “I’m not hollow,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her core was molten,radioactive. She knew that beneath the surface she was diseased, rotten, incinerating herself from the inside. But that wasn’t the same thing as being hollow. Not the same thing at all.
    Toward the end of February, she got back to her building around six in the afternoon. She had been cast, through the intervention of the Irish poet, in a play about the potato famine. In rehearsals she had to roll around moaning in hunger in a chilly basement, and after every session she was exhausted and aching and, indeed, starving.
    There was a bad smell inside the front door. The landlord, wanting to make life unpleasant for those in the rent-stabilized apartments, had suspended superintendent services. Nothing was cleaned, there were no functioning lightbulbs in the stairwell, there was no one to call in case of an emergency. In the corner, just below the mailboxes, was a pile of what Anne took to be discarded clothes until she realized, with a start, that it was a person.
    Whoever it was shifted slightly beneath a brown wool blanket and a green army coat that were somehow twisted together in a kind of shelter. Outside it was damp and blustery, the kind of freezing cold that slips through zippers and buttons to get at your skin, even into your muscles. She let him be.
    The next day, though, he was still there. The grandmothers in the building—almost all the apartments were rented by little old ladies—had clustered anxiously on the landings, whispering. Of course the super wouldn’t answer his phone or buzzer, so one of the old ladies had called the police. “They laughed in my face, those rat bastards,” she said. “Said they had more important things to do.” Other tenants, probably nervous about their own status in the building or the country, slipped past without so much as a glance.
    Anne, theoretically, should have done the same thing. She was living in an illegal sublet with no proof that she belonged there, and only Larry’s fear of confrontation kept him from kicking her out. But she could handle him. She jumped right into the conversation.
    Soon the intruder in the lobby had drawn the residents together, like survivors of a storm. For the next two days, as Anne went intoand out of the building, she would meet her neighbors’ eyes with a shrug and a smile, and they’d shrug and smile back.
    In all