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plasma-screen televisions—that was a nightmare.”
    They take the old mattress and box spring without comment.
    As they exit, a flash goes off in the yard.
    “What the …” Flash, flash-flash.
    One of the men drops his end of the outgoing mattress and plunges into the darkness. I hear scuffling sounds from within the bushes. The mattress man comes up, holding an expensive camera.
    “Give me the camera,” a stranger says, pulling himself out of the flower bed.
    “Who are you?” I ask.
    “That’s my camera,” the stranger says.
    “Not anymore,” the mattress man says, hurling it towards the street.

    I have to go home. It’s almost 11 p.m. I lock up the house, lead Tessie to the car, give her a boost up, and head for the highway. Tessie shakes.
    “No shots,” I say. “No vet. We’re going to the city, Tessie.”
    The dog passes toxic gases. I pull to the side of the road, and Tessie explodes onto the edge of the highway.
    “Did you have a good trip?” the night doorman asks. I don’t answer. “Your mail, your packages,” he says, filling my arms, “your laundry.” He hooks the hangers over my crooked finger.
    “Thank you.”
    He says nothing about the dog, whose leash I’ve lashed around my wrist.
    The apartment has a certain smell, familiar yet stale. How long have I been gone? It’s as though everything is frozen in time, has been frozen, not only for the days I’ve been away, but maybe the entire decade preceding. What once was modern, sophisticated, looks like the set of a period piece, Edward Albee circa 1983. The phone is a push-button trim-line, rarely used. The sofa arms are worn. The carpet pile is uneven along a certain path, a well-traveled route from room to room. The piles of magazines are dated eighteen months back.
    And still I am grateful to be in a place where everything is familiar, where I could go blind and still find my way. I sink into it, want to roll in it, I want none of what’s happened to be true.
    The orchid is still in bloom. I water it, and, as if I were watching a time-lapse sequence, within the hour the petals fall off, as if suddenly released, springing to certain death on the cabinet below. By morning, only the bare stick will remain.
    The refrigerator seeps the curdled scent of sour milk, half of a dry grapefruit, a jar of ageless peanut butter, some brown bread white and furry on the edges, old rice pudding brewing a green bull’s-eye center in a plastic deli container. In a frenzy I open every cabinet and throw out what’s expired. I wonder, does everyone do it the same way—glasses here, dishes there, dry foods and cans together? Where do you learn it, the grouping of like things? I take the trash down the hall and order Chinese. The man recognizes my phone number and says, “You call late tonight, long time no see; hot-sour soup, fried chicken rice, moo-shu pork?”

    W hile waiting, I take the elevator to the basement, unlock the storage bin, and wrestle out an enormous ancient blue suitcase. Upstairs, I open the bag on the bed and begin to fill it. Unsure of exactly what I am thinking, I pack as if to consolidate, to minimize myself. I assume that when Claire returns I will no longer be welcome. Pulling open the drawers, the closet, the medicine cabinet, I am impressed with the gentility with which things coexist, how they hang, nestle, rest side by side without tension or judgment. Her floss, toothbrush, Nair, mascara, my gargle, nose spray, nail clipper. All of it intimate, all of it human, all of it divided his and hers—there is little overlap.

    W e married late; Claire had already been married once, briefly. It was two years before I took her to meet my parents. The first thing she told them was “It was a small wedding, just friends.”
    “Why did you keep her from us for so long?” my mother asked. “She’s beautiful and has a good job. You thought we wouldn’t approve?”
    My mother took her hands. “We thought there must be something