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in this line of work, to save the trees. Inside, the first two floors are occupied by the landlady, one or both of whose late husbands must have said that what they loved about her was her temper. From time to time, she needs to throw an all-night party, with singing from The Fireside Book ; at other times, though, far more frequently, she needs to provoke quarrels, pound on a tenant’s door, and scream. The house only has four floors. When I’m in town, I’m the tenant on the third floor, just above our landlady’s duplex. Brian and Paula, both young lawyers, both the first in their families to go beyond high school, are on the top floor, with Apple, their Afghan hound.
    In the winter, right after New Year’s, our landlady likes to take a cruise around the world. She sublets her two floors for six months and goes. Whoever moves in then inevitably changes the character of the house to some degree. Last year, we had a banker and his family, who were the children and grandchildren of a war criminal. This year, all day on weekends and sometimes after school on weekdays, a child comes and endlessly picks out “Frère Jacques” on the piano. Pausing, hesitating, never getting it quite right, using sometimes one hand, sometimes two, alternating, though this month is March, with a few notes from “Jingle Bells.” One night, when Brian went to look for something in the basement, he encountered an armed man, whom he took to be a prowler. The man was a bodyguard. The family in our landlady’s duplex this year, it turns out, lives under a pseudonym. Their real name is Somoza. Today, this morning, someone is using a hammer and a blowtorch on a house across the garden. Apple has begun to bark. And Madame Somoza cowers behind her shades and draperies at this quantity of noise.
    Very amusing, the rich Italians always say now when they’re here. Or else, Not very amusing.
    By the time the old couple moved to the suburbs, she had become flatly, almost by reflex, ornery. He was a sort of engine of cliché. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he might say, over his brandy. And she would reply, without hesitation, “Yes it was.”
    Maybe he won’t be there when I get back. Maybe I won’t either. Who would have thought that every time he had a choice he would choose the other thing.
    Did it mean nothing, then, that he came to see her every day?
    Oh, it meant a lot, a lot. And I don’t hold with saying, at every mood and moment, This is how I feel, this is what’s happening now to me. I know reticence has its depths. I really do. But you can go too far with the undone and the unspoken things. What it comes to in the end is that there’s only an ambiguous footprint, a hair that could be anyone’s, a drunken moment that I couldn’t actually swear to, though it held me for a few years longer, to say that there was ever a living creature there. And while I was moved to tears when you walked here in the night, with your flashlight and your dog—not to tears, I guess, but to a stillness of the heart—it was really with your dog that you walked in the moonlight and the woods, and I drove you home. A man I know used to speak of women as high or low maintenance. Since his world was city life, what he meant was that one kind of mistress requires furs, cars, constant small attentions; another kind asks much less. I guess I’ve been high maintenance in just this sense: that you’ve given me more time, on those rides, business travels, visits in the interstices of your life, than you ever planned to give. What you’ve done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part. No, I don’t mean that. It is only that I didn’t think I set the price so very high. There wasn’t ever going to be a price. Yet here I am, after all, alone on Orcas Island. And it’s just that what happens now is just so bleak and ordinary, either way.
    Hey wait.
    Well, love after