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painted china base and a pleated, dark red silk shade, held out at an extravagant angle, like a hoop skirt.
    I described it to Hugo. “That is a whorehouse lamp,” I said. Afterwards I wanted to be congratulated on the accuracy of this description. I told Hugo he ought to pay more attention to Dotty if he wanted to be a writer. I told him about her husbands and her womb and her collection of souvenir spoons, and he said I was welcome to look at them all by myself. He was writing a verse play.
    Once when I went down to put coal on the furnace, I found Dotty in her pink chenille dressing gown saying goodbye to a man in a uniform, some sort of delivery man or gas station attendant. It was the middle of the afternoon. She and this man were not parting in any way that suggested either lechery or affection and I would not have understood anything about it, I would probably have thought he was some relative, if she had not begun at once a long complicated slightly drunk story about how she had got wet in the rain and had to leave her clothes at her mother’s house and worn home her mother’s dress which was too tight and that was why she was now in her dressing gown. She said that first Larry had caught her in it delivering some sewing he wanted her to do for his wife, and now me, and she didn’t know what we would think of her. This was strange, as I had seen her in her dressing gown many times before. In the middle of her laughing and explaining, the man, who had not looked at me, not smiled or said a word or in any way backed up her story, simply ducked out the door.
    “Dotty has a lover,” I said to Hugo.
    “You don’t get out enough. You’re trying to make life interesting.”
    The next week I watched to see if this man came back. He did not. But three other men came, and one of them came twice. They walked with their heads down, quickly, and did not have to wait at the basement door. Hugo couldn’t deny it. He said it was life imitating art again, it was bound to happen, after all the fat varicose-veined whores he’d met in books. It was then we named her the harlot-in-residence and began to brag about her to our friends. They stood behind the curtains to catch a glimpse of her going in or out.
    “That’s not her!” they said. “Is that her? Isn’t she disappointing? Doesn’t she have any professional clothes?”
    “Don’t be so naive,” we said. “Did you think they all wore spangles and boas?”
    Everybody hushed to hear her play the piano. She sang or hummed along with her playing, not steadily, but loudly, in the rather defiant, self-parodying voice people use when they are alone, or think they are alone. She sang “Yellow Rose of Texas,” and “You Can’t Be True, Dear.”
    “Whores should sing hymns.”
    “We’ll get her to learn some.”
    “You’re all such voyeurs. You’re all so mean,” said a girl named Mary Frances Shrecker, a big-boned, calm-faced girl with black braids down her back. She was married to a former mathematical prodigy, Elsworth Shrecker, who had had a breakdown. She worked as a dietician. Hugo said he could not look at her without thinking of the word lumpen , but he supposed she might be nourishing, like oatmeal porridge. She became his second wife. I thought she was the right wife for him, I thought she would stay forever, nourishing him, but the student evicted her.
    The piano-playing was an entertainment for our friends, but disastrous on the days when Hugo was home trying to work. He was supposed to be working on his thesis but he really was writing his play. He worked in our bedroom, at a card table in front of the window, facing a board fence. When Dotty had been playing for a bit, he might come out to the kitchen and stick his face into mine and say in low, even tones of self-consciously controlled rage, “You go down and tell her to cut that out.”
    “You go.”
    “Bloody hell. She’s your friend. You cultivate her. You encourage her.”
    “I never told