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replied. She always wrote “hooray” when Ben got a job, and meant it.
    The tenant of her New York apartment had discovered the air-conditioning did not work, had called the super, had discovered the circuit-breaker box, had discovered the air-conditioning did work, had apologized for all the messages. He was a retired executive of some sort, a man used to having things done for him instead of doing them himself. His angry messages were peremptory, his apologetic messages grudging. She hated the idea of him and his wife sleeping in her bed. She had realized as she was leaving the apartment, her car packed full of suitcasesand boxes, that it was the second time she had had to move out of a place she did not want to vacate. The first was incandescent in memory, the day she had been subjected to the indignity of yelling at her husband to get out after a sleepless night of swelling outrage and then having him coolly remind her that the apartment was part of his university compensation and that she would have to throw him out by leaving herself.
    Rebecca had bought new sheets for the duration of the sublet. Tenant sheets, she thought of them, nice, but not as nice as her own. But it turned out the tenant wife had shipped her own linens (as well as pillows, blankets, and assorted artwork) from their home in Palo Alto. “It’s important to claim the space,” the wife had said solemnly. She was a Reiki practitioner and had placed a small statue of the Buddha on the windowsill overlooking Central Park.
    Rebecca couldn’t claim to have truly claimed the space in the cottage, with its balky toilet, its rattling refrigerator, its splintery wooden walls. In front of the cottage was a stretch of lawn that degenerated into a scruff of grasses and shrubs and a steep slope down a wooded hill. If she stood at the edge she could see the flat roof of a small house at the bottom. Sometimes she saw something glittering below, as though the sun was striking fire off a metal fence or a patch of mica.
    But the woods started almost at her back door, and because of the miserly little windows and the way the cottage was placed, it was dark inside a good part of the day, her bedroom and the small guest room on the other side of the bathroom plunged into gloom, the living room and kitchen lit briefly at midday and then in shadow the rest of the afternoon. It was a shame she no longer needed a darkroom; the spare bedroom qualified as one with almost no modification. She had set up her printer on a small table there. The room had one electrical outlet, and Rebecca had purchased several extension cords. She had also put her beautiful gold watch in a top bureau drawer (that stuck, evenafter she rubbed its bottom with a bar of soap) and replaced it with a black rubber digital watch that glowed in the dark. It worked much better and didn’t need to be wound. It was waterproof, too.
    The cottage was not a place you wanted to linger, not like her apartment, with its golden easterly light, the changing shadings of the park outside the living room windows—big windows—its loveliest artwork. She had loved that apartment from the moment she walked into the narrow foyer and saw those windows and the vista before and below her. The idea of selling it was unthinkable, although figuring out how to hold on to it was a constant worry, like a stitch in the side that would not ease. Its worth had appreciated a good deal since she had bought it; it had now become so valuable that she could no longer really afford to live there. Her home, her true home, her beloved home, or, as her accountant called it, her greatest illiquid asset. Most useful to her with someone else living in it. Last night she had even dreamed about the lobby of her apartment building. “Glad to see you again, Miss Winter,” Mike, the daytime doorman, called to her in the dream, and yet the elevator doors never opened.
    “None of your work here?” the Reiki practitioner had said, looking around