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with
     her afternoon patients. She double-parks as her mother comes down the steps. Eva reaches
     in back for her bag and opens the car door. She stands still as Myra holds out her
     hand and then, not receiving a hand in return, touches Eva lightly on the arm.
    Myra leans over to kiss Caro through the open window.
    “Will you be okay?” Caro asks softly.
    “Of course—and thank you.”
    Caro returns her mother’s car to the garage, and then walks home. Reaching her building,
     she gives a half smile to her doorman, who, after seventeen years at the job, can
     distinguish the residents’ personalities and moods: who wants to chat, who wants to
     pass through the lobby without intrusion. A man who knows that during the twelve years
     she has owned her apartment, she has never brought anyone home or unexpectedly failed
     to return for a night.
    She unlocks her front door and takes off her shoes. She finds it comforting that when
     she comes back in the evening, nothing inside her apartment is ever altered. It is
     the panorama outside her windows that changes: a cityscape of water towers and rooftops
     with the Hudson River beyond, steel gray and white-capped in winter, a palate of blues
     in summer. At night, the lights of Edgewater across the water; mornings, the buildings
     brushed with pink from the eastern light.
    Eva’s disorientation this afternoon had brought back her own experience as a foreigner
     during the semester she’d spent in Paris. Eager to save money to travel, she’d eschewed
     the dorms offered by the study program, taking instead a job as an au pair for two
     children, five and seven. The mother had been a concert pianist who wore her hair
     severely pulled back from her face and did not hesitate to pinch either Caro or the
     children when she was displeased. Her chubby engineer husband escaped the pinches
     by strategic retreats to a little workshop off the kitchen where he made birdcages.
     The children would torment Caro by bounding ahead of her in the street and pulling
     their mouths horizontally until their eyes looked as if they would pop. She had been
     so miserable she lost her appetite, unable to swallow the celery rémoulade and boeuf
     bourguignon the pianist made each Sunday, the buttery gratins and smelly cheeses she
     served in the evenings. For the first time, her collarbones emerged. Misery gave her
     a waistline. No longer overshadowed by belly and hips, her breasts seemed enormous.
     The engineer took to watching her as she leaned over to tie the children’s shoes.
    One night, she was awakened by a sound in the keyhole of the maid’s room where she
     slept. The chubby engineer stood over her bed, an enormous erection pointing at her
     face. She wanted to scream, but she was afraid of waking the children and receiving
     a vicious pinch from the pianist. The engineer smiled at her. Even in the dark, his
     teeth appeared brown. He offered her a chocolate truffle. Too scared to refuse, she
     put it in her mouth. He locked the door and gently pulled back her covers. He massaged
     the crotch of her white cotton underwear. She felt humiliated that her pelvis arched
     toward his fingers and the crotch of her underwear grew wet. Chocolate drooled out
     of her mouth. It was her first orgasm, though she’d not understood that at the time.
     The engineer laughed. Afterward, she felt something warm and sticky on the tops of
     her thighs. In the morning, when the children had left for school and the pianist
     had disappeared behind the glass doors of the salon to practice, he handed her an
     envelope with two thousand francs and told her to leave before le déjeuner .
    Ma petite putain , the engineer had called her. My little whore.
    14
    The first morning Eva is in the house, Myra wakes, as usual, at four-thirty. Opening
     her bedroom door, she nearly hits Eva’s sleeping body, curled on the hallway floor.
     Eva is wearing yellow pajamas and sucking her thumb.
    Myra gently rouses Eva,