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occurred to me that as much as I knew he liked me as a person maybe he didn’t think I was cute or his type or whatever. Maybe his type goes out. Nevertheless, it had been some time since I’d had a real shower (I had running water and a lot of aromatherapy products, that’s not my point); there are separate men’s and women’s bathrooms in the solarium, but no shower, and by then I was longing to have a really good shampoo. So one day I asked the elevator man if he’d mind washing my hair in the sink, and he didn’t seem to think this was weird in any way, and the next time he came back with this really nice-smelling chamomile shampoo, which I thought was pretty sweet. We brought a chair into the bathroom, and he put a towel around my neck, and if he were an actual shampooer in some salon, I’d have given him a lot more than two or three dollars, because he was especially careful about getting the temperature just right, and I can’t even really describe how great it felt except to say I was just about hallucinating, and he took a lot of time, and I thought about asking him to marry me afterward. The only reason I changed my mind was that we hadn’t kissed or anything and I thought it might be too soon. I did ask him if he’d mind doing it once a week, and he said, Not at all .
    One day Anna came up to tell me that this guy jumped off the roof of one of the other sections of the building, that he was pretty young, married, with a family. She didn’t know him at all and there was a little bit of speculation in the building about what the story was; it didn’t really matter to me, it was obvious that there was one. Some people said it was money, which seems pretty absurd from my point of view, seeing as how anyone in this building has to be rich, and apparently his health was fine. Other people said it was an accident, but there are very high bars on the terrace, much taller than a very tall person, and so that’s pretty unlikely. There wasn’t any note. Anna seemed pretty stressed about it, and I guessed that this had never happened to her before, but when I was growing up on West End Avenue, it happened not once but twice in my building, and you know, it’s not ever a good thing but it starts to be less of a surprise after the first couple times. The first time we heard a lot of shouting coming from the apartment below us (which was nothing unusual, this forty-year-old guy lived there with his mother, and they were always shouting) and it seemed kind of louder than usual so my dad climbed up on the kitchen sink and looked out the window and there was the guy, hanging halfway out the window threatening to jump, and my dad, lacking any training in any such emergency situations, said, Get back in there , to the guy and he actually did, which is totally not what you’d expect, but let me say we were all really glad not to have seen him not get back in there, and a few weeks after that he did jump right out that same window, which thankfully for a lot of the tenants was in the back, and there was no shouting that time. The second time some other person went up to the roof and jumped off the front, right around dinnertime, when my dad was just getting home from work, and my mom and I were both kind of squeamish so we asked him to skip the rest of the grisly details after he told us that they were laying down not one but two white sheets, some distance apart on the sidewalk, to cover up this one person. I walked to and from school smushed up against the building for a while after that.
    Anyway, Anna said, Maybe you should think about coming down . This was the first time she seemed worried about me at all, all this time, but I assured her, Anna , I said, I’m fine. I’m not going to jump. I’m happy here . But then the elevator man came up too, to talk about it; I asked him what he thought the story was, he said he didn’t ever work in that other