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“It’s easy to forget how lucky we are,” I said.

“Where do you think our sadness comes from?” Cornelius said. “From owning too many things? From indigestion?” He had picked
up the knife again and with the tip of it was tracing light circles on the back of his hand. “A person whose struggle, whose
suffering, is created internally . . . well, it’s just one’s feelings, isn’t it, one’s depression. There isn’t anything really
to despair about.”

“But even so, isn’t that person’s suffering real?” I asked.

Cornelius gazed at me with pity. There was something cruel about his regard. He believed he could do nothing for me. I experienced
a similar hopelessness every morning when I opened up the newspaper. Or when I watched a spider drown in my bathtub.

Milly lit the menorah from left to right, and she, Cornelius, and Rachel sang a blessing in Hebrew with low voices. Their
warbling was sweet to hear, and we smiled at each other like children who have entered a magic circle.

I left Milly’s party and walked along old narrow streets, feeling a peculiar tenderness as I passed by quaint eighteenth-century
homes with their soft-lighted windows. Inside, I imagined lit candles, roses in glass vases, gleaming mirrors, and bowls of
potpourri smelling of cinnamon and pears. I imagined those warm rooms and wished more than anything to step inside.

The cold was vivid against my skin. By the time I reached my boyfriend’s apartment, I felt I was glowing. I tried to explain
to him how interesting it had been, going around the table at Milly’s latke party, relating the terrible, miraculous things
that had happened to our families. My boyfriend frowned. He is a serious person and wondered if we had told our stories
in bad faith, simply to amuse ourselves. When I described to him how Milly made latkes, my boyfriend, who is Jewish, finally
cracked: “That’s not how my mother makes them!” He has never liked Milly and thinks she is a cold person because she talks
to a spot above his head without looking at him. My feelings for her are so different. I have a photograph of her standing
under a huge magnolia tree, and she is wearing a blue dress and black Mary Jane shoes, and she looks just like Alice in Wonderland.
Even if I show him this picture, my boyfriend will never see Milly as I do.

Then we went to bed. I thought about Milly and Cornelius, and how nothing will ever happen between them. Cornelius is self-absorbed,
and Milly, shy and repressed. Both of them are too afraid, but what is it that they are afraid of? As for my boyfriend and
me, we had been together for over a year, yet not once had the word hue been spoken between us. Our hearts seemed too small
for such a word to pass between our lips. We had not encountered adversity and seemed fated to walk through life unattached,
glancing at one another through distant windows.

W
hen I was still in my twenties, I lived for a few months in an artist colony in Oregon. Before then, I had never lived by
the sea. I don’t know what it was I wanted there, but I kept imagining a pale room with glimmering walls. The room would be
silent and modest, and if there was any sound it would be muted and far away like the sound of the sea inside a shell. In
my vision, the room and its view of the shore were always absent of people.

In March, I arrived at the colony, and the woman in the office handed me a key to my studio. The door turned out to be unlocked,
drifting on its hinge. It was early afternoon, yet the room seemed steeped in twilight, the windows shadowed by a view of
the stairwell and the parking lot. The room was cluttered with mismatched furniture—a futon covered with gaudy orchids, a
narrow bench that served as a coffee table, an oak desk scarred with graffiti, a bright square of blood orange carpet—and
the fireplace had long ago been sealed off with white plaster. It was a senseless patchwork of a room, as if composed by a
distracted mind. One corner opened up into a deadend space used for storage, and here I found two coffee machines, a box of
handmade Christmas ornaments, the head of a plastic doll, a recent crusty issue of a porn magazine, a flat white clamshell
blotted with cigarette ash, and a tin can crammed with stiff, unusable paintbrushes.

I closed the curtains and lay down in bed. Above me, a tile had broken loose like a rotted tooth. It sat on brass pipes, which
ran straight across the ceiling and disappeared into the closet.

Someone knocked on the door. It was Steve, the maintenance man, and he asked me how I liked the apartment. “It’s kind of dark
in there so I made sure to put in plenty of lamps,” he said. “There’s even one that belonged to my mother-in-law.”

I smiled and thanked him. Then I closed the door and returned to bed.

An hour later, I heard another knock.

“Hello,” a young man wearing small round spectacles said. “We haven’t met. Martin Leung.” He extended his hand, and I shook it. He had grayish green eyes and short cropped hair, and
there were little gaps between his teeth. He had pulled back his shirt cuffs, which were unbuttoned and flared out loosely,
and a number of colored rubber bands circled his wrist. He examined me more closely. “Were you sleeping?”

“No,” I said.

“Because there aren’t any lights on. What could you be doing in there?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Oh, fine,” he said. “If that’s your story.” He closed the screen door on me and began to walk away.

“You don’t believe me?” I called out.

He turned, smiling slightly. “I’ll let you get back to your nap.”

I went back to bed, but this time I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t dare turn on the light because then I would have to look
at the ceiling. I must have lain awake for hours like this.

The next morning, before anyone else was up, I walked down Market Street to look at the bay. It was tepid and flat and gray.
Overweight seagulls brooded in the sand. I found an eroded brick covered with limpets and carried the cold, heavy thing back
to my studio to put on the windowsill. The brick was still sandy, and I rinsed it with water, but the shells, which had been
as inert as stones, began to move and rise, cracking loudly like ice. I set the brick on my desk, listening to the cracking
until I couldn’t bear it, and then I picked up the brick and walked to the bay again and tossed it into the water.

On my way back, I passed through the colony’s lounge and heard someone playing Chopin, the notes blurred and tinny and mournful,
but the pianist stopped when I entered. “I’m sorry,” I said, wishing she would continue, but the woman rose slowly from the
bench and regarded me with large, somber eyes. “You’re a composer, then?” I asked.

The woman said she was a visual artist. Her name was Andrea.

I lightly pressed a key down with one finger. “Don’t you like the way old pianos sound?”

“Well, this one is very out of tune,” Andrea said. Her shape and stillness reminded me of those impassive Russian dolls, the
ones that open to reveal another smaller doll inside that is exactly alike. This goes on until you reach a doll that is the
size of a tiny wooden peg.

I asked Andrea what she was working on at the colony.

“Maybe I’ll tell you another time,” she said. “When I know you better.”

But I didn’t think Andrea and I would ever be friends.

In the mornings, I liked to walk down Market Street, catching glimpses of the bay in between the storefronts, the air pungent,
smelling of the sea. I passed by the mailman making his rounds, a woman talking sweetly to her Boston terriers, a man tending
roses in his garden, and I didn’t have to question anything, my mind as clear and calm as the day.

Then I returned to my studio, made a pot of coffee, and sat down to write. But my window faced the stairwell, and I got distracted
watching people climb up and down. Whenever an artist peered into my room, I drew back quickly, pretending not to have noticed.
Sometimes I pulled down the shade, but even then I felt I could be
seen
. The walls were thin, as if made out of paper. I could hear voices, entire conversations, a door swinging shut, engines starting,
laughter, the crunch of gravel, someone hopping down the stairs, an artist shouting in Italian, the dribble of a basketball
... One morning I felt I couldn’t breathe. I sat at my desk, pressing my hands over my ears, as voices leaked through the
little paper box that was my room. I waited for silence. Then I sprang out of my chair and drew back the shade, glancing outside
to make sure no one was in sight before opening the door. The sky was gray, and any moment it would begin to rain.

I walked rapidly with my head down, my arms tingling with paralysis. The story I was writing was a puzzle inhabited by mannequins
in exquisite clothes. The sentences too were shiny and stiff. The words did not look like words after a while. If I stared
at the word
and
long enough, it began to look strange. It didn’t look right. I sat down in front of town hall and closed my eyes.

“So how many pages have you written this week?”

I looked up and saw Martin, the person who had knocked on my door when I first arrived at the colony. He stood on the sidewalk,
an open book in his hand, which didn’t surprise me as he seemed like someone who would have his nose in a book while crossing
the street. The first raindrops began to fall, and I got up from the bench. “Are you heading back?” I asked, and we began
walking toward the colony.

“So how many? Twenty pages?” Martin said, looking at me. “Ten? Five?” When I continued to be silent, he said, “Two? One?”
He stared at me in wonder. “Have you even written a sentence?”

“I write very slowly.”

Martin laughed, turning his face to the sky. “I’m so relieved! All this time I thought, she’s writing pages and pages! You
don’t know how worried I was. But why don’t you ever come out of your apartment? What are you doing in there all day?”

“Well, I read,” I said. “And I think about the story I’m writing.”

“So you’re working on stories while you’re here?”

“Just one.”

Martin’s eyebrows lifted. “A single story?”

I nodded. There was a light, steady rain now, and we had arrived at our studios, but I didn’t want to return to mine. “Let’s
keep walking.”

“All right. But let me drop off my book.” In a few minutes, he came out of his studio carrying an umbrella and a mug of coffee.

“So you’re miserable here, aren’t you?” he said.

“I like living by the sea.”

“What’s so great about living by the sea?”

“It feels momentous, don’t you think?”

“It’s supposed to feel momentous, but does it? Are you really moved when you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Because I don’t feel anything,” he said. “I’m supposed to feel something ... I’m supposed to feel
wonder
.” The sidewalk was too narrow for both of us, and he began walking down the middle of the street as he talked, looking at
me over the parked cars. Midsentence, and a van would completely obscure him from view. “Because the only sincere response
I can have is if I don’t expect it. There’s a road here in town that I like because of the way it rises. You go up and up
this hill, and when you’re least expecting it, all of a sudden there it is—the sea—and I feel the seaness of the sea. For
a moment. As soon as I become aware of it, the feeling passes.”

“The seaness of the sea.”

“I said that, didn’t I? It’s brilliant, isn’t it? The seaness of the sea!” He finished drinking his coffee and put the mug
in his coat pocket.

My hair and shoes were drenched now, and my scarf felt twice as long around my neck, yet I didn’t mind. I liked how the rain
made everything vivid, as if my eyes were clearer and the world more sharply focused. The sidewalk glistened, and the cars
on the street looked newly polished. We walked for a moment in silence, staring at the bay.

“Well, this is all slightly unreal,” Martin said, “isn’t it?”

The next morning, I heard a soft rapping at my door. It was Andrea, grave and inscrutable, her thick arms curved around her
stomach. She wore oversize glasses, and her dark brown hair spread out from her face in the shape of a mushroom. She asked
me if I could take her to the grocery store.

In the car, I asked if she enjoyed living at the colony.

“Yes,” she replied, looking out the window.

“It’s pretty here, isn’t it?”

“I guess you could say that.”

At Safeway, Andrea pushed her cart slowly down the long gleaming aisles. Her face remained expressionless as she delicately
picked items off the shelf. She was a short, heavy woman who handled things gently, as if they were alive. At the checkout
stand, she carefully pried loose a copy of Star magazine from its bin.

When we were back at the colony, I invited myself into her apartment. “Can I see it? I’m curious what the other places look
like.”

“Susan,” she said, and her voice for the first time had a wryness to it. “You are a curious person.”

I laughed. “Is there anything wrong with that?” I helped carry her groceries to her door.

“Well, you know, curiosity killed the cat.” But she let me inside.