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Martin opened his door to signal that our conversation was at an end. I trembled as I stepped out of his car. “Well,
hasta luego
, Susan,” Martin said rather breezily.

“Thank you for taking me fishing,” I said stiffly.

“Yes,” he paused. “Good night, Susan.”

There is a pleasure in having secrets, an inner life that no one knows anything about. I like the impassive face I present
to the world even though I may feel a burning inside. To tell someone about my pain is to give it up. Or worse, I would have
to see it grow small in the eyes of others. But not to tell anyone means that none of it has a life outside my head.

I gave an informal reading with two other writers in the colony lounge one afternoon at the end of April. Afterward Karine
tapped me on the shoulder. “You are a sly one, aren’t you?” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, and I thought she knew about me and Martin.

“You’re not as innocent as you look, my dear. You can pretend no longer with me. I always thought you were so nice and shy,
but all the while there were these merciless thoughts going on inside your head. I’m afraid of you now.”

I looked into Karine’s eyes. “Everyone always says I’m nice, but they never mean it as a compliment. I’m not nice. I don’t
think I am.”

“You don’t
think
you are,” she said, smiling.

Martin was nowhere in sight. I assumed he had left early because he didn’t like my work and didn’t want to compromise himself
by saying untruthful things about it. I felt restless and decided to visit Andrea in her studio. She was knitting a scarf
and watching television, a glass of water on the table in front of her. The vase that I had seen filled with daffodils was
now empty of flowers. I sat down beside her, blinking at the television screen, where characters with the same cloying beauty
loved each other under the warm California light. During a commercial, I asked Andrea how she could stand watching this stuff.

“I don’t take it too seriously,” she replied.

“But why not watch something good?”

“I get tired of meaningfulness.”

We went out for coffee and afterward sat on the beach, listening to the beating of the ocean. There was a wild, desolate smell
of brine and broken shells, and strewn along the shore were moon jellies and huge tuberous roots that looked like serpents
disgorged from the sea. Not far from us a ravaged seagull stuck out from the sand.

I forgot myself, then remembered myself.

Andrea was shaping mounds of sand with slow, careful hands. “Do you think there’s something funny about this town?”

The wind was sharp and cold, and I sat up, wrapping my arms tight around me. “What do you mean?”

“I noticed a man sitting at the table next to us at the café. He was looking at me, and I felt peculiar, like maybe I had
seen him before. And then I remembered I
had
seen him before. A week before, he was standing in line behind me at the bank.” Andrea was silent for a moment. “Both times
he said something about me.”

“What did he say?”

“In the bank he said, “She looks all right, but you never know.’ And in the café, he said, ‘She thinks highly of herself,
doesn’t she?’ “

“Why would he be talking about you?”

Andrea shrugged. “Sometimes when I’m walking down Market Street, I feel there’s a subtle pattern to the people coming toward
me and the people following behind. It seems to be random, these people walking on the street, but it’s not. It’s like everyone
is pretending to be jogging or walking a dog or looking at a store window, everyone is pretending to be going on with their
own lives. But all the while they’re interested, they’re watching me and picking me apart. I always pretend I don’t notice
anything, but everyone is just waiting for you to give yourself away. People say terrible things about you.” Andrea’s eyes
had a glassy sheen, though her face remained stony and impenetrable.

“But how do you know they’re talking about you?” I asked.

Andrea frowned slightly. “Well, I hear them.” She looked down at her hands. “I shouldn’t have said all this,” she said quietly.

“No, I’m glad you did.”

“You probably think I should be in the loony bin.”

“No, I don’t think that.” But I felt a chill inside me, a sick, empty feeling as if all at once I was falling.

I moved out of the colony at the end of May. I never did finish my story and left the drafts behind in a box in the deadend
storage space of my studio.

Sometimes I received postcards from Martin hastily clacked out on his Underwood. The letters were always animated, full of
misspellings and unfinished sentences. He lived in the present, and other faces delighted him. I imagined his conversations
unfolding slowly through the night, taking shape by dawn. He said his greatest sympathies lay with Neville in
The Waves
, but I always thought of him as Bernard, rushing off to catch the next train without a ticket.

I saw Andrea again two years later, after I had moved to New York. It was on a foggy December morning as I was coming out
of my studio in Brooklyn. The city seemed insubstantial, barely formed in the pale morning light. She was bent over on the
sidewalk tying her shoe, her face obscured by her thick hair. “Andrea,” I said, and she straightened up and looked at me with
a solemn smile. The glasses she wore took up half her face. “Andrea,” I repeated, but she turned away and began walking down
the street. I followed her a few steps and touched her arm. “Won’t you say anything?” I asked her. “Why don’t you speak to
me?” But she kept walking with her head down, though the curious smile remained on her lips, and finally I let her go, watching
her disappear into the traffic on the street.

N
o one wanted to rent the Chens’ apartment. It sat vacant for three months, collecting dust and heat. Footsteps now and then
echoed along the wood floors. Voices came and went. Sometimes the drone of a fly butting itself against glass. Until silence
fell, and the fly—its legs as thin as eyelashes—dried on the kitchen windowsill.

In August, when Mr. Chen opened the door, he felt the apartment’s hot breath as he entered, the Christian lady following behind.
The windows had become as cruel as a magnifying glass. Mr. Chen’s head swam, as if it were severed from his body and floating
in the ocean. He blinked, trying to see the woman more clearly.

“A good apartment, this one,” he heard himself saying. “Everything paid for. Garbage. Electricity.”

His eyes were watering. For a moment, he could not remember what he was going to say. He walked over to the windows and began
pulling down the blinds. Light glinted off cars and trees from the parking lot.

“Garden also,” Mr. Chen murmured.

His wife called the apartment their worst investment. “Other than you and I getting married, this apartment has been the biggest
mistake of our lives,” she said.

No one wanted to live there. The rent was too high, even though the Chens kept lowering their price, stopping at eight hundred
to break even. People called, but lost interest when they heard it wasn’t near the subway station. The ones who actually saw
the apartment examined the scratched floors, smiled politely at the 1970s plastic cabinets, inquired whether there was a dishwasher.
There wasn’t. Washing machine? Dryer? Mr. Chen shook his head. The laundromat was next door. After that, there was only the
bedroom left to see. This was the moment Mr. Chen dreaded the most. He always felt an urge to apologize for how small it was.
The previous owner had called it “quaint” when he showed it to the Chens eight years ago. If the people were kind, they went
through the motions of opening the closet door and peering inside. A short while later, they thanked Mr. Chen, saying they
would think about it. The door closed, and Mr. Chen was left standing alone in the apartment. He was a stout man, but at such
moments his body seemed to cave in, as if his bones were softening. The apartment was quiet and hollowed out. A part of him
wanted to rest on the dull wood floor, the same color as earth. He didn’t want to go home to his wife and tell her of another
failure.

They had bought the apartment because Mr. Chen thought it would be safe to invest in real estate. It wasn’t like the stock
market, where you bought what you couldn’t touch, your money rising and falling with intangible economic winds. Mr. Chen had
a literal mind. He promised his wife that they would earn four or even five hundred dollars a month once they paid off the
mortgage. He hadn’t realized that the apartment management would raise their maintenance fee every year, that the value of
the property would fall, and that no one would be interested in renting. It was a bad sign that most of the people living
there were the apartment owners themselves.

When Mr. Chen thought about it carefully, he was convinced that he had been fooled into buying the apartment. He blamed the
garden, a conservatory adjoining the lobby, which was always pungent with the smell of overripe flowers. Eight years earlier,
he and Mrs. Chen had been beguiled by the magenta-speckled lilies as they sat together on one of the wooden benches. Mr. Chen
had gotten out of his seat once or twice, pacing the garden in an excited manner. “Who wouldn’t want to live here?” he said
in Chinese to his wife.

Mrs. Chen knew that her husband was naïve, that he had a habit of promising things he couldn’t deliver. When he began exaggerating,
her lips would wrinkle in disgust. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she would say, waving her hand impatiently in front of her face.
Sitting in the garden, however, Mrs. Chen was distracted by the huge lavender peonies that looked as clear and delicate as
watercolors. She couldn’t help but be lulled by the fragrances wafting beneath her tingling nose as she listened to her husband’s
boastful talk, all his plans for them and their son. She could not deny that the garden was a beautiful thing. In the end,
she agreed that they should invest their savings in the apartment.

Eight years had gone by, and their son was now dead. Whenever Mrs. Chen saw the garden, she felt a bitterness rise up to her
mouth. The smell of lilies reminded her of funerals now. Their rich, exhausting perfume made her want to claw at her throat.
The transplanted flowers were crowded too close together, and their thin, transparent petals gave off a ghostly luster. This
was not a living garden, Mrs. Chen decided. Not a place where things came back.

When he first met the Christian lady, Mr. Chen was startled by the coldness of her fingers. He wondered if she had poor circulation.
She slipped her bony hand out from his, glancing quickly around the lobby. She wore a dark blue suit in spite of the heat
and a thin white blouse with faux-pearl buttons. Though she was respectably dressed, the suit was too large for her and made
her seem almost pitiful, as if she were wearing another person’s clothes.

When Mr. Chen first called the woman to set up an appointment, he got her answering machine. A listless recorded voice spoke
to him.
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall
there be any more pain
. There was a pause and then a beep. Mr. Chen hung up the phone, for some reason too embarrassed to leave a message. He called
back later that night after he and Mrs. Chen had closed the grocery store.

A soft voice answered the phone.

“Yes. Hello,” he said abruptly. “I am calling you back. You say you interested in the apartment? Garden City Apartments, 26
Harrison.”

Mrs. Chen listened on the extension as her husband spoke. It was a constant regret of hers that she had not married a more
cultured man. Mr. Chen’s brusqueness always became more apparent when he spoke English. It was even worse when he was on the
phone, for then he shouted his responses as if he were deaf. What must these Americans think? she wondered. The woman said
she was interested. Her name was Marnie Wilson, and she agreed to meet Mr. Chen at noon the next day. Mrs. Chen heard a click
at the other end as the American lady hung up, and then she, too, put down the receiver.

“Did you hear?” Mr. Chen said to his wife.

“Yes,” Mrs. Chen said, “but will she rent it? Bargain with her if you have to, but don’t show her you’re desperate. That will
only scare her away.”

Mr. Chen remembered his wife’s words now as he stood in front of the shaded windows of the apartment, nodding and smiling
at the Christian lady. He noticed that she stepped gingerly around the empty rooms, as if she were afraid of setting off echoes
with her heels. Mr. Chen judged that she was twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven years old. Her formality and meekness made her
seem old-fashioned. Maybe she came from another country, though to Mr. Chen’s ear she spoke perfect English.

As they rode down in the elevator to see the garden, Mr. Chen learned that the Christian lady worked as a receptionist at
World Wide Travel. Had Mr. Chen heard of it? The office was only three or four blocks away. Mr. Chen said he had not. He didn’t
know of any office buildings close by. The woman wrapped her hand tighter around her purse strap and stared at the glowing
display of numbers as they descended eleven floors. Mr. Chen scratched his forehead with the tip of his pinkie. He was hoping
she wouldn’t care about the subway station.

The elevator doors slid open, and Mr. Chen gestured for the woman to go ahead. They walked through the lobby, past the double
glass doors that led into the garden. As had happened before, Mr. Chen experienced the curious sensation of leaving behind
some part of himself. Everything suddenly was light and color and air. So many flowers he didn’t know the names of, the same
color as autumn leaves, gold and burgundy and rust. Sunlight streamed through the glass vault of the ceiling, yet because
the conservatory was air-conditioned it was cooler here than inside the apartment.

“Beautiful garden,” Marnie Wilson said, staring at the chrysanthemums.

“Yes, beautiful,” Mr. Chen agreed.