The only other person in the fourth-floor corridor who seems to be here is the crazy woman in 402, Mrs. Zabritski, a widow with wild white hair, pinned up by two old tortoise-shell combs that just add to the confusion. The Golds have told him she survived one of the concentration camps when a girl. She looks at Harry as if he’s crazy, too, to be here.

He explains to her one day, since they meet at the elevator and she looks at him funny, “I had this sudden impulse to come down early this year. My wife’s just starting up in the real-estate business and I got bored hanging around the house.”

Mrs. Zabritski’s little neckless head is screwed around at an angle on her shoulder, as if she’s bracing an invisible telephone against her ear. She stares up at him furiously, her lips baring her long false teeth in a taut oval that reminds him of that Batman logo you saw everywhere this summer. Her eyes have veiny reds to them, stuck hot and round in their skeletal sockets, that wasting-away look Lyle had. “It’s hell,” the tiny old lady seems to pronounce, her lips moving stiffly, trying to keep her teeth in.

“It’s what? What is?”

“This weather,” she says. “Your wife – ” She halts, her lips working.

“My wife what?” Rabbit tries to curb his tendency to shout, since hearing doesn’t seem to be one of her problems, regardless of that pained way her head is cocked.

“Is a cute little thing,” she finishes, but looks angry saying it. Her hair sticks up in wisps as if it was moussed and abandoned.

“She’ll be down soon,” he almost shouts, embarrassed as much by his secrets, his hopeful lies, as by her dwarfish warped craziness. This is the kind of woman he’s ended up with, after Mary Ann and then Janice and Ruth’s silky-sack heaviness and Peggy Fosnacht’s splayed eyes and Jill’s adolescent breasts and stoned compliance and Thelma with her black casket and Pru glowing dimly in the dark like a tough street in blossom, not to mention that tired whore in Texas with the gritty sugar in her voice and that other paid lay in his life, a girl he once in a great while remembers, at a Verity Press outing in the Brewer Polish-American Club, she was skinny and had a cold and kept her bra and sweater on, there in this room off to the side, where she was waiting on a mattress like a kind of prisoner, young, her belly and thighs sweaty from the cold she had but pure and pale, a few baby-blue veins where the skin molded around the pelvic bones, her pussy an old-fashioned natural dark ferny triangle, flourishing, not shaved at the sides to suit a bathing suit that way you see in the skin magazines. You paid the guy who stood outside the door, ten dollars for ten minutes, he hadn’t shaved very recently, Rabbit assumed he was her brother, or maybe her father. He assumed the girl was Polish because of the name of the club, she might have been eighteen, Mrs. Zabritski would have been that age after getting out of the concentration camp, smooth-skinned, lithe, a young survivor. What time does to people; her face is broken into furrows that crisscross each other like a checkerboard of skin.

“She should wait,” Mrs. Zabritski says.

“I’ll tell her you said so,” he says loudly, fighting the magnetism sucking at him out of the unspoken fact that she is a woman and he is a man and both are alone and crazy, a few doors apart in this corridor like a long peach-colored chute glinting with silver lines in the embossed wallpaper. All his life seems to have been a journey into the bodies of women, why should his journey end now? Say she was eighteen when the war ended, he was twelve, she is only six years older. Sixty-two. Not so bad, can still work up some juice. Beu Gold is older, and sexy.