Free Picturing Will by Ann Beattie Page B

wineglasses, which could be hers if she married him? What about the stereo (they could compromise on the volume), the mattress (they could get one larger), the bath towels (if she didn’t like brown, they could buy them in every color of the rainbow).
    As she came to the end of the row of brownstones, she saw the man who lived in the garden apartment sitting on the front steps, watching his dog play with a bone on the little patch of cement inside the front gate. Daryl was a good-looking man in his late fifties who had retired from NBC, where he had worked as a cameraman, to devote his time to his great love: the acquisition and repair of jukeboxes. The garden behind the brownstone prospered because it was cared for by his sister, who came from her apartment in Hoboken two or three times a week to plant and prune. His sister was responsible for ending—or almost ending—the springtime ant problem in Mel’s apartment. The ants had climbed the twisting wisteria boughs and come through the screens until Estelle ingeniously designed an upside-down funnel that fit around the base of the vine and sprayed it with chemicals to repel ants. “All he has to do is remember to douse it every couple of days, but I know he slips up,” Estelle had said to Jody when she last visited. “All his life he’s put his cereal bowl in the sink ‘to soak,’ which means that he was too lazy to wash it. All men are the same about their cereal bowls—as if they’d be washing a part of themselves down the drain if they cleaned them. Cereal bowls are sitting in sinks all over America, filled to the brim with water.” Naturally, Jody was crazy about Estelle. She loved to be invited to walk in the garden behind the apartment to see the little plants and flowers. From the fourth floor, most of the flowers were only a pastel haze.
    “She’s not here today,” Daryl said. “I thought I’d take the opportunity to sit out front. She gets insulted if I want to see some city life instead of flowers.” He picked up the blue leash the dog trailed behind it. She smiled down at the little dog, whining happily to see her at the front gate. Will had been asking for a dog. She suspected that Will and Mel were in collusion.
    “The tulips are up,” Daryl said. “The ones with the green centers.”
    “Parrot tulips,” she said.
    Daryl gave her the look a parent gives a child who has said a dirty word the parent would like to disappear from the child’s vocabulary: a glazed-over look, with the trace of a prim smile.
    The dog ran up the steps behind her and stood panting at the front door. Daryl got up and brought the dog down the stairs again. She put her key in the door and pushed it open—it always stuck on the ugly carpeting—then closed it behind her. The half-table in the hallway had a vase of dried flowers on it, and the gray rug had been recently vacuumed. This was because the second-floor apartment was empty. The landlord always put out flowers and hung a painting in the stairwell when an apartment was empty. When it was filled again, the painting would disappear and the flowers would be left to crumble into confetti on the tabletop.
    Climbing the stairs, Jody thought about the peculiarity of walking into someone else’s life. Now the dog downstairs knew her. Just like that, she was greeted by the small things that surrounded Mel’s life. You never merely took on another person, you drew all the things surrounding that person to you like a magnet—the postman’s nod, the gas station attendant smiling through the windshield at both of you, the waiter who asks, “How are you?” and looks to both faces, the colleague’s wife who asks you to lunch. Before you knew it, there would be a drinking glass that was your favorite; the lipstick you left behind would be put in a dish on the back of the toilet. He’d hide your toothbrush so you’d go home and have to buy another, and then there the toothbrush would be, in the holder, the next time