Little light thing goes red between the two couches, above a recliner across from the narrow hallway to the door to the laundryroom, the name of the room in which laundry’s done, though it could also be named Rachel or Leah, or Adela. Then, her door. Jambed at an odd recline. As if pasted on the wall, a stamp. As if a patch sewn onto the flag of a stranger. Imageless. Alan Koenigsburg — senior partner in Koenigsburg & McQueen, which was how he’d come to own this house, Israel’d recommended for opposing counsel, testified responsibility to the tribunal — having obtained the necessary permits, had hired the brother of a client to sledge his hammer to a wall; the room, and the washroom, too, adjoining, and through another door, to the right, Storage — all was redeemed from nothingness. Potentiality until. It would always have that, impermanence. He’d never enter the Underground through the wardrobe of his Domestic, as did the other husbands through the wardrobes of theirs, preferring instead the access of an Apple Street sewergrate, having a subterranean fear, the contracting mistakes, the problems with his foundation as Alan’d say, too close to home. To remove your hard soles, at the threshold, then to replace them with soft, with the slippers, is another way to sanctify home, a room of her own. Adela’d been here for maybe a year, and her drawers still as empty as life: no movie career or master of business degree, no husband dumbly rich with portfolio — her inexpensive imitation denim still in its suitcase, whose own home is the floor. Twinbed with bedding themed by dinosaurs, Oriental partition of ricepaper. On sale at a steal, $69.99 for a limited time only at Wiltinghills, not the Siburban location but the Upper East Side & Lex. In the bathroom adjoining, a bath slash shower and toilet, alongside a stack of magazines wetted then dried into each other into a tablet, half off the Law. Inside the room proper, atop a table, her own framed images, these limited to frontispieces of various samizdat editions smuggled autographed by their authors either in prison or exile, then those family photographs of her mother and which sister or her posing waterside, Lake Balaton, the Danube, Vltava, which is the Moldau, the Irtysh or Ob, the same; a strip of photos she’d taken with Wanda amid an airtight steel trap sunk a million miles deep, Port Authority, maybe, or below Grand Central Station; and then on that table’s only low shelf, a dictionary, which she’d memorize on the weekends when she had off if the Koenigsburgs weren’t entertaining, they had to give notice. Hall: a connecting passage, charitably the lowermost room in a house set with doors leading to other rooms, empty, forgotten, a crawlspace it’s called; from there, a door slamming shut onto Storage, a room half the space of hers in which she keeps the clothes she bought here as opposed to those she brought with (wardobed): the new underwear and stockings she never wore, three sweaters and a skirt pressed and folded, tzedakah, the skirt Alan and Edy’s and the sweaters Hanna and Israel’s presents, last Xmas; Adela’s to get another skirt this year, this one longer at Edy’s insistence, more demure than the mistake of last year, if tomorrow.
