"I'm not going to have sex with you."
"I'm not asking you to."
"You're old enough to be my granddad."
"Probably so."
He left his hand on her back while another train came and went. Audi was gone the next day. He sat on the bench with a cup of coffee in each hand and watched four crowds get into four trains. Then he went home.
The city turned dark, gray, and frigid as the month wore on. The streets were slick and the tall buildings looked like they were cut from wet cardboard and stuck against the sky.
Each morning Gerald sat at the station, scanning the platform for her, searching the overcoat-wearing, briefcase-toting crowd. He noticed women with their purses hanging loose and open from their shoulders. Men shouting into cell phones while their briefcases sat unwatched beside them. A treasure trove of targets. But no Audi.
Gerald watched through the window of his office as the winter came in fast and cold. The snow blew in sideways and piled in dirty drifts along the edges of the rooftops. The pigeons at first huddled together in the rafters and eventually disappeared altogether. Gerald tried to fill the hours in the day. He balanced his checkbook. He did crossword puzzles. He wrote, toying around with different stories, far-fetched tales with beautiful female pickpockets as the leading characters. Mostly he just looked out the window. He wondered if Audi's apartment had a heater. He wondered if she'd really had an apartment to begin with.
He went by the market near his house every day on his way home. He liked putting his hands on the fresh vegetables, weighing the ripe fruit. He walked slowly, taking his time, planning his meals as he wandered the aisles. This took time. Bringing it all home and cooking something also ate up the evening. By the time everything was eaten and cleaned up, it was almost time to go to bed, and another day was over.
A week before Christmas, he was sauteing onions when he heard the knock. He left the onions sizzling in the skillet and went to the door. Audi was there, the wind blowing cold and wintry around her, her hands deep in her pockets, her ballet shoes wet with dirty snow.
She looked at the ground, made patterns in the sludge with her toe. "Hi," she said.
"Hi," Gerald said. He stepped aside and she came in.
He put on a pot of coffee; then he made a huge omelet with eight eggs, green peppers, onions, chopped-up smoked sausage. Audi sat at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her and didn't speak. She watched him cook. He cut the omelet in half with the spatula and put half on a plate and set it in front of her. He sat down with the rest of it and began to eat it right out of the skillet. Audi stared at her plate.
"You don't like eggs?" Gerald said.
"They're fine," she said. "It just looks pretty. I don't want to mess it up."
"It's just an omelet."
"It's been a long time since I've had an omelet."
She ate, and she told him the story, how she'd come home to her apartment and found the door boarded up, how she didn't even know who the landlord was, how she had no idea what happened. She found one of her roommates on a bench at the park. He told her the rest.
"Drugs or something," Audi said. "The guy said that the cops came and busted them, and after that the landlord kicked everybody out. Boarded the place up. Said she'd had enough of renting to worthless kids."
"Shame," Gerald said. "Not really your fault."
"Hmm."
She finished her plate, and he took it from her and put it in the sink. He poured her a cup of coffee and sat back down at the table. She held it tight between her hands.
"How did you find my house?" Gerald said.
"Followed you one day, a few weeks ago." She pushed her hair back. Looked from the cup to Gerald and back again. "You said I could come if I needed to."
"I know I did. And you're welcome to. I just wondered how."
"I don't want to impose."
"You're not."
She drank the coffee. "The food was good," she said.
They sat at the table in silence and drank their coffee. The snow started to come down again, edging against the windowsill like silent white feathers. Frost coated the glass. The heater kicked on with a groan, and the warm air blew through the kitchen. Audi squished her shoes against the tile.
"You want some dry clothes?" Gerald said.
She nodded. Gerald left her at the table and went upstairs. He had a walk-in closet in his bedroom; the right side was full of his stuff, on the left still hung all of Dolores's clothes. He hadn't known what to do with them. Her shoes were lined up neatly against the wall, except for a pair of heavy brown boots-the last shoes she'd worn-thrown haphazardly in the corner, exactly where she'd left them. He took a selection of shirts and pants and carried them back downstairs.
Audi was sitting on the couch in the living room when he got back. Gerald laid the clothes out on the coffee table in front of her.
"So retro!" she said, fingering the frilled sleeves of a scarlet blouse. "Where'd you get all this stuff?"
"It was my wife's," Gerald said.
Audi nodded and looked at the clothes.
"She died a few years ago," he went on.
"Of what?"
"Stroke."
Audi picked up a pair of brown slacks and stood up. She held the slacks in front of her and looked down, lifted her leg, twisted her toes. "Do you miss her?"
He nodded. "Often."
"I'm going to put these on," she said. She took the scarlet blouse and the brown slacks and went into the bathroom. She was in there a long time. Gerald turned on the TV. A rerun of The A-Team was on. Mr. T beat someone up. Gerald turned down the volume.
"What was her name?" Audi said. She was standing in the doorway, looking slim and clean and young in his wife's clothes.
"Who?"
"Your wife."
"Oh. Dolores. Her name was Dolores."
Audi looked at her reflection in the dark window. "Very pretty," she said, flexing her arm, turning around and standing on her tiptoes. The snow fell quiet and heavy.
She stayed in the guest bedroom that night. He took the sheets down from the top of the closet and made the bed while she stood in the doorway and watched him. She grinned at him.
"For a guy you're pretty good at that."
"I had to learn," Gerald said. He tucked the sheets under the corners of the bed.
"My ex-boyfriend was terrible at it. He always made me help him." She sat down on the end of the bed. "It was a huge pain in the ass."
Gerald propped the pillows against the headboard. "There's a TV," he said, "if you want to watch TV, but I don't have HBO or anything, and I don't know where the remote is."
She crawled up to the top of the bed and settled back into the pillows. "I'll be fine," she said. "I think I'm just going to go on to sleep. I'm tired." She smiled at him. Her skin was fair and her cheeks were flushed and pink. Her hair fell over her eyebrows and spread out behind her on the pillow.
Gerald backed out the door. "Okay, then," he said. "Good night, then." He pulled the door to behind him.
The next day he woke at seven and got dressed. He cracked the door into Audi's room and peeked inside. She lay asleep, under the covers, except for one leg, a long fleshy leg that hung out and down to the floor, bare and pink. Dolores's pants were on the floor beside the bed. Gerald looked at Audi's skin as she shifted in her sleep. He shook his head and shut the door.
At the office, for the first time in weeks, he found himself compelled to write. He took his latest attempt at a memoir out of the drawer and read the first page. The writing was pedestrian, dull. The scene was a boring one, a school play, from ages ago, from third grade. He folded the pages in half and threw them in the garbage and slid a fresh sheet into the typewriter. He began to write, this time starting the story with Dolores's death. He wrote with fire, the words crackling like lightning across the page. He saw himself rolling over to the empty part of the bed, relishing the space, nuzzling into the pillow as the sun made its way through the windows. Then rising late, stumbling downstairs, where Dolores's hair was splayed across the table, her hands dangling limp and straight down at her sides, milk dripping slowly onto the tile.