Page 31 of The New Couple in 5B

The lounge singer mourns her unrequited love, voice dripping with sorrow.

“I can’t,” I say, leaning in. “You know that.”

“Youwon’t,” he counters, eyes darkening.

Lately, what I can give him is not enough. This man, too, wants a home, a family with me. But that’s exactly what I am trying to escape by being here with him now. My life is with Paul. Even if my heart, my soul, is with this man.

“You think I can’t give you the things you want,” he says. There’s anger in his eyes.

Paul is wealthy; our life is secure. No, my love is right. My life with him would not be the same as the one I share with Paul. We’d struggle. And I don’t want that, either. My mother would say all that glitters is not gold. I’m smart enough to know this is true.

I try to draw my hand away, but he grabs my wrist. Too hard, his fingers digging painfully into my wrist.

“Stop it,” I say, feeling a flutter of fear. Everything has been light and easy until now—late nights dancing, stolen moments, too much champagne.

“I’m sorry,” he says, drawing back. His accent is thick when he drinks too much.

But the mood is ruined. And now in this dim room, at this late hour, I finally see clearly how wrong this is, what a mistake I am making in this affair. My husband loves me, and I’m a fool to risk what I have with him.

I rise.

“Please,” he begs. He’s so handsome with high cheekbones and smoldering eyes, thick, dark hair.

“I have to go. This is so wrong. I love Paul and I won’t leave him. Not even for you.”

“Willa,” he calls as I rush away. His voice is too loud, and people stare. I run from the bar, back up the avenue home, thinking about men and how they always want you to be whattheywant. When, I wonder, do you get to choose who you are?

nine

I am up before Chad, sifting through Uncle Ivan’s box labeled “The Windermere.”

It’s a treasure trove, filled almost to the top with old photographs, the original architectural drawing, apartment layouts. No amount of time in any research library would offer me this wealth of primary sources. As the sun comes up, debuting white golden through the east windows, I am way down the rabbit hole, with the contents of the box spread around me in a great arc—one pile for photos, one for notebooks, one for schematics and drawings.

I unfold a large drawing of the fifth floor—our floor. Our apartment and Charles and Ella’s unit used to be one much larger space. Now, Charles and Ella are 5A and we’re 5B.

I spread open the layout, the blue-and-white paper whispering, staining my fingertips. Someone—maybe Ivan—has drawn a big red line where the apartments were divided. To my right is the wall of the second bedroom I’m using for my office, but which I hope will one day be a nursery. A big built-in bookcase spans the length of the wall, still holding many of Ivan’s old volumes on the shelves.

Staring at it a moment and envisioning the place next door, I deduce that this wall butts up against the back wall of Charles and Ella’s kitchen. Was it hard for them to give it up? Did it feel like a loss? They’ve never even mentioned it.

I have come to recognize Ivan’s handwriting, and along the red line he’s written:apartment divided by the Aldridge family in 1960.

Ivan bought this place in 1965. Paul and Willa Winter lived here before that.

I look around the sunny space and try to imagine them. What were they like? Where did he write? Were they happy? Did they laugh and make love and fight, right here in this room? But my office, with its rows of shelves and gleaming floors, the window looking out at the building across Thirty-Seventh Street, my new desk, is quiet and serene. There’s no echo of the past. The space is too bright and beautiful, toonow.

I sift through the photographs and pull out the one Ivan has of them. Paul is slim with ridges for cheekbones and deep-set, dark eyes, serious in round specs. Handsome, I suppose in a bookish way, wearing a simple white oxford and pressed black pants. Willa is petite, a glowing beauty, looking up at him with a mischievous smile, wearing a clinging blue dress. He snakes a possessive arm around her waist, and they lean against a gleaming new Buick, the avenue behind them, the trees in the median in spring blossom. I lose myself for a few moments, staring back in time through the black-and-white photograph, think how unchanging is Park Avenue. It looks almost exactly the same, only the cars and the style of the people on the streets have changed.

When Chad starts clanging around the kitchen, I’m snapped back to the present and join him for breakfast, tell him about the apartment, and he agrees that maybe he knew that, too, that the whole floor once belonged to the Aldridge family.

“Did Ivan ever talk to you about Paul and Willa Winter?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and I wonder if he didn’t hear me. His audition is in a couple of hours; he’s probably running lines in his head.

Then, “Why don’t you ask Ella? I bet she and Charles know everything there is to know about this building, and especially the apartment.”

“They are on my list of people to interview,” I say, cracking an egg into the waiting frying pan. As he’s setting the table, he drops a fork that clatters on the hard tile floor.

“Sorry.”

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