“It’s a floor-through?”
“It’s a floor-through duplex. I don’t think there are any buildings on Cavanaugh Street with more than one apartment on a floor. Not anymore. It was different in the old days.”
The elevator door opened. Paul Hazzard put his hand against the rubber safety edge and let Hannah go in first.
“In the old days, this was a tenement neighborhood,” he said, nodding. “I’m impressed with what’s been done to it. Most of the tenement neighborhoods have become slums.”
“Most of the tenement neighborhoods were slums,” Hannah said. “I always tell my grandchildren that that’s what I grew up in. A slum. My grandchildren live in suburbs, of course. My children wouldn’t live anywhere else.”
“What about you? Why do you live here?”
“Why not?” Hannah shrugged. “I’ve lived here all my life. And my children did well. All our children did well, and the grandchildren who are grown did well, too, and we’ve had a little private urban renewal. It’s very comfortable here.”
“I wish it were comfortable where I live,” Paul Hazzard said. “I’ve still got the town house my I-don’t-know-how-many-greats grandfather built before the Revolutionary War, but the neighborhood’s not what it was. To put it mildly. The neighborhood’s downright dangerous.”
“Oh, yes,” Hannah agreed. “So much of the city is dangerous these days.”
She had been holding her finger on the “open door” button. Now she released it and the door slid closed. Her head felt stuffed with cotton and very floaty. It was as if she had had a good strong cocktail to drink. Hannah never had anything to drink except a glass of wine at Christmas. Her mother hadn’t approved of drinking, and her father had done too much of it.
The elevator cab slid upward, silent. Paul Hazzard studied the pattern of the wallpaper on the cab’s sides.
“Here we are,” he said as the cab bounced to a stop. “Why are all the foyers in this building dark? It isn’t safe.”
“Cavanaugh Street is always safe,” Hannah told him. “I don’t think there’s ever been a crime here, not really, except one Halloween we had an attempted robbery.”
“Only attempted?”
“Somebody coshed the thief with a—I don’t remember what it was. But it was all right, you know. Nobody got hurt and they caught the thief and we didn’t even have to go to court because there was a plea-bargain.”
“Wonderful,” Paul Hazzard said.
Hannah found her apartment key, wondering why her fingers were still stiff. She did not wonder why she still couldn’t breathe. Paul Hazzard was the handsomest man who had ever said two words to her in her life, never mind asked her to dinner, which he had done. He was the tallest and thinnest and most Wasp-looking man she had ever met.
Hannah got her apartment door open and stepped into her own front hall. Paul Hazzard came in after her and Hannah found herself wincing. It all looked so—so stodgy. So solid and middle-aged and graceless. The big square club chairs in the living room. The hand-tatted antimacassars. The doilies her grandmother had made, badly, from spools of undyed thread. What had she been thinking of?
She scurried quickly into the living room, to the little glass panel in the built-in bookshelves that hid what she had always thought of as her “bar.” Now that seemed pretentious as hell. It wasn’t a bar. It was a bookshelf with a couple of bottles of Scotch on it. They were probably the wrong kind of Scotch.
“Well,” she said. “I don’t keep much in the way of liquor, but I do have some Scotch. If you’d like to have something to drink while I’m getting dressed…”
“Do you have Perrier water?” Paul asked. “Or Poland Spring? Something like that?”
“You don’t want a real drink?”
Paul Hazzard shook his head. “I gave all that up years ago. You have to be so careful with alcohol. It doesn’t take anything at all to get dependent. But you should have something if you want…”
“No,” Hannah said. “No, I don’t drink. I never have. I stick to diet soda and coffee.”
“I’ll bring you some apricot herb tea. It’s better for you. Caffeine does terrible things to your intestines. And as for diet sodas—” He shrugged. “Chemicals,” he told her. “You know.”
“Of course,” Hannah said, although she didn’t know. “I do have some mineral water.”
“I’ve gotten really serious about taking care of myself these last few years,” Paul Hazzard said. “It’s so important when you pass fifty. If you don’t take control of your life, you’ll really go to pieces.”