The Key to 2B

The paint smell is the first thing anybody notices about unit 2B, and I always apologize for it, which is a weird thing for a realtor to do, apologizing for the thing that proves the place is new, but there it is. I had the windows cracked that Thursday afternoon in October, the ones that actually open, which in a converted warehouse is a selling point all by itself, and I was standing in the middle of all that empty square footage in my good blazer wondering if I remembered to lock my car.

My name is Doris Pinkney, and I have been selling real estate in this college town for long enough that I can tell a grad student from a slumming professor from across a parking lot. I was also, at that particular moment, four years out of a divorce that had ended so quietly people kept asking me if I was okay, which is its own special kind of humiliation. The last time I had shown a unit in this building, back when the renovation was just starting, I was still wearing my wedding ring, and I remember wiping dust off the windowsill with the hem of my blouse and thinking, well, at least Gerald never had to see me do this part.

So anyway. Fresh paint, sawdust, one lonely armchair the stager left behind because it was too heavy to bother with, and me, with my folder of flyers and my comfortable shoes. The ShowingTime app said my appointment was booked under the name Z. Pena, and I had spent the last hour picturing a woman, because Z could be Zelda or Zaina or Zoe, and honestly the name Pena sounded like a woman who did hot yoga and drank oat milk. I even rehearsed complimenting a hypothetical scarf.

The elevator dinged.

He was not a woman. He was also not what I expected in about four other ways, the main one being height, because he came out of that elevator a full head taller than me and I am five-eight in flats, and he had that slightly hunched way tall men get around normal ceilings, like he was apologizing for the space he took up. Early thirties maybe, good jaw hidden under a week of not shaving, and a jacket that had seen some winters. He looked around the empty lobby of the floor like it might bite him.

"Mr. Pena?" I said, hand out.

"Oh, uh, Zack, please, Mr. Pena was my father," he said, and then he winced at his own joke, and shook my hand, and his palm was warm and his grip was careful, like he was afraid of crushing me.

"I'm Doris. Thanks for coming out on a Thursday. Can I get you to forgive the paint smell? They finished the last coat, I want to say, Tuesday, and it just hangs on."

"No, it's, actually it smells like my advisor's lab, so it's kind of comforting," he said, and I laughed, because it was a good line, and he looked surprised and pleased that I laughed, which told me something about him right there.

We did the tour the way I always do it, slow through the living area so the ceilings can do their own talking, out onto the little balcony that overlooks the bike shop with the neon sign, and the whole time I kept waiting for the questions a real buyer asks. Where are the washer hookups, what's the HOA, how's the sound. He asked none of them. He walked with his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor more than the views, and he kept glancing at me when he thought I wasn't looking, which, honey, after thirty years of marriage and four years of not being married, I notice when a man looks at me, I just don't always know what to do with it.

The master suite is at the east end of the unit, and it is honestly the best room, big windows, a picture of morning light painted right on the listing. I led him in and did my little speech about the eastern exposure and how the previous building had been a glove factory, which everybody loves, and he stood there in the middle of all that emptiness and cleared his throat.

"So, my friend set this up," he said. "The whole thing. And I just want to, I guess I want to check the logistics before we, um."

"A friend of yours referred you? That's lovely, I love a referral," I said, because I thought that was where the sentence was going, people hand my card around like it's a coupon.

"Yeah, no, I mean, he said he took care of everything, so, is the service prepaid, or do I settle up with you?" he asked, and he said it while looking at the closet doors, the way a man looks at a menu when the question is embarrassing.

And here is the part where I have to be honest with you, which is the only kind of honest I am anymore. I did not understand him. Not even a little. My brain heard service and prepaid and settled on, of all things, a commission arrangement, some kind of finder's fee his friend had worked out, because in Doris Pinkney's world men in good jackets talk about money, and because the alternative did not exist inside my head. What I did register, underneath the misunderstanding, was the way he said it. The pink in his ears. The way he could not look at me while he asked.

"The, um, the arrangement," I said, and I heard my own voice do something I hadn't heard it do in years, a little lower, a little slower. "Your friend covered it. So you don't owe me anything out of pocket."

"Great. That's, okay. Great," he said, and exhaled as a man who had just paid a toll.

Some witchy little engine in me had already started up, some part of me that had been sitting in the dark since the divorce papers, and it heard flustered boy and said, oh, we could play with this. I am not proud. I am not entirely not proud, either. I was fifty-two and invisible at the grocery store, and this tall nervous man had booked a Thursday afternoon with me under a name I thought was a woman's, and whatever he thought he had purchased, he was standing in my listing, in my sale, with his ears going red.

"Well then," I said, and I heard myself glide right past the whole subject, "let me show you the rest, since your friend was so generous. The closet is really the sleeper feature here."

I opened the door to the walk-in, and I will tell you what that closet is, because it matters. It is not a closet so much as a small windowless room, and the developers had put in one of those double vanity setups inside it, two sinks side by side in the little dressing area, which the stager had styled with two toothbrushes in a cup like some couple lived there, which always made me a little sad in a way I didn't examine.

"Now this is what sells the unit," I said, running my hand along the counter. "Double sinks. His and hers. People think it's the windows, but it's this. Every couple I've ever sold to, they stand right here and one of them says, see, we'd never fight over the mirror."

He came and stood next to me, close, closer than the tour required, and looked at our two reflections in the mirror over the double sinks, and I watched him get braver by degrees, like a kid working up to the high dive.

"So we're, both of us, here," he said slowly, testing the words out. "Like this is happening. Right now. In this unit."

"It's a Thursday, the unit's empty, and your friend took care of everything," I said, and my heart pounded like a rabbit, let me tell you, because I still thought I was talking about a bonus structure, and because my body, that traitorous, long-banked body, had apparently not gotten the memo about what we were talking about at all. "So why don't we just see how it feels."

He looked at me in that mirror for a long second, me in my good blazer and him in his winter jacket, both of us framed over two sinks and two staged toothbrushes, and then he reached out and put his hand on my shoulder, very gently, like I was the one who might spook.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked. "I feel like I should ask."

"Zack," I said, and I turned around under his hand so we were face to face, or rather face to sternum, and I tipped my head back and looked up at this stranger who was a head taller than me and twice as nervous as me and completely wrong about what was happening, the same as I was, both of us standing in a half-million dollar closet with our own private misunderstandings, "you can certainly try."

He bent down, and I closed my eyes, and that is the moment, as far as I can reconstruct it, where everything went sideways for both of us.

* * *

*Zack*

Her mouth was soft and she tasted like coffee and she kissed me back with a kind of patience that I did not expect, no rush to it at all, just her hand coming up to my jacket lapel and holding on like she was checking whether the fabric was good quality, which for all I knew she was. When we broke apart she stayed close, her forehead almost touching my chin, and she said, "Well. You kiss better than you negotiate." I laughed, some noise came out of me anyway, and she smiled at that, an actual smile with corners in it, and I thought, okay, whatever this is, I am not going to be the one who stops it.

"Show me the master bath," she said, or maybe I said it, honestly by then I was not keeping score of who was steering. There was a bath down the hall, still smelling of grout and new caulk, and the shower in it was one of those glass boxes the size of a small parking space, two shower heads, a little teak bench in the corner that nobody had ever sat on. She walked in and stood in the middle of it with the afternoon light coming gray through the frosted panel, and she looked, I don't know, available is the crude word, but what I actually remember is that she looked comfortable, like a woman standing in her own kitchen.

I stepped in after her, which was ridiculous, both of us fully dressed in a dry shower stall in an empty loft, and I reached out and touched her wrist, just the wrist, over the cuff of her blazer. "Hey," I said. "Can I ask you something dumb?"

"You've asked several already," she said.

"This is the one that matters. Do you go by the name in the email? Because I've been, um, rehearsing it in my head all week, and it feels weird to say out loud, like I'm doing a bit."

I watched her face do something small then, a flicker, a hitch in the machinery, and she looked down at my hand on her wrist before she looked up at me. "What name did the email say?" she asked. "Doris," I said. "Doris P. I figured the P was, you know, privacy. Professional discretion. Which, respect, by the way, I get it."

She was quiet for a second, long enough that I heard the building's ventilation hum, and then she said, "Doris is fine. Doris is what