were what repelled her. Psychologists called it social phobia. She was able to be around people only briefly and could not tolerate crowds at all. She would touch no one and would not allow herself to be touched. She had a phone but rarely answered it. She shopped almost exclusively on the Internet. Groceries were left on her doorstep, where she could collect them when the delivery boy had gone. She loved people, she said, especially those in books, which was largely how she knew them, but she declined to associate with those who were not fictional.
I interrupted then to say, “Sometimes I think there may be more truth in fiction than in real life. Or at least truth condensed so that it’s more easily understood. But what do I know of real people or the world, considering my strange existence?”
She said, “Perhaps you have always known everything important but will need a lifetime to discover what you know.”
Although I wanted her to explain what she meant, my greater desire was to hear more about her past before the coming dawn drove me underground. I encouraged her to continue.
Her wealthy, widowed father, sympathetic to her condition and suspicious of psychologists, chose to indulge her rather than force her to seek treatment. As a child, Gwyneth had been a prodigy, self-educated and emotionally mature far beyond her years. She lived alone on the top floor of her father’s midtown mansion, behind a locked door to which only he was allowed a key. Food and other items were left outside her door, and when her quarters periodically required housekeeping, she retreated to a room that only she cleaned, to wait until the staff had gone. She did her own laundry, made her own bed. For a long time, except for people on the street, whom she watched from her fourth-floor windows, she saw no one but her father.
Shortly before her thirteenth birthday, she had chanced upon a magazine article about Goth style, and the photographs had fascinated her. She studied them for days. On the Internet, she sought other examples of Goth girls in all their freaky majesty. Eventually she began to think that if she became a Gwyneth different from the one whom she had always been, a Gwyneth who denied the world all power over her and challenged it with her very appearance, she might be able to walk in the open with a degree of freedom. Denied sun, her skin was already as pale as lily petals. Spiked and pomaded hair, heavy black mascara, other makeup, facial jewelry, sunglasses, and faux tattoos on the backs of her hands were more than a costume; they were also a kind of courage. She discovered that too extreme a Goth look drew attention that she didn’t want, but soon she found the happy medium. Thereafter she could live beyond her fourth-floor rooms, although she didn’t go out often, wouldn’t enter a crowd, preferred quiet streets, and was most comfortable in the night or in the foulest weather.
Her father, as forward-looking as he was indulgent, had prepared for his daughter’s future, so that she would be able to thrive after he passed away, a prudent step considering that he died before her fourteenth birthday. Assuming that Gwyneth would be no less a recluse at eighty than she was as an adolescent, assuming that the confidence and freedom she got from her Goth disguise or from any different look she might later adopt would always be limited, he created a web of trusts to ensure her lifetime support. But the trusts were also designed to allow her to draw upon them and benefit from them in numerous ways with the barest minimum of interaction with trustees, in fact with only one man, Teague Hanlon, her father’s closest friend and the only confidant that he fully trusted. After her father’s murder, Hanlon had been her legal guardian until she turned eighteen; he would be the primary trustee of the interlocking trusts until his death or hers, whichever came first.
Among the things that the trusts provided were eight comfortable though not extravagant apartments located in different but appealing parts of the city, including the one in which we sat now together at breakfast. This choice of residences allowed her a change of scenery, a not inconsiderable boon if her reluctance to go out resulted in day after day during which her experience of the city was restricted to the view from her windows. In addition, her father supposed that because of her natural elegance and her elfin beauty—which she denied possessing—she might attract the unwanted attentions of a dangerous man, whereupon an apartment could be easily abandoned for immediate relocation to another ready haven. Likewise, a fire or other disaster would not leave her homeless for so much as one hour, an important consideration if her social phobia rendered her more terrified of human contact and more reclusive as the years went by. She also kept moving from residence to residence as a means of discouraging well-meaning neighbors from making any attempt to be neighborly.
She rose from the table to fetch the pot from the coffeemaker.
The night was in retreat from the city, first light less than half an hour from possession of its streets.
I declined another cup.
Nevertheless, she poured one for me.
Returning to her chair, she said, “Before you go, we have to settle a few questions.”
“Questions?”
“Will we meet again?”
“Do you want to?”
“Very much,” she said.
Those two words were not just music, they were an entire song.
“Then we will,” I said. “But what about your … social phobia?”
“So far you haven’t triggered it.”
“Why is that?”
She sipped her coffee. The silver-snake ring, as delicate as the nose that it ornamented, glimmered when the candle flame fluttered, and seemed to circle round and round through the pierced nare from which it hung.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe next time, I’ll turn away from you and run, and want to be alone forever.”
She stared directly at me, but I was too far from the candle for her to see anything more than a hooded figure with gloved hands, and nothing more visible within the hood than there would have been if I were Death himself.
She said, “Come by this evening at seven o’clock. We’ll have dinner. And you’ll tell me more about yourself.”
“I never go out until after midnight. Too dangerous.”
Following a silence, Gwyneth said, “Do you have hope?”
“If I didn’t, I would long ago have died by my own hand.”
“Belief and trust, twined together, can meet any danger. Do you fear death, Addison?”
“Not my own death. Not the way people fear their death in books. I sometimes worried that my father would die. And when he did, the loss was worse than I imagined. The pain.”
She said, “I want to hear all about your father and your life, at dinner.”
My heart felt enlarged, not swollen with grief as it had been after Father died, but with complex emotions, swollen but not heavy, buoyant. I reminded myself that the heart is deceitful above all things, though I was sure it did not deceive me now.
I pushed my chair back from the table and got to my feet. “Leave the window open. At that hour, I’ll have to be very quick, out of the storm drain and up the fire escape.”
Rising from her chair, she said, “The rules don’t change.”
“The same rules,” I agreed. “You don’t look, and
