He arrived in New York on a Saturday in late May, in the particular beauty of a Manhattan spring that he had somehow, despite many visits to the city, never experienced at close range — the trees in full leaf in Riverside Park, the light off the Hudson, the bodegas with their flowers in buckets on the sidewalk, the whole city's extraordinary improbable daily vitality.
Mara met him in the lobby of the building on Riverside Drive. She was in jeans and a white shirt and she had paint on her forearm from helping a friend hang a show. She looked at him coming through the glass door with an expression that was the composed form of enormous feeling.
He put his bag down and she came to him and they held each other in the lobby for a long time. The doorman pretended to read his phone.
She showed him the apartment — her apartment, soon to be theirs — the small studio with the view of the water and the folding table where she composed, turned to face the window and the May light. His boxes were arriving Monday. She had made room on the shelves.
She had made room on the shelves.
He stood in the middle of the room and looked at the shelves with the space she had made, and felt something he had been waiting a very long time to feel: the solid, ordinary, magnificent sense of having arrived.
She was watching him from the kitchen doorway with the look he knew — the particular, searching quality of her attention.
'Well?' she said.
'Well,' he said, looking around the small apartment with its light and its view and its space for his books. 'It's very small.'
She laughed. 'It is extremely small.'
'I love it,' he said.
'Good,' she said. 'Because it's expensive.' She came forward and stood beside him, looking at the room — the same room, together. 'It'll get better,' she said. 'More space. Eventually. When we know more about what we're doing.'
He looked at her. 'We know what we're doing,' he said.
She looked back at him. 'Yes,' she said. 'We do.'