Chapter 3

As promised, Emily’s outer door was unlocked when I walked across the little stairwell landing and opened it. I locked it behind me and looked around for the first time at my landlady’s inner sanctum.

It was a handsomely furnished, somewhat old-fashioned living room, with an adjoining office-sitting room off to the left, with windows facing the front and one side of Emily’s large old house. The living room area, although much larger, had only two smaller side windows. The remainder of Emily’s apartment was in the rear section. It consisted of a dining room, a kitchen at the rear with matching front-and side large windows similar to those in the apartment’s front room, plus two bedrooms and a large bathroom off to the right.

My own little apartment, I recognized, must share a wall with Emily’s bedroom and guest room.

I found her in the kitchen preparing coffee. She invited me to wait in the living room to be served, and after giving her kitchen a brief examination, I did as she had asked.

She brought in a tray, set it on a table in front of the couch and sat across from me in a comfortable-looking easy chair.

“So. How are we going to play this?” she said.

I tried to make direct eye contact over my upraised cup of coffee. “The way I see it, we’re two essentially lonely people in need of a safe harbor. We have our wide difference in age, but we’re both grown-ups and we’re both capable of making basic decisions designed to produce ... a chance at some happiness.”

“How old is your mother?” Emily asked.

“A couple of years younger than you,” I answered. “Is that what you want me to say? But let’s not talk about my mother. This isn’t about her. This isn’t Oedipus the King and I haven’t got any major complexes that I’m aware of.”

“You mean you’re not ‘in love’ with me?” Emily asked, making a pouting pretense of expecting an affirmative answer.

“No, we’re not in love and we’re unlikely to be. Just being in lust will have to do.”

“Maybe when you see an almost-fifty woman’s naked body, you’ll lose your lusty feelings,” she said.

“I’ve already seen it. It’s remarkably beautiful — for a woman of any age.”

That shocked her a bit. “You’ve seen me ... where?”

“Out there,” I said, gesturing toward the rear of the house. “On the landing outside your kitchen window — between the gables.”

On the roof outside the interior wall of Emily’s kitchen there was a small, sheltered flat space, perhaps five feet wide and ten or twelve feet long. Large double-windowed gables on either side protected the space from view, along with the tall rear roof behind it. Emily’s boarding house was the tallest building in the neighborhood, making the crude little rooftop landing invisible, except from above, even at its single open side at the rear of the house.

On several occasions, Emily had sunned herself on that shingled landing. She had to crawl through a kitchen window to reach it. She would emerge from the window topless. Then, after arranging a padded roll-out mat to cover the landing’s rough surface, she’d strip off her bikini bottoms and sunbathe nude.

A matching window from my side of the same landing had been tightly boarded up — perhaps after Roger Farnsworth had died. But my curiosity about the blocked window had led me to pry loose a tiny corner of one board, just to see what was out there. The answer, at the time, was nothing much, but later I was treated to an extremely surprising reward: my landlady in the buff.

She had appeared out there at least twice more that I knew about, and (although I didn’t stand and stare), each time that I was home during one of her sunbathing sessions I confirmed her naked presence and once again briefly admired her ample breasts and supple body.

“You’ve spied on me out on the landing?”

“You’re wonderful to look at.”

“Your view was supposed to be blocked.”

“I’m resourceful.”

“You’re a pervert.”

I laughed. “You don’t even believe that yourself. You know exactly what I am. I am Everyman. Because every man I know would have looked.”

“I suppose I should have done a better job of blocking the window.”

“It seemed to have been competently done. It just didn’t prove entirely adequate to the task.”

“I’m too old to be out there sunning myself naked anyway,” she said.

“Wrong,” I told her. “You’re not too old. But we’re going to be doing it again — on our cruise.”

“Oh, yes. I can just see us — nude in public together — the old woman and her young gigolo. We’ll be the scandal of the ship.”

“You said it was a European cruise line. They’re far more sophisticated than we semi-rural Americans.”

“They’ll have to be.”

“If I’m going to join you aboard ship, sunbathing naked,” I said, “I’m going to need to get accustomed to seeing you that way beforehand. I mean, what could be more gauche than getting an erection on a cruise ship’s sundeck?”

“Sleeping with you is going to be the dumbest, most inappropriate thing I’ve ever done,” Emily said.

“What do you imagine you’re doing? Having sex with a mere child? I’m legal, you know.”

Emily made a rude noise with her lips. “Probably it’s only legal because nobody ever thought anybody would want to do it.”

“Bullshit, Emily. You know better than that.” I began to unbutton her blouse.

“Wait,” she said. “No, really ... wait.”

She hesitated. “We need rules. Ground rules.”

“No blouse-unbuttoning?” I asked frivolously. I was feeling confident now. Eager. This was actually going to happen.

Emily wasn’t in a joking mood. “We both want to do this, but we have to go into it with eyes open.”

“Blouses, too,” I offered.

“Circumspect,” she said. “If I’m going to do this, it’s going to have to be a secret. A real one. All my boarders knew about Mr. Farnsworth and me. We didn’t care, and they didn’t either. He was older than I and we were considered a good match.”

“But you want us to sneak around?”

“Absolutely,” she said without hesitation. “This would be terribly humiliating for me — for both of us — if it got out. I’m sorry, but I have a certain standing in this little city. A reputation.”

“Okay, I can understand that,” I told her. “But it sounds pretty impossible. I mean, with all of us living here together.”

“It’s not impossible. But our behavior in public ... around the other boarders ... that can’t change at all.”

“So, no bragging around the breakfast table about what a hot night I had?”

“This isn’t a laughing matter, Randy. It absolutely isn’t!”

I got serious. I knew that if I didn’t, I was going to blow this entire relationship before we even got it off the ground. “Do you think it’s really possible?” I asked her. “Keeping it a complete secret?”

“Yes,” she said at once. “If we resolve to keep it to ourselves, it will be relatively simple. First of all, no one would imagine such a thing. If we stayed cool, there’s no reason at all that we couldn’t maintain the relationship as a secret.”

I was skeptical. “All it would take for the secret to get out would be for one second-floor boarder to see me going into your apartment — like I did just a few minutes ago. Or they could hear us up here. Once in awhile, I can hear ... a certain boarder downstairs who shall remain nameless ... when he — or she — is entertaining a guest.”

“That won’t happen,” Emily said.

“You seem awfully confident.”

“I am confident. If you can behave naturally around the other people in the house, then this can be kept completely private. My apartment doesn’t share floor space with any tenants’ rooms — or wall space either — except for yours. The walls and floors are very thick all over this house. And my bedroom is separated entirely from all the boarders’ rooms — again, except yours.”

“So what do I do? Unscrew the ceiling light on the landing between our front doors, so I can sneak over in the dark?”

“No,” Emily said. “In fact, you shouldn’t ever again come into my apartment through that door.”

I was bewildered. “Is there a back door?” I asked, “or have I said something that pissed you off?”

“Well, there is a back door,” Emily said, “but it has an outside stairway that would be very public indeed.” She smiled. “And, no, you haven’t said anything that pissed me off.”

She took me by the hand. “Leave your coffee,” she said. “Come let me show you something.”

In Emily’s bedroom, the far wall bordering the main room of my unit held a large walk-in closet. She opened the closet door and I saw that in addition to the ample walk-in area, the closet narrowed off to the right side and continued as a five-foot wide, very long space running the entire length of the wall. There was a long clothes pole, supported by braces, that continued down the closet’s length.

“Your two rooms were once a part of this apartment,” Emily said. “This closet serves bedrooms on either side.”

I leaned in and peered down the long enclosed space to what I assumed was the wall of my own living room. “My closet’s on the other side of that wall, there at the end?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s just a continuation of this closet. But that’s not a real wall at the end, there. It’s just a panel.”

“A secret panel!” I said, delighted.

“A secret to everyone except Mr. Farnsworth and me,” she said. “And now also, Randy Sinclair, co-conspirator.”