But the scrubbed-clean center of the city gave way to morning, to railside tenements: a fortress of small variations: brown, rust-brown, gray-brown, blue unshining windows shuttered against the monolith of mist-gray sky, eroded at the base by clusters of shirts and sheets hanging dankly on clotheslines: white scraps like beacons. People on the train turned to look. Yes, I looked, but also a commuter in a wool-blend suit, two students snapping photographs, a young mother whose right-hand fingers retucked a tuft of down into her infant’s navy-striped cap. Yes, I imagined living her life. It was easy to make it perfect. My husband: young and smiling and kind. Our well-lit flat perched over a musty bookstore, where a single table teetered on the sidewalk, the dun-gray sky reflected in the bookstore’s plate-glass window. I carried a matchbook in the pocket of my denim blazer at all times. Only one chair. Perfect.