The Matchmaker in Apartment Six

The key fit the lock only after the old man apologized to it.

This was embarrassing. He had once tied together lives separated by mountains, wars, and several generations of determined relatives. Now he stood on the second-floor landing of a building in Shreveport, speaking politely to a piece of brass.

Behind him, a woman said, “Try pulling the door toward you.”

He did. The key turned.

“It swells when it rains,” she said. “Don’t apologize. Makes it feel important.”

She carried a camera case and a paper sack darkened by grease. A strand of black hair had escaped the knot at the back of her head. She looked at the room beyond him, then at the embroidered bag hanging from his wrist.

“Are you Hank’s uncle?”

“I have been called an ancestor.”

“That sounds like his family.”

She went down the stairs before he could ask what Hank had said about him. He watched her cross the narrow courtyard, avoiding a puddle without looking at it. A line of red light followed her ankle. It passed through the locked door of an apartment opposite and vanished.

He knew red thread. He had carried it longer than he had carried a name.

Inside Number Six, there was a mattress, a table, two cups, and a note.

Make yourself at home. Back Wednesday. Hank.

Below that, in a different hand: Borrowed room. Borrowed furniture. Please leave the good chair alone. Marjorie.

He set his bag on the table. It held a spool of red silk, a narrow book, and an old knot he had never been able to undo. He had arrived with no memory of choosing this building. One moment he had been following a thread through the dark between places; the next, a brass key had waited in his palm.

A room offered freely could sometimes become a place to begin again. He had learned that during long journeys in which people mistook him for a beggar, a teacher, or a man waiting for a daughter who had forgotten him.

He had not learned what a refrigerator was supposed to sound like.

He opened it. Inside were mustard, a lemon, and something wrapped in foil. The appliance gave a tired shudder.

“I will not interfere with your work,” he told it.

Someone knocked.

The woman on the doorstep had gray hair cut just beneath her ears and a small dog under one arm. The dog stared at him as if disappointed by the choice of tenant.

“I’m Marjorie. Hank said a friend might need the room. I assume that’s you.”

“It appears to be.”

“Good. I’m not carrying the dog up these stairs for everybody.”

She pointed out a loose board, the water shutoff number on a card, and the broom in a cupboard. Hank rented the apartment but spent much of his time working away. He had offered it for a month while he finished a job outside the city. Marjorie owned the building, which had six apartments and more opinions than plumbing fixtures.

“What should I call you?”

He gave her his title: Yin Yuan Lao Ren, the old man concerned with the ties between people.

She listened, tried it, and frowned at her own attempt.

“Yuan?”

“That is acceptable.”

“Well, Yuan, keep the landing clear. Sol nearly broke her neck over Hank’s toolbox last year.”

At the name, the red light beneath the opposite door sharpened.

“The woman with the camera?”

“That’s Sol. Number Three. She’s moving out next Tuesday.”

Marjorie set the dog down. It inspected his shoes.

“Where is she going?”

“To a job. You’ll have to ask her about it.”

He wanted to ask about Hank instead, but Marjorie was already describing the garbage schedule. She gave him a second key, smaller than the first, for the courtyard gate. Then she took the dog and left him with responsibilities.

He went to the window. Below, Sol sat on the edge of a low planter, eating from the paper sack. She had placed her camera beside her as carefully as he placed his book. When her phone lit up, she read the message, smiled, then pressed her fingertips against her closed eyes.

The red thread curved from her ankle toward the room behind him.

On the wall near the table hung a photograph of two people standing in a half-painted kitchen. The man had a paintbrush tucked behind one ear. Sol was laughing at something outside the frame.

On the back, in her hand, were the words: We almost finished.

He put the photograph down.

There had been a time when such evidence would have seemed complete. A visible thread, a shared room, a picture of happiness: the task could scarcely have announced itself more plainly.

He took out the spool.

A knock interrupted him again. Sol stood outside, holding a little blue key ring.

“Hank asked me to return this when his friend got here. Spare for Six. The front door sticks.”

“I have been informed.”

She held the key out without stepping into the room. He accepted it. Her gaze moved over his shoulder to the photograph on the table, and her expression changed.

“Sorry,” she said. “I thought he’d put that away.”

“You were happy there.”

“That’s a strange thing to say to somebody you just met.”

He looked at the photograph. “You appear happy.”

“People are complicated outside photographs.”

She started down the stairs. He followed to the landing, carrying both keys.

“There is something between you,” he said.

She stopped. “Did Hank ask you to talk to me?”

“No.”

“Then please don’t.”

The thread remained bright after she left. He had never seen one extinguished by a sentence spoken in anger. He told himself that this was significant.

He spent the evening examining his book. Names appeared differently here. Some had more than one spelling; others had ceased to answer to the names under which he knew them. Hank was Henry Bell. Sol was Soledad Vega, a name that rested on the page with a force the shorter one did not lose.

Between them lay a knot without a date.

He could not read what had happened to it. His book had once been very good at beginnings and less curious about the middle.

Near midnight, a man came up the stairs carrying a toolbox. He had rain in his hair and a thumb bound with blue tape.

“You’re in? Great. I’m Hank. Job finished early. I’ll grab a few things and leave you the place.”

He saw the photograph, then the old man’s open book.

“Marjorie tell you about us?”

“Very little.”

“That’s surprisingly restrained of her.”

Hank went into the bedroom and returned with shirts folded over his arm. He was careful to leave a clear route between the table and the door.

“You can use the kettle. Don’t trust the bottom drawer. I’ll stay at my brother’s. You need anything, my number’s on the fridge.”

“The room is yours.”

“Right now you need it more than I do.”

The old man took his spool from the table. A single loop around an object freely passed between two people could encourage it to return to the place where it was most wanted. He had used that small courtesy to recover wedding combs, borrowed bowls, a sandal lost on the road to a proposal.

He did not command hearts. That had never been the purpose of the thread. He could make a chance more likely to occur. People had always seemed grateful for the distinction once things turned out well.

While Hank searched for his phone, he tied the two spare keys together and separated them again. The silk became invisible, leaving warmth against the brass.

He handed Hank the key with the blue ring.

“Thank you for the room.”

“No problem.”

Ten minutes later, someone cursed in the courtyard.

Sol stood beneath the outside light, holding the key that should have been in Hank’s pocket. Hank stood at her door with the spare she had returned. They looked at the keys, at each other, and finally up at the old man.

He smiled before he understood that neither of them was smiling back.

“Did you do this?” Sol asked.

The old man came down the stairs. Rain ticked through a broken corner of the gutter. Hank stood with his toolbox between his shoes as if it were a small animal he had promised to keep out of trouble.

“I encouraged a return,” the old man said.

“You switched our keys.”

“That is the visible part.”

Sol held hers out. “Switch it back.”

He did. The thread gave a little resistance beneath his fingers. He had tied it properly. It would offer two further chances before fading, unless he unmade it himself. A person could refuse to carry the key, refuse the door, refuse the meeting. The thread had no authority over a refusal spoken honestly.

He explained this, expecting reassurance to follow.

“You don’t get to decide whether my no is honest,” Sol said.

Hank lifted his toolbox. “I’ll call you tomorrow about the room,” he told the old man. “Stay out of people’s things tonight.”

They left by different gates.

The old man stood in the courtyard until Marjorie’s kitchen light came on. She opened a window.

“You waiting for an apology?”

“I fear I may be required to make one.”

“Good. Do it after breakfast. Everything sounds worse in the rain.”

He went upstairs and laid the spool on the table. The knot in his book had not changed. He had believed a visible tie justified bringing people together. Now he considered that it might simply tell him where two people were still hurting.

At dawn he found Sol on the landing, kneeling beside a suitcase whose handle had come off. She was trying to fasten it without waking the building.

“I will not touch your possessions,” he said.

“You can hold this bit if you’re actually asking.”

He held the plastic bracket while she tightened a screw. Her hands were quick, with a nick beside one thumbnail. She asked him whether the thread business was a joke he shared with Hank.

“No.”

“Are you a fortune-teller?”

“No. I have arranged marriages.”

“For a living?”

“For longer than a living.”

She sat back on her heels. “You should meet my aunt. You could make each other unbearable.”

He helped her stand the suitcase upright. She pulled it twice across the landing to test the repair. The wheels rattled over the loose board Marjorie had warned him about.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Baton Rouge. A photography studio wants someone to manage commercial shoots. Six-month contract, possibility of more. I’ve been trying to get out of wedding work.”

“Why?”

“Because I spend every Saturday making everybody look as if nothing difficult ever happens after the cake.”

She caught his expression and gave a short laugh.

“I used to like it. I still like the photographs. I want to try something else.”

“And Hank does not wish you to go?”

The suitcase stopped rattling.

“Ask Hank what he wishes. I’m tired of telling people his part.”

She went downstairs carrying the repaired handle in one hand, still not trusting it to bear the weight. He watched her leave, then took Marjorie’s broom out of the cupboard and swept the landing. It was a useful task that contained no interpretation.

Hank arrived at nine with bread and a box of tea. He placed them on the kitchen counter, looked at the unswept corner behind the refrigerator, and asked if the old man had eaten.

“I would first like to apologize.”

Hank leaned against the counter.

“To both of us. Separately.”

“Yes.”

“And don’t make it an explanation of why you were right.”

The old man folded his hands. It was difficult to begin with so much of the usual material removed.

“I brought about a meeting you had not requested. I will not repeat it.”

“Can you stop the keys doing whatever that was?”

“I can untie the loop.”

“Then do that.”

He reached for the spool. The invisible connection could be loosened only while he held both objects, a restriction he had once considered helpful: people had to come close enough to resolve a misunderstanding. He had not considered it from the position of someone who did not want another meeting.

“I need the other key,” he said.

“You can ask her to leave it with Marjorie.”

Such an obvious arrangement. He made a note of it without opening the book.

Hank poured the tea. The old man asked about the photograph, then stopped himself. Hank followed his gaze.

“It was a kitchen we worked on. Not ours. A client wanted everything done before her son’s wedding. Sol took the pictures when we finished.”

“The words on the back—”

“She meant the kitchen. We still had a strip to paint.”

The old man lowered his eyes.

Hank smiled without pleasure. “You made a whole story out of that, didn’t you?”

“I am beginning to see that I did.”

For a while they listened to the refrigerator. Hank pressed a foot against its lower edge until the vibration stopped. The old man resisted the urge to treat the action as an explanation of his character.

But Hank began speaking anyway.

They had lived together for three years. Then his mother became ill in another town. He went to help and kept saying he would be back in a week. The weeks lengthened. He would not ask Sol to leave her work, and he would not admit that returning frightened him because she had learned to manage without him.

“When my mother died, I stayed another month. There were things to sort out. There were always things.”

“And Sol?”

“Kept asking for a date. Then stopped.”

Hank turned his cup slowly. “We didn’t have one big fight. I came back and found my work boots in a box. She’d put a clean towel over them so they wouldn’t get scratched by the tools. I think that was the worst part.”

He had been sleeping in Number Six, across the courtyard, ever since. It had seemed temporary until temporary acquired its own bills and neighbors.

The old man looked toward Sol’s door.

“You could have told her you were afraid.”

“Yes. That’s one of the many useful things I’ve thought of since.”

Downstairs, Marjorie called for help moving a chair. Hank went immediately. The old man followed, carrying nothing but the tea towel Hank had left on the counter.

Marjorie’s apartment smelled of furniture polish and oranges. She was preparing to repaint the front room after a long delay. A framed portrait of Wilfred stood beside a bowl of keys. In the photograph he looked impatient to return to whatever he had been doing.

“My husband,” she said when she saw the old man looking. “Five years gone, and I still ask what he thinks before I pick a color.”

“What does he say?”

“Usually agrees with me. Much easier than when he was alive.”

Hank laughed. Marjorie asked him to take the good chair through the wider doorway. She had decided to hold a courtyard supper on Saturday, before Sol left. Everyone was to bring something that did not need to be kept hot.

“Is this a farewell?” the old man asked.

“If people leave, we can say goodbye. We don’t have to hold a funeral for the building every time somebody gets a job.”

Hank carried the chair out. Through the window, the old man saw Sol arrive in the courtyard with her camera bag. She and Hank nodded to one another. Neither looked away first.

He felt the thread stir in his sleeve and kept his hands still.

Later Marjorie handed him Sol’s spare key in an envelope. She had delivered it with a note on the outside: Please stop helping like that.

He took it upstairs, set it beside Hank’s, and began to loosen his loop.

The silk came free easily. It had not been destiny resisting him. It had been his own reluctance to admit that a knot he had made might need to come undone.

Under the released thread lay a folded sheet he had not noticed inside the envelope.

Sol had written on it two years earlier. It began, Hank, I have been offered something, and ended without a signature. The note on the front had been written across the clean side of an old letter. Sol had folded it around the key without noticing what was inside.

The old man read the first sentence. Then, despite everything he had promised that morning, he read the next.