The Risk Pool

airless. At the landing, I stopped to wipe the sweat from my forehead and consider whether it might be possible to retreat and drive away unnoticed. There were voices on the other side of the door, but not close—they seemed to come from the back of the flat, the kitchen probably. I was about to knock when the door opened and Claude, who must have seen me pull up in the street below and traced my progress up the stairs, was grinning at me as if to ask what I thought of all
this
. We shook hands there in the entry.
    His mother peered in from the kitchen and caught us at it. “Honestly, Claude,” she hollered. “Don’t make your friend stand out there in the horrid hall. Have him come in where it’s cool!”
    Claude rolled his eyes at me and stepped out of the way, so that I could come in where it was cool. Or at least so that I could come in, because I couldn’t see that it was a degree cooler inside than in the horrid hall. That it was cooler must have been deliberate fiction designed to make life bearable during the summer months. In fact, the apartment was stifling. For some reason all the windows were clamped shut, their dark shades three-quarters drawn. I recognized a few pieces of furniture from the house on Third Avenue, old and faded now. I wondered how on earth they’d managed to get some of the larger pieces up the narrow staircase and into the cramped flat. Unless there was a rear entrancethat was more accessible, it looked to me a geometric impossibility.
    “Why don’t you run along and get the pizza, dear?” Mrs. Schwartz sang from the kitchen. “And Mr. Hall can have a seat.”
    She reappeared in the doorway before the sound of her voice had stopped reverberating. “Scoot,” she told her son. “Scoot, scoot, scoot.”
    “If you’d like some company,” I began, already anxious to be out of the apartment.
    “
I’m
the one in dire need of company,” Claudine Schwartz said emphatically. “My son has a wife and the post office, too. What I have is walls.”
    By way of punctuation, a door slammed in the extreme rear of the flat. Mrs. Schwartz made a face in the direction of the noise.
    “Scoot,” she repeated to her son, whose banishment had been momentarily halted by the sound. He did as he was told though, and his mother and I listened to the sound of his footsteps in retreat down the stairs. I listened for the sound of a car starting up in the street, but there wasn’t any, and I couldn’t tell whether with the windows closed I’d missed it or, more likely, that Claude had set out on foot. The nearest pizza place was Al’s, several blocks away, which meant that I was going to have a good twenty minutes in stir with Claudine.
    Actually, Claude’s mother had not aged significantly. Never an attractive woman, she looked to me like her low-slung anatomy might still be accommodated by the same dress size, and her hair was dyed the same cheerful blond it had been when Claude and I were boys. Her skin was more sallow now, perhaps from staying indoors with the shades drawn, but then the sun had never made much of an impression on it. I remembered that afternoon in October when we’d all gone to the lake and she’d beached herself in the sand, covering her eyes with a towel, defying the weak October sun to color her pale limbs. She had asked me to remain a friend to her son that day, and I thought she must be pretty dissatisfied with my performance. But then everyone seemed to have pretty modest expectations where Claude was concerned.
    “So,” I said. “Claude works for the post office?”
    “For the last six and a half years,” she said. “Since he took the civil service.”
    I smiled at the expression.
    “He works strictly in the mailroom,” she explained, as if otherwisethe idea of Claude as a postal worker might strain credulity. “He’s left alone to do his job and that’s the way he likes it. He reads all the magazines that come in and brings home the ones that can’t be delivered.”
    Now that she’d mentioned it, there were a startling number and variety of magazines in the room. There were teetering piles of them up against every vacant wall space.
    “You wouldn’t believe some of the gutter filth that comes through the United States mail,” Mrs. Schwartz said, glancing around apprehensively, lest an example might be in plain view. “It’s enough to make you ill. Physically ill.”
    I said I bet it was.
    “That’s why we can’t open our windows,” she