Every Wednesday at two o'clock, I took the train from Penn Station to the Plaza Hotel, where Victor had a suite with a view of Central Park and a record player that played Gershwin.

He called me his dear bird. I called him Uncle Victor. This was the language of our arrangement.

The suite was not a room — it was an apartment, really. A sitting room, a dining room, a bedroom that I was not supposed to sleep in but always did. A bathroom with marble tiles that Victor's mother had chosen and that no one had used in eight years.

On this particular Wednesday in October, I sat on the sofa and thought about a line from Woolf that I had read in the library the day before: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

I had a room. It was at the Barbizon, a boarding house for working women, on West 63rd Street. My room was small — a bed, a desk, a window that looked at the brick wall of the building next door — but it was mine. I paid for it with the money Victor gave me each Wednesday, after dinner, when he pressed bills into my hand like a man making a donation to charity.

"Fifteen dollars," he said this week. "For your books."

I counted them. Sixteen. "You gave me fifteen."

He smiled. "I changed my mind."

After dinner, he put on a record. Always Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue this time. The piano was dramatic, all flashing runs and theatrical pauses. I thought about Clarence's piano — different entirely. Clarence played like a man who was telling you something he needed you to hear. Victor's piano played like a man who needed everyone to hear him.

"You're quiet," Victor said.

"Thinking."

"About what?"

"About a room."

He poured me sherry. "You have a room."

"Not the kind I mean."

He sat across from me, one leg crossed over the other. He had been wearing this suit since September. Dark blue, tailored in New York, with a pocket square that matched nothing. Victor dressed the way men dress when they have nothing to prove to anyone who matters.

"What kind of room, Linnie?"

"The kind that's yours. Not the kind that's given to you and taken away."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he looked away. "You read too much."

"That's what the nuns said. That's what Hazel says. That's what —" I stopped.

"What?"

"Nothing."

He refilled my sherry. "Tell me."

"It's nothing. Hazel says the same thing the nuns say. That I read too much and think too much and that thinking is dangerous for a girl who doesn't have a husband to think for her."

"Does Hazel also tell you to marry someone so she can stop worrying about you?"

"She does."

"Then Hazel is right about one thing and wrong about the rest."

The record ended. Gershwin's hands had been on this piano in 1924, forty years ago. He was dead by now — no, he was still alive, living in California, writing symphonies that people called serious. Victor's Gershwin was the kind of music that played in hotels and restaurants, music you heard but didn't hear, the sonic equivalent of wallpaper.

On the train home that night, I sat by the window and watched the city pass. The brownstones of Harlem. The fluorescent glow of drugstores. The subway billboards advertising movies I couldn't afford to see. I thought about Clarence's melody — the one he had written for me, not because of me. A slow blues progression. About waiting.

The train pulled into Penn Station. I walked to the Barbizon. Hazel was in the common room, reading Emma Goldman with a cigarette dangling from her fingers. She looked up. "How was he?"

"Fine."

"Did he buy you fifteen dollars?"

"Sixteen."

Hazel exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. "You know what Fitzgerald wrote? 'I am not fresh enough to disgust.' Is that what you are? Disgusted?"

"I didn't say I was disgusted."

"Didn't have to. Your face said it."

I went to my room. Closed the door. Sat on the bed. Took out a blank page from my notebook and wrote three lines:

"The man who buys me sherry also buys my silence. The man who plays piano for me buys my attention. The man who buys both buys me."

I tore out the page. Put it in my pocket. Would decide what to do with it tomorrow.

Tomorrow was Thursday. Tomorrow I would go to the library. Tomorrow I would meet Clarence at the diner on 14th Street. Tomorrow I would eat cherry pie and talk about whether Hemingway was any good.

And the Wednesday after that, I would go to the Plaza again. Sixteen dollars. Gershwin. Sherry. "My dear bird."

Wednesday was a circle. I was inside it. I knew this. The question was whether knowing was the same as being free.

Woolf said you needed money and a room. I had both. I had a room and money and books and a piano and a man who brought me sherry every Wednesday and a man who wrote me melodies on folded pieces of paper.

But Woolf didn't write about the man who gave you the room and expected you to live in it forever. She didn't write about the difference between a room of your own and a room that someone else let you occupy.

I put my head on the pillow. The brick wall outside the window was dark. Somewhere below me, a woman was laughing. I could not see her face. I could not hear her words. But the laughter was real, and it was loud, and it was not for me.

That was enough for one night.

The next morning, I woke before sunrise. The Barbizon was quiet — the kind of quiet that has weight, the kind that presses against your ears like deep water. I got up, dressed in the grey sweater and skirt I wore to the library, and sat at my desk.

I took out the page with the three lines about the man who bought things. I held it over the small gas stove in the corner of my room. Lit a match. Held the flame to the corner.

The paper curled. The words blackened. "The man who buys me sherry" — gone. "The man who plays piano for me" — gone. "The man who buys both buys me" — the last word smoldered for a second longer, then collapsed into ash.

I swept the ash into the sink. Turned on the water. Watched it swirl down the drain.

Then I went to the library.

The New York Public Library on 42nd Street was a cathedral of other people's words. I sat at a carrel in the reading room, opened a book I had already read three times, and pretended to read it again. My eyes moved across the page. The words did not enter me. They sat on the surface, like birds on a wire, not landing, not staying, just existing in a line that stretched from one end of the page to the other.

Clarence was waiting for me at the diner on 14th Street. He had two cups of coffee and a slice of cherry pie on a plate between us, neither of which he had touched.

"You look like you didn't sleep," he said.

"I didn't sleep well."

"Bad dream?"

"No dream. Just... thinking."

He nodded. He knew about thinking. He had told me once that he thought so much he sometimes wished he had a switch — a real switch, in the wall of his head, that he could flip and make it stop. "But there's no switch," he had said. "That's the joke. You can turn off the lights, but the thinking doesn't care about the lights."

I drank my coffee. It was too hot. I burned my tongue. It was a small pain, but it was mine.

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