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confusing and it’s hard to separate love from money, but I kept that opinion to myself.
    As things got worse with Maryann I could see he was getting worried. She didn’t want him smoking for one thing. She probably also sensed he could never be monogamous. Soon he began calling me to do dope runs every three or four days. Even though more than half the time the source wasn’t there, I was still buying too much pot, and keeping so much in my apartment was making me nervous. I knew that if you got busted your punishment was determined by how much pot you had in your possession. “One or two small bags probably won’t get you put in jail,” Dash had said. But I had a lot more than two bags. As a result I began smoking more so I’d have less in my possession if I were ever caught—which seemed logical at the time. As a result of that, however, I was spending too much on it and told myself I’d have to just stop answering his calls for a while and skip basketball for a while too—which would hurt—or else just say no to him on the phone and risk getting him angry, maybe so angry that he’d stop buying for me. The dealer was already saying from time to time that he was gonna quit soon. “You better start buying more ’cause I’m gonna stop doing this soon, it’s just not worth it,” he’d say, though I never fully believed him.
    Just as all this was reaching a crisis point the dealer went away for a while. He’d gotten a minitour for his group—three or four gigs in small towns in Missouri and Wisconsin. It was like thesudden removal of a loud, relentless noise and my first reaction after he left was, paradoxically, to feel disoriented, nervous. But after a jittery first day, my normal sense of time returned, then my normal sense of hearing, though I could still hear Birdwoman puttering around. It was as if once I started hearing her a few weeks ago I would always hear her. But with the dealer gone it was comforting, in a way, to know she was there to potentially talk to, if only I could, like the dealer, take more of the initiative.
    For the first time I found myself wondering about Birdwoman’s life. So far we’d talked mainly about condo issues (there were only the two of us in the building), like where to put recycled trash, or about the condo fees I’d forget to pay. A couple of times she’d met me in the hallway outside my condo and helped me install a new fuse she gave me. It felt good to have someone do something for me without paying them. My mother was maybe the last person I’d experienced that with, but she was far away now, so it was really nice.
    Soon I found myself wondering what Birdwoman was doing upstairs, how she spent her time. I knew she didn’t work and had once been a professor. I think the real estate agent told me she was a painter to reassure me that her noise level would be low. Once when I gave her a copy of my keys I stepped inside her place for a minute or two and was dazzled by its elegance—at least in comparison to mine. I remember she had lots of paintings on the walls and that many of them were hers and were very good as far as I could tell. I wished I’d told her so then, when I had the chance, but not wanting to reveal that I didn’t know anything about photography, I said nothing. I did compliment her place but didn’t think that would matter much to an artist who put so much of herself into her work.
    I was disappointed in myself, at how stingy I was to her, especiallyconsidering her age (probably late sixties to early seventies) and how few times she would probably ever hear her work praised again. I promised myself to tell her how much I liked her work but so far I hadn’t found the right time. Unfortunately, that’s the way I am. I often know what I want to do but aren’t able to struggle enough to be able to do it. It was like my relationship with the dealer,