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EXCERPT THREE: "THAT WASN'T PRECISELY THE RESPONSE I WOULD HAVE EXPECTED ..."

I had just put one load in the wash and was sorting another into lights and darks when the last person in the world I wanted to see walked in. Jimmy was wearing a sleeveless ribbed T-shirt that showed off his extremely well developed biceps, his triceps, his deltoids, his trapezius muscles. Somehow, no matter how he abused himself, he still looked like the agile middleweight boxer he used to be. He should have looked like fifty miles of bad road, all things considered, but even the lines on his face only made him look rugged. I then realized that he was, in fact, the second-to-last person I wanted to see. Right behind him, and clearly with him, was a pair of five-inch, stiletto-heeled sandals — gold-lamé sandals with gold-flecked clear platform soles, delicate gold ankle chains, and thin gold toe straps fringed with turquoise medallions and crystal beads, encasing ten perfectly painted, Rioja-red nails on the tips of the slender toes of a tall girl of about twenty in Argentine air-hostess sunglasses.

I was wearing sweatpants and a Morrisville State College T-shirt. Everything else I owned was in the wash.

I looked at Jimmy. He looked at me. "Hi," he said at last, looking at me a bit as if I were someone whose face he couldn't quite place.

"Hi, Jimmy. How are you."

He looked at a loss for words. He attempted to smile; it came off as an unsuccessful smirk. Finally, he said, "Need to do me laundry."

"Yeah." My hands were full of dirty running clothes. I couldn't leave: Half my clothes were already in the machine. I took a good long look at the Sandals. She had the same coloring as he did — black hair and olive skin, which on Jimmy, I suppose, was the legacy of the Spanish Armada. His Mediterranean ancestors had evidently had a swell time in Ireland. Together, they looked as if they'd walked out of an advertisement for coconut suntan oil. She was a Spanish summer-exchange student, from the looks of it. I expect he found her on the rue Saint André des Arts, adjacent to the laundromat. The street was nicknamed Bacterium Alley by the Anglophones because of its many crowded bars, where at night it was easy to pick up not only a summer exchange student, but an embarrassing itch.

Jimmy shrugged, and went to put change in the soap dispenser. She hopped up on the counter behind him and began swinging her sandals back and forth. "Jee-mee," she asked, "deed you bring dee theeg-a-rettes? I tink you leeve dem in my bedroom?" Jee-mee reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a packet of tobacco and some rolling papers. She obviously didn't know him that well, I thought, if she imagined some wild Spanish monkey sex would make Jee-mee, the most committed smoker I've ever known, forget his tobacco He handed a pouch of tobacco to her. She began rolling a cigarette, delicately licking the rolling paper with the tip of her adorable pink tongue, and he began unpacking her laundry from her little wheeled hamper. That's when I saw her underwear, which made her sandals look practical by comparison, and that's when I decided to leave my laundry in the washer to rot. No one needs clean towels that badly.

When I returned to my apartment, I sat down and stared morbidly at the walls for a while. Then I began writing a letter to Samantha. "That must be some nurturing kind of love," I wrote. "Those sandals. Those fucking sandals. How much more, God, how much more? I want to strangle her with the straps of her sandals and smash his nose with their platform heels." He had a perfectly straight, Roman nose. He was proud of it. Somehow, in all his years as a boxer, it had never been broken. I thought it was high time. "Well at least he's someone else's problem now. Just wait until she gets tired of paying for dinner."

I sent it off, brooding miserably and contemplating my own unpedicured toes while I waited for Samantha to write back. After an hour, I still hadn't heard from her. Another message from the Iranian man arrived, however.

"That wasn't precisely the response I would have expected to a letter about my bereavement," he wrote, "but I'm certainly glad for the distraction."