Theme, variations.

Abby writes, out of blue nostalgia, that she has been reading The Mayor's Hotel. She says she misses eating spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk, which, she reminds me, only immigrants do now. "This is all by way of flavor," she writes, "and now that I've written it down, it doesn't describe exactly what I miss."

I know that feeling. It's like waking up in the garden apartment of the inscrutable brownstone you are house-sitting, only to find a barricade at the top of the stairs: the first-floor parquet was painted while you slept.

All day you stay below, in the hold of the brownstone, hearing the vestige of yesterday's interminable Taboo game. Vestige, from the Latin for "footstep." The footstep of the imagined butler, himself a vestige of something, pouring a drink for Linda Tripp, who wears a snapdragon in her hair. She introduces herself as your secretary; she tells the butler, "Any correspondence between you and the lady is considered correspondence between the lady and herself." Meanwhile, the vestige of a tropical storm called Ida blurs the house from the outside, churns the hours into butter.