It seemed so clear to me now, as I sat on the balcony with a glass of wine, my second and his fourth, that we are only what we are told we are as children. He recounted a moment from his childhood that he wanted to recreate for his own children, how each night his parents would sit in the living room and read. His best memory of his parents was their quiet attention to books, tucked under the same blanket on a wide couch in the soft light of a fire. When he and his four sisters were old enough, they would join and read their own books, all in silence. A comforting silence of good habits and learning. I would like that for our children, he said, if we could recreate it.

I suppose I could get my head around reading, I said, looking out at the parking lot of the complex where we had lived for a year and a half, in a country where neither of us could speak to anyone. We had moved here after our wedding. We hadn’t planned it; it had been out of our control. He worked for a large health care company, one of the largest in the world, and they had decided in some boardroom far away that he needed to be moved here, to Switzerland, so he could work in a small office that looked exactly like his small office in Hartford, different only in that the building was smaller, and rather than the hazy view of the suburbs there was the jagged view of mountains. The office was filled with other English speakers from all different places in the United States, and this group of people huddled in the office had become our only friends. My husband wanted to buy a house closer to them, but I did not, as it felt too permanent.

I hadn’t realized until the second week of our new arrangement in our Swiss apartment how much I had relied on my own home. I had a two-bedroom house in a poor area of Hartford with iron-barred windows that I had found beautiful, as they were made with pretty twists and turns. My front door was guarded by an iron gate with its own gaudy keyhole and a special medieval-like key crafted from the same iron. When I took out my keys to unlock my car I would admire this key, I would be proud of it. When I sold my house I kept it, changing the old lock for a keypad at the request of the buyer. Secretly I was grateful that they demanded the alteration.

The key hung on the hook by the door. My husband continued to imagine his room of little readers, congratulating us for finding an apartment with a fireplace so that this dream could be real. We won’t have children here, Chris, tell me we won’t, I said in a low, sarcastic voice, laughing so that he could see it was a joke. My gaze drifted past the glass door to our balcony, through the living room with its pale gray couches and the cold stone front of the fireplace to the kitchen, which was wide and expansive and filled with pots and pans that I loved, handmade Swiss cookware that cooked so evenly and with such flavor that I spent hours in the kitchen preparing menus, experimenting with the new range of fish, spices, root vegetables, and dairy. But my creativity went out abruptly, without warning, the dishes now used for little more than scrambled eggs. I looked past the remnants of an old passion that had once been my career and rested my attention upon the iron key, which I saw as a dark black speck within the shadows of the house.

I knew that by the sixth glass of wine that my husband’s dream of seven people happily reading would become clearer, a nightmare, always sharper than dreams, as details were added one by one. For now, he was only on his third glass. It’s dangerous, I said, to have children on a tenth-floor apartment, you know that.

There are guards we could buy.

Ugly guards, untrustworthy guards.

Plastic stoppers for the windows.

Then we’ll never be able to open them in the summers again.

This air doesn’t need a wide window.

Crisp mountain air, no, it doesn’t. You’ve gotten me, Chris, yes, you’ve convinced me, we’ll have children, right now. I set down my wine glass with a flourish, so that it made a chiming sound like a bell, and a little crack, barely perceptible, came from within the glass on its base, a little crack and chip. I hardly cared. Chris’s eyes were closed. Make that sound again, he said.

It’s six forty-eight, you’ll hear it in twelve minutes, if you have the patience.

With his eyes shut he lightly tapped his glass against the table, and his made a much clearer, intentional sound. It rang long into the air. Hurry, there isn’t much time, I said.

Wait, he said, and he touched the glass to the table again, gently, with care I did not think his drunk hands could manage.

This is much better than reading around a fireplace, I said, laughing again, because his quiet concentration upon such a strange and useless task embarrassed me. Instead, we can all sit on the living room floor with singing bowls, I said, if these sounds are so pleasing to you. I leaned back to check the time, and two minutes had passed. The bells will be here soon, I said. That’s a real sound. I found myself praying for the church bells. On each hour and sometimes half-hour the entire city would alight with chiming, a thing that had at first been a novelty but quickly became an annoyance, and I had now been settling into a kind of love for it, the way I had come to love the sounds of traffic in Hartford. He suddenly stopped, sat up and peered into his empty wine glass that had made such a beautiful sound precisely because it was empty. Mine was full, and so its sound was dull and heavy and cracked. More wine, he said to the glass.

Have mine, I said. There isn’t any left, I poured the last of it.

He glanced at my wine glass and shook his head. No, I’ll get us more.

Please don’t.

You haven’t finished yours. I can’t take it.

Don’t think of me.

I always think of you, he said, leaning over the table to kiss me.

Stay, let’s have children. I took his face between my hands.

When I get back, he said. Finish your wine, enjoy it, the weather, the sun, the day. He hung in the doorway, looking back at me. You’re lovely, he said. You are lovely.

I watched him in the kitchen as he looked for his wallet and shoes, which he never put in the same place. He was like a child in that way. Under the bed, I said. You kicked them there. I watched him follow my direction, and then he took my keys from the wall, and he was gone. I was left staring at the place where my iron key had been. My eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to its absence, and it seemed that there was a small black hole there, one that I could touch. One I could pitch into head first, and find myself in another world of different decisions.

You’re lovely. His compliments felt like the chimes of his wine glass. I could close my eyes and listen carefully to them. But how foolish he had looked, listening, how much I wanted him to stop, to be interrupted by something truly beautiful, any sound of this city, any routine sound. Was this how I looked, waiting for his compliments, shutting out everything so that I could fold myself within them? But the roughness of his beard, how I hated it, how it lingered on my upper lip, a bitter irritation. The sort of desperate crankiness that nothing at all could relieve. My iron key was now in his hand, journeying beneath me, and I looked over the balcony, determined to see the key from afar rather than my husband, to see the key in a different world than it should have been, split from its partner, from the one thing in its life it was meant to open.

I saw him: a small, inconsequential form. Of course, it was impossible to see something as small as a key from here. I was shocked by the look of the world as I peered over, however, as he walked beside the foundation of a new building not yet constructed. From the street you couldn’t see it. It was protected by a thick wall. But I could see the chasm only a few feet beside him. The wall looked ineffectual, so slim, like a pencil line drawn along the sidewalk. The carved foundation was a gaping mouth, with only a long shaft where the elevator would go. The building would rise from this immovable structure, the slim spine that would take people to their homes; their walls would be flexible, moveable, so that the wind couldn’t tear them down. Our walls are moving now, I thought, for there was a breeze just light enough that it didn’t cause discomfort. I thought I could feel how the building responded to the wind, swaying. I began to feel nauseous, so I focused hard on my husband as he walked innocently past the hole in earth. The bells erupted, singing sweetly, and at this I sat down, pulled away, finished my glass, enjoyed the weather, the sun, the day.

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