Tenant

He was sitting down to dinner when the finder called. If you wanted to call it dinner. Two scrambled eggs with cheese and toast with peanut butter, which he planned to eat in front of the television. He’d plated his food and poured his beer, he was just now pulling the ottoman close and trying to recall where he’d left the remote—there it was between the picks for his gums a dental hygienist had given him that morning and some Sunday paper advertising circulars; probably he’d have to slap it a little because the batteries inside were loose. Should he answer or let his machine take the call? The eggs were warm, the beer was cold. He was ready to eat; he didn’t need a hassle. Answering the phone would mean a physical effort. He walked the six steps, though, to the caller ID box, and when it registered with him that the caller was his finder, he put down the beer and picked up. “Yes,” he said.

This finder—he hardly knew him—liked pleasantries before business. This finder was from the school of socially-correct throat-clearing and so, in a tone of droll commiseration, described the current weather—miserable, rainy—and the terrible traffic on Interstate 90 from Mercer Island to the 405 Interchange. According to him there were two good options—well-qualified people who checked out on every front—as a result of his professional efforts. He’d showed the apartment three times that afternoon, first to a woman who admired the re-model—the great room space, the light, the cork floors—but who didn’t want to move from her apartment down the corridor: “A voyeur,” said the finder. “Someone just looking.” Then to a nurse who wanted eagerly to rent it—a woman who “would make a perfectly good renter.” Then to a woman who was the broker’s top pick because of her references and “an off-the-charts credit score somewhere in the low-mid-eight hundreds.”

“Go with your top pick,” he told the finder.

The finder arranged matters. The renter, whose name was Williams, Lydia Williams, signed the Lease/Rental Agreement and initialed each page. Her signature was indecipherable—as it was on her check for the first and last months’ rent and a prorated eleven days, and on her check for the damage deposit—but her initials were, by contrast, stark and plain. Lydia Williams, renter, he thought, of a modest two-bedroom apartment with a garage. Lydia Williams, cryptic non-presence, intangible so far because he hadn’t seen her, but generator—faithfully and smoothly, he hoped—of perpetual rental income. He put a copy of their agreement in his “Apartment” file, along with her application and credit report, but not before confirming that it accurately portrayed their payment arrangement, namely, that Lydia Williams’s rent would henceforth flow from her bank account to his via electronic transfer on the fifteenth of each month; the fifteenth for tax purposes—he liked it for its symmetry. He also filed a letter from the finder, who therein reported providing Williams with two sets of keys to the front door, garage, mailbox, and garbage/recycling enclosure, and explaining parking regulations to her, and parceling out to her the right decal for her wind-shield and the right pass for her guests, and stressing to her the rules in force at the Blue Vista Condominium Complex, and leading her on a “walk-through” so she could list flaws she wouldn’t be responsible for at move-out. But she’d listed nothing, either because she didn’t want to or hadn’t looked closely, or maybe because he’d worked so diligently to render the apartment rentable, to put it in good order. He’d painted the inside of the front door, patched the drywall. There were new batteries in the smoke detectors.

Lydia Williams—as the finder put it in his final report before siphoning off his outlandish fee—moved in “without a hitch.” Invisible, an abstraction, RENTER—all caps—but indeed her rent got...