The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan

was an easy and effective way of maintaining the distance established between them for years now. There were the rare occasions on which people spoke it to her, such as when the waiters at Versailles (a chain of Cuban restaurants) flirted with her, or when recent immigrants (a cashier in a convenience store, an attendant at a valet station) could not speak even rudimentary English, but for the most part she abstained. Now, perhaps as a latent effort by her calmer self—who had already processed what had happened and wanted to shieldhim from her fury—she unleashed upon his head a torrent of expletives in her first language.
    This was what she got for reaching out to people.
    Six months earlier she’d noticed him on the Boardwalk, which was only a few minutes from her house. It was a lively scene—a patchwork mess of wacky street performers, aged hippies, young burnouts, yuppie joggers, Euro tourists, and a generous helping of homeless people, such as the one collecting the juiciest cigarette butts from between the cracks in the basketball courts, and stowing them in one of those black plastic bags that came with purchases in small convenience stores. Is he actually going to smoke them later? she wondered. Gross. His nylon Dodgers jacket had faded to a sickly yellow, the ruined elastic waistband sagging off his sunken frame. Salt-and-pepper dreadlocks sprouted from his head like the fronds of a palm tree or the bloom of a firework; a more modest row ringed his greasy neck, little pod-shaped excrescences that looked as if they harbored some unspeakable pestilence that would burst forth one day, fully winged, and take off into the air. His grizzled beard was thick and puffy; his nose, cheeks, and forehead were so bumpy and discolored, it looked as if his skin had melted and then hardened again. Never before had she seen so much sun damage on a black person’s skin; she didn’t even know it was possible. He must have been living out here for years , she thought. I wonder how old he is. It was hard to tell how much of the wear and tear was due to age as opposed to the elements; he could have been anywhere from forty to seventy. He reminded her of Robinson Crusoe, but worse—a castaway trapped inside a crowd, surviving off whatever scraps of human refuse he could find.
    He caught her staring. She turned, but it was too late. He extracted a beaten-up coffee cup from his shopping bag and approached her.
    â€œHey, girl!” he shouted.
    Elizabeth pitied the homeless, but as a single woman she made it a rule not to engage with them. You never knew what they were going to do; many of them were mentally ill. She lifted the book she was reading a little higher to cover her face.
    â€œ To the Lighthouse ,” he read aloud.
    Oh, Lord , thought Elizabeth, eyes glued to the page. What now?
    â€œAlways liked that Lily Briscoe.”
    She froze, waiting for more.
    â€œAlways had a thing for her. My kinda woman.” He emitted a single, staccato burst of a chuckle from somewhere between his chest and throat—a growly, gurgly “huh” that she would come to recognize as his signature noise. “Hey, what’s that thing she keeps moving around? On the table? Com’on, you know what I mean. At dinnertime?”
    A saltshaker; it was a saltshaker. Lily Briscoe was Elizabeth’s favorite too, a confirmed spinster and amateur painter who by the novel’s end achieves a measure of artistic greatness, though it will almost certainly go unrecognized and unremembered—like Lily herself. And yet she wasn’t a tragic character. She was, by her own reckoning and that of her creator, triumphant. Transcendent.
    Despite her rule, Elizabeth put down the book and turned to him.
    â€œYou’ve read To the Lighthouse ?”
    â€œWhadda you think? Huh. Used to teach it,” he said, before adding as if it were a natural segue, “Spare change? I gotta get drunk.”
    Elizabeth