Word: komar
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Lanning's hero, Herbert Komar, is about as unheroic as a man can be. A timid accountant whose pleasures are as small as his appetites, he has managed to reach 60 without marriage, love or any other risk...
After work, Komar eats in a drab restaurant, chats with the waitress, and goes home to the rooming house in which he has lived for ten years. Sometimes his landlady invites him down for an evening of bridge, and tuna-fish sandwiches. "He was aware of the larger possibilities of life, the beautiful, excruciating entanglements that other people got into, and survived, but these required an enormous effort, and in his observation were rarely worth it; he liked better the passing warmth that asked nothing of him beyond the moment's courtesy or interest...
Suitor at 60? Recently Komar has become restless; he thinks of living in a house of his own. He will hardly admit it to himself, but this is really one way of getting ready for death. For "there was something awful and sad about old men dying in rented rooms...
...first, it seems simple. Blanche Loyd, a real-estate agent, offers to sell the old house in which she lives with Lily, her blind, 80-year-old mother. But Komar soon discovers that he is becoming entangled with people rather than buying a house. Blanche Loyd is the first woman in years who can ruffle the dull passage of his life. The ancient Lily, still brimming with life, jeeringly mistakes him for still another of her daughter's suitors-or pretends to, since she does not want to sell the house. Both of them challenge Komar's ineffectual...