The Apartment: A Novel (7 page)

These conversations between him and me took place usually while drinking vodka on the rocks at lunchtime, poolside. We’d talk, his phone would ring, he’d bullshit for five minutes, pick a number out of thin air, and when they agreed, as they always did, he’d silently pump his fist, say goodbye, send an email to one of his employees with instructions, and say, to me, Speedboat, baby. He was a millionaire, I think, but he had so many outgoings that he barely scraped by from month to month. Eventually he got the speedboat, but his wife wouldn’t let him take the kids out on it, and the neighbourhood association wouldn’t let him park it in his driveway, so he kept it in a storage facility thirty minutes away, visited it like a spouse in prison, and rarely spoke of it. He was a good guy, and he wanted to make money, have a nice life, raise his kids, have regular sex with his wife. And it seemed kind of insane to me that the very natural idea of wanting to be successful in order to create a comfortable life for your family had, here, taken such a big-hearted, unassuming, funny guy and placed him in the heart of darkness.

The last time I saw him we were up late in his back yard. He’d been drinking vodka tonics through the afternoon and evening. I came over after dark, because I heard loud music playing on his outdoor speakers. The police came by a few times to tell him neighbours were complaining, and he turned the music down for a little while, but then a song he liked would come on, and he’d turn it back up. After midnight, his wife started coming out every ten minutes to tell him the kids could not sleep. I was wearing a jacket, and he was in swimming shorts, bare feet, and a T-shirt. At around half past one, he started bouncing on his trampoline. He kept saying, Watch this, as though he was about to backflip, but all he did was bounce. Intermittently he delivered his philosophy on life as well as his philosophy on women. Finally his wife asked me to go home, so I left him there, bouncing on his trampoline, in the middle of the night, which was cool and starry. It was a few days later that I packed some things into a suitcase and got a taxi to the airport. I didn’t say goodbye. I suspected that he knew me as the kind of man who came by and had drinks, not the kind of man who said goodbye.

I say to Saskia, What were we talking about? Picnics, she says. I was saying we should have a picnic in the spring. Sounds good, I say. My favourite thing to do in spring, she says, is to go to a park with a friend on Sunday morning with all the newspapers and spend five or six hours there and not say a word to each other, except to comment on the nice weather. And then we go for lunch somewhere outdoors and drink white-wine spritzers for a long time. Then we go back to the grass and look at the blue in the sky until we fall asleep. Good Lord, I say, that sounds nice. Do you do that often? She pauses and watches the road for a few moments. No, she says. I don’t think I’ve ever done it, not like that. Everybody I know wants to talk. They read over your shoulder, and then they want to talk. Well, I say, I’m your man. She holds my elbow as though to thank me for saying something nice. If you get your apartment today, she says, tomorrow morning I’ll come over with food and we’ll have a breakfast that takes two hours to eat. I’ll bring bread and jam, and lots of butter. We’ll have an egg each – every course is small, and we eat them slowly. We’ll have mushrooms and sausages. We need buttermilk, meat and cheese. We’ll get very smelly cheese. We need fruit. And some newspapers. And lots of coffee. During breakfast, we’ll smoke lots of cigarettes, and when we’re done we’ll open the windows and air the kitchen out. After that, we’ll play some music and look at the city guide. God, I say, I hope I get the apartment. We could do it at my place, she says, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same. She has a flatmate. He’s from Montenegro, and he works and plays video games and spends a lot of time on the phone to his mother. She looks up at me and her mood has sunk a bit, because she is thinking that this is her life, to share a small flat with an adult who plays video games, so she thinks of something comforting. At least he pays his rent on time, she says.

The road levels out, and the streetcar accelerates. We pass the palace and enter a large white square. All around us is massive white imperial space. It really takes your breath away – still, even though I’ve seen it many times now. The inner ring is at the other end of the square, four or five lanes in both directions, always swamped with traffic. Two large avenues, one leading into the centre and one leading away, have curved in along either side of the streetcar tracks. Cars are backed up on the avenue leading into the city, as far back as I can see. The avenue out of the centre is nearly empty, and the odd car flies by. Today, because it has snowed so heavily, there is almost nothing that is not white, except the red lights of cars that are ahead of us, and the black, gritted streets, and various flags flapping over hotel lobbies and on the tops of buildings. The lights in the hotel lobbies are red and gold. They look empty and extremely peaceful. We pass the first stop that is on the ring road, between a school for actors and a school for musicians, and Saskia tells me a little bit about them, that it is very difficult to get into these schools, and that the drama school is for teenagers but the music school is for children as young as six. If you are six, she says, and you have not been identified as a musical genius, it is probably too late for you.

Just before the next stop, as we are waiting at a traffic light, she leans down and sees someone, and starts knocking loudly on the glass. Manuela! she shouts. A girl in a big fur coat and big pink combat boots turns around. She’s got dark red hair. Saskia waves. Manuela smiles and waves back. The streetcar starts to move again and they both point up the road – presumably to the next stop, where we will rendezvous. What a coincidence, I say. You’d think so, says Saskia, but I always run into people I know. You’ll like Manuela. She’s very pretty. I look back, and Manuela shrinks into the scrolling scenery. We stop and get off, and have to readjust to the cold – I put my hat on and she puts her gloves on, and we zip and button up again. Shall we wait or go to meet her? I ask. She’s going in our direction, says Saskia, so we should wait. Yes, I say, but it feels odd to just wait here. Let’s walk very slowly. Okay, says Saskia. We begin to walk back toward Manuela as slowly as possible. And she – I can see her now a long way off – is hurrying in our direction. I see that she is tall and thin. Saskia has mentioned Manuela to me before, and I have, I suppose, expected that she would be cool and stern, but I can already see that she is sort of goofy. She takes short, quick steps, with crossed arms. She holds her head down and looks up only when she nearly bumps into somebody. I know that Manuela used to work with Saskia and now works for the central bank. She’s more interested in her work than Saskia is. She is always working late, writing papers for conferences, having power lunches. Saskia is happy to stay in research, working hard in rare bouts to write reports only five or six people will read in their entirety, and is always dreaming of new things to do outside of work. Saskia says that Manuela sometimes irritates her, because she has no interest in books or art or history, but then admits that without Manuela she’d have an uninteresting social life. There’s a small park beside us, in which there is a statue of a huge seated figure – a poet. On the other side of the ring road is another figure – Saskia tells me this is a philosopher. They are real historical men, friends and rivals, who lived at the same time, about three hundred years ago –
aesthesis
versus
theoria
, Saskia says. Manuela is close enough now to wave. Then she looks down again. Saskia stops, so I stop. There is no reason to keep walking. Manuela gets to us and is out of breath. She and Saskia talk for a bit, and I don’t understand anything but hello and how are you, and the cold. Then Saskia says, We have to speak English. So Manuela switches to English. We’re going to buy him a new coat, says Saskia. And then we’re going to look at an apartment for him. An apartment! says Manuela. How exciting. Where? Saskia says the name of a street, or an area, I suppose. You must be rich, says Manuela, but not in the way Janos said it. You were in the Navy? she says. I nod. Saskia says, I’ve just learned he was on submarines. You don’t look American, Manuela says. Sorry, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with looking American.

It is agreed that Manuela will come with us. I am pleased and not pleased about this. She is, as Saskia said, very pretty, so I am as happy as anyone would be to walk around with her. But I have already met Janos and now Manuela, and I start to feel that I am meeting people I’ll see again. It is not that I don’t like them. It is simply that they reinforce the idea that you can never escape who you are, never truly anonymize yourself. Even if you never speak to anyone, people see you, and they get to know you for themselves. We cross the road through another underground passage. Manuela doesn’t ask any more questions about the Navy, or about me at all, which is a relief, but she tells a funny story about an office colleague who went with her to a conference last week, and who is uncomfortably antisocial. She met some interesting people at a dinner event but he followed her around, reminding her they needed to go back to the hotel and sleep. Every interesting conversation that almost happened with these interesting people was ruined by the colleague, who introduced serious questions about economics whenever the opportunity arose. She went back to the hotel with him, then waited an hour and sneaked out. When she returned a few hours later, very drunk, there was a note that he had slid under the door, saying he was disappointed that she hadn’t done as he said. He’s not my boss! she says. If it weren’t for people like him, says Saskia, economics would be left entirely to people like you. That’s a terrible thing to say! says Manuela. Saskia rolls her eyes. I feel I understand exactly how this friendship works.

We stop in front of a large department store, which is all glass. Manuela suggests we keep going. This is where my colleagues get their suits, she says. You have to be careful or you will come out looking like a civil servant. Saskia says, He’s just getting a coat. I say, Let’s have a look here and go somewhere else if we have to. We walk through the entrance into a thick gust of heat. All the walls are mirrors and all the effects are chrome. The light is bright and the music is loud. It’s electronic muzak – a bass line repeating with chiming and twinkling bits inserted. The sensation of walking into this environment out of a freezing, old city is profoundly unpleasant. I take off my hat and Saskia takes off her gloves and Manuela takes off her coat. She is wearing a little brown-and-green dress, and tights. Saskia has told me she is a maneater, and this is easy to imagine. She ties her hair up in a ponytail. She has a small, slightly freckled nose and green eyes. Do you need anything? I ask Saskia. I’m broke until next week, she says. How about you? I ask Manuela. I’d never buy anything here, she says, for women at least. Okay, I say, and we go straight to the escalator. What kind of coat are you looking for? asks Manuela. Something better than what I have now, I say. Buy something trendy, she says. I say, I’m not a trendy person. I’m thinking of something classy, something I can wear until it falls apart. I see, she says, and looks at my boots. I pick a foot up so we can all examine the boots, and think about them in relation to a coat. I like my boots, I say. Me too, says Manuela, but they’re combat boots. They don’t look like combat boots unless you hold them up like that, says Saskia. I put my foot down. Oh well, I say. I can buy classy shoes another day, when it gets warmer.

We land on the second level, which is still the women’s section, and Manuela, before we turn onto the next escalator, grabs a low-cut red dress with shoulder pads. See? she says. My mother would wear this. And suddenly something catches her attention, and she disappears across the floor and among the high racks of dresses and tops and sweaters and skirts and jeans. Saskia gives me a look. You okay? I ask. Fine, she says. She stresses you out? I ask. No, says Saskia. She’s just Manuela. Saskia looks upward, to the next level. I am below her on the escalator, two steps behind. I am looking up at her body and the back of her hair. She takes her coat off and places it in the cradle of her crossed arms. The next level is divided into men’s formal and casual, and there is hardly anyone shopping in the formal section, just some middle-aged men looking at suits. The casual coats have zippers on the sleeves or logos or writing on the back or they are made of shiny fabric. The larges are too small – the sleeves are too short and the shoulders are too narrow – and the extra larges are too big. They all make me look as though I want to look younger. But I don’t feel younger. I feel my age. I feel, now that I am forty-one, that I was born forty-one, that this number was somehow encoded in my DNA – this number was mass-produced by every cell of my body my whole life and for most of my life powered my bewilderment with the way everybody else acted, or what they wanted, or how they went about getting it. As a joke, I try on a coat that is blue and pink and has three small white stripes in a circle around the biceps of each sleeve and Saskia waves me away from the section entirely. I follow her. There is a ledge from which we can stare down at the level below, and we see Manuela inspecting an unsightly coat that would, no doubt, look nice on her. Saskia sighs. She seems eager to get out of here. Perhaps because her father was a civil engineer who ate himself to death, she equates the efficiency and usefulness of contemporary commercial architecture with ruthlessness and disease. She likes old, small, run-down places. In her camera phone she has photos of a thousand crumbling doorways and rusted gates. Since I have known her, she has added dozens. She has photos of broken windows in palaces and overflowing trash bins outside official buildings.

I see a coat on a headless mannequin at the other end of the floor, in a row of headless mannequins wearing nice coats. The coat is grey, almost silver. We walk to it. We stand beside the window overlooking the street. The coat has a lapel collar and epaulette sleeves and hidden buttons. Saskia says, It’s beautiful. She runs to find one my size. It’s ninety-nine per cent cashmere and one per cent cotton. It’s so soft, says Saskia. But look. She holds out the price tag, which is hanging out of the cuff. I don’t make that in a month, she says. It really is nice, though, I say. Yes, the best by far, she says. If you can afford it, you should get it. I feel inside the sleeves. It is expensive, but it’s also one of the nicest coats I’ve ever seen. And I may never buy a coat again. Put it on, says Saskia. I put my old coat on the ground and kick it away from me. I take the new coat and put my arms through the sleeves and pull the collar to my neck, and it fits. It’s a lot warmer than my other coat. It falls to my knees and there’s a large slit up the back.