The Rest of Us: A Novel (8 page)

I wandered over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art following an urge to photograph the vendors selling knockoff artwork and mass-produced photographs of Times Square, signed and framed to look like originals. Observing a group of teenagers hesitating at a table of fake African sculptures, I felt a surge of pleasure. For the past week, this had been happening to me. I’d be walking along and suddenly feel overcome with joy. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was photographing again or because I’d begun anticipating Rhinehart’s return.

•  •  •

I’d also recently made the decision not to renew my lease. The rent was going up again, and there’d been a rumor going around the building that the landlord’s son was filing for destabilization based on a tax abatement that had expired. It hadn’t happened yet, but the possibility had frozen me with fear several months ago, when suddenly the rider I’d been signing all those years appeared ominous. There was a lot of nervous talk amongst my neighbors, and I became
jittery every time I received a letter from the building, until I decided I didn’t need to stay in the apartment and be at the mercy of it. Once I’d made the commitment, even privately, I felt freer. Maybe, for the first time, I was learning to trust my instincts.

I’d delayed telling Hallie, until she asked about it over the phone. She always remembered when the lease was up.

“Are you crazy?” she said. “Why would you move?”

“No matter how many times I paint the bedroom ceiling the paint peels because there’s a leak somewhere in there. Two weeks ago, I was taking a shower and all these tiles fell off the wall and shattered in the tub. I’ve been calling Tony twice a day to come fix it, and he didn’t show up until yesterday and then he said he didn’t have the right tools.” Tony was our super, who was aging along with the building. “I’m really excited about moving, actually.” Looking around, I already saw myself walking away from some of the apartment’s unsolvable problems that I’d learned to tolerate, how the pipes clanged when the heat came up and made the living room stiflingly hot, the grime on the outside of the air shaft window that I’d never been able to figure out a way to clean.

“Do you know how expensive the city’s gotten? You’re not going to be able to find the same deal.”

“I don’t need to live in the East Village anymore. I’m not twenty-two. All the noise and the kids hanging out in front of the bars is starting to get to me. I’m thinking of further uptown where rents are cheaper. I’ve been looking online.”

“Craig’s List? Land of false promises? Have you checked out any of those places?”

“I’ll find something. It’s time for me to stop being so scared of change and just take a leap.”

•  •  •

I had budgeted $1,500 a month, which was manageable with my recent raise, and I could also take off-site jobs, possibly weddings, although I was wary of cutting into the time I’d set aside to do my
own projects. After having two Realtors tell me I would be unable to find a decent studio, or even a share at that price, I increased it by $100 and then by another $100. For one of the first times in my life, I felt acutely cramped by my income and even began to resent my salary, although I’d seen the books, and I knew Marty was paying me more than he should have given what he took in. My father had left me money in his will, but not much, the farm had been heavily mortgaged by the time we’d sold. I was reluctant to dip into it, since he envisioned me buying a little house with it. A practical little house, like the one I’d grown up in. It was something I’d always expected I’d have, but later, when I was older. When I was settled.

I checked out tiny commuter apartments, two hundred square feet that only fit a bed and a kitchenette. Windowless studios, or ones where the only window faced an air shaft. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon walking in the West 30s, trying to locate a handwritten rent sign I’d seen a few days before. The sun glittered off the distant Hudson. I stepped around iridescent puddles from leaking cars. All my free hours were bound up in the fruitless search. I didn’t have the energy or desire to take pictures, and I constantly worried that although it seemed temporary, I’d stopped for good.

I gave up, the only thing on this desolate stretch between the ferry and Penn Station were city auto body shops and the Central Park carriages. Horses stood out in the street in their blinders, waiting to be taken in. I thought of what Rhinehart used to say,
Illegitimos non carborumdem.
“Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

It had been more than a month since his note. A week ago, around the time I’d internally decided he was back in New York, a familiar feeling had begun to creep up on me. Impatience. At first an exhilarated impatience, like anticipation, and then, the more I obsessively checked my silent phone—irritation, depression. This was ridiculous, I thought. I wasn’t in my twenties anymore. If I wanted to speak to him, I should just call his cell. So I did. Listening to his recorded message, I began to get nervous—it didn’t say he was out
of the country. I attempted to sound cheery, casual and upbeat. I waited a day, two days, before it became clear that he wasn’t going to return my call. Maybe he’d reunited with Laura. Maybe he’d just had second thoughts about me. That refracted image of myself that I’d been holding on to—that confident, creative, sweet young woman—evaporated. Why the hell had he come back into my life? Just to reject me again? Make it clear that I would always feel more for him than he would for me? I had an inextinguishable loyalty, like a dog had.

•  •  •

Harlem was above my price range, and I began searching even farther up, in Washington Heights. In desperation, I agreed to a one-bedroom on 181st even though the hallway was strewn with trash, and I heard a cooing that I thought came from pigeons outside and turned out to be doves the woman next door kept. But it was large and bright and the building manager said there wasn’t anything that size for the price, and it would go fast. I was an easy target, as desperate and unaccustomed to apartment shopping as a greenhorn.

I went back uptown the following night to hand in my security deposit and first month’s rent in bank checks. Half a block short of my new building, I passed an empty storefront with the lights on inside. Even with the door closed, I could hear the music blasting. A group of men were standing in a circle around a blanket—a woman was on it, reaching under her dress, doing something. Feeling sick, I turned around and walked back to the subway.

•  •  •

In tears, I phoned Hallie, who said, “Call the landlord! Tell him you want to stay.”

“I did already. He’s rented the place for more than I was paying.”

“Did you sign anything? A termination notice?”

“No, but I didn’t renew in time. And he has it on email.”

“Let me talk to Adán. He knows lots of lawyers. You can fight this.”

“And how much is that going to cost? All that money just to stay in an apartment I want to leave. I really thought this was going to work out. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

•  •  •

Lying in bed that night, it occurred to me that if I wasn’t able to find something within the next week, I would have to start looking at shares. I felt my face flush with anxiety and shame. I was thirty-five years old, and I knew most of the people who shared apartments were younger than me, and they would think it was pathetic once they saw me show up for the interview. Women my age weren’t supposed to sit on old couches that no one could remember who bought, and use a bathroom in the hall, and check off on a chart whether they’d cleaned the kitchen. I would have no privacy, have to go out on nights when my roommates wanted to have a party. How could it have come to this? Why hadn’t I gotten further by now? Why was I still struggling alone with no one to help me or even to share my life? I thought angrily of Rhinehart, and then, despairingly, about myself and my inability to progress. How small my problems were, an apartment and my own self-image, and yet the fear was palpable that night. It felt real. It felt like a failing in me, and as I lay there, getting myself more and more worked up, my failures seemed the only truth.

I was so alone. I wondered if my father ever felt this way. He used to pray for my mother every night before bed, even though she’d been dead for thirty years. He’d been mostly quiet about his faith, although he’d attended the Presbyterian church in town and insisted that I go to Sunday school up until sixth grade. Whenever I was struggling, he’d use a firm tone I found comforting. “If you want to talk to God, He’s always listening. He can fix anything.” I never did, and the problems always resolved themselves on their own. That night, though, I got out of bed and slid down to the floor and began talking, my hands clasped together so hard my knuckles ached. I started with a long description of my problem followed by a lot of equivocation
and backtracking. Then I began speaking directly, as if my father had asked me, “What do you need?” I remembered a time in junior high school when I’d accidentally offended a girl in my math class by whispering about her failing grade, and afterwards she had scrawled the word “bitch” on my locker and was threatening to beat me up. After I’d told him about it, my father stayed up half the night writing a list of solutions that ranged from him visiting the principal to things I could say to the girl to diffuse the situation. He handed it to me in the morning, and I’d angrily rejected it. He’d scrambled to come up with something more, scratching his head underneath his cap, saying “Gosh, honey. Maybe we should call your Aunt Maryanne. Maybe she’s had an experience like this one.” Neither of us liked Aunt Maryanne—she had objected to my mother’s marrying him, a farmer, and had tried to get custody of me after she died, but he called her in Florida whenever he felt he needed a woman’s advice on a problem. What I’d done was just apologize to the girl when I saw her in class, which had been the first suggestion on my father’s list, and she’d acted like she’d already forgotten about it. I came home and told my father, and he’d said, “See—we shouldn’t have worried so much.” How blessed I’d been to have him. Maybe he was even still out there watching over me. In the end, what difference did it make if I had to share an apartment temporarily?

•  •  •

Marty, who was most eager to solve my problem, had mentioned my situation to his sister, who had six kids and owned a house in Staten Island with an illegal basement apartment. “Only a microwave and one of those mini-fridges, but she’s real nice and a lot of times, if everyone gets along, the tenant is invited to have dinner with the family. You may even be able to earn a little more baby-sitting.” I wondered if this arrangement, which sounded terrible to me, was my sign. Baby-sitting? Perhaps I should have been more specific. But I had seen a place on the Internet this morning that looked great—in Manhattan even, on the Upper West Side. Even though they hadn’t
gotten back to me yet, I was feeling optimistic. So optimistic that I decided to cancel an appointment to see a studio in Brooklyn on the border of Bed-Stuy. It was a great price, lower than my range, but I wasn’t so sure about the neighborhood.

“Just go,” Marty said.

“I don’t know if I feel like going all the way out there to be disappointed.”

“What else are you going to do this afternoon—we’re dead here. And if it doesn’t look good, there’s always my sister’s place.”

So I went, then got lost, and was so late meeting the agent, I debated whether it was worth showing up at all. But as I came down the block I saw her there, huddled in a down coat, waiting for me. The building was near the projects, and it was nowhere that Hallie would ever live, but I liked it. On the way over, I had passed two old women trundling their shopping carts, reminding me of how the East Village used to be.

•  •  •

We walked into the studio, and immediately I was hit in the face by sun streaming through an enormous arched window. I was in a large, high-ceilinged space. There was an alcove for my bed like in my childhood room and the same glass doorknobs on the closet. A deep clawfoot tub in the bathroom was on the same level as windows that had a view of a huge oak tree. I wandered around, stunned. I knew. This was where I would live.

•  •  •

As it turned out, I was almost outbid and spent two frantic days back and forth with the agent before signing the lease. But the lease was signed, and I moved on an overcast day in March. Stripped of all my things, my little East Village apartment looked forlorn, as if it knew it was going to be demolished and had given up all pretense of being a home. I thought about when I first arrived, before Hallie and I had bought any furniture, how I used to lie on my twin bed, staring up
at the cracked ceiling, imagining previous tenants, years of them, in their undershirts and housedresses, who drank and fought under the fluorescent lights in the kitchen, and read the newspaper at night, and cooked on a hot plate to save the gas.

The truck was packed outside, but I was reluctant to leave. I checked the narrow bedroom closet again to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind on its high shelf that you could never see to the back of. It was a terrible closet but the only one in the apartment, and when Hallie and I had tried to share it, it became so jammed with our clothes, you couldn’t move the hangers and had to pull out each individual item to figure out what it was. “This sucks,” she said. “It’s like the Loehmann’s sales rack.” Hallie tried to buy closet rights off me for fifty bucks, and then, when I refused out of principle, she spent an entire Saturday creating a “boudoir” out of a clothes rack and a glued-together pyramid of empty shoeboxes with a sheer blue fabric draped tentlike from above “for privacy.” She even hung a full-length mirror. It had a piece of notebook paper taped to it that said, “You’re sexy.”

“For your confidence,” she said. “Imagine a man saying it to you.”

But it was in her handwriting, so all I could hear was her saying it. “And sometimes it sounds sarcastic,” I told her. Within a day, the fabric had snagged on the hangers, pulling out the tacks that connected it to the ceiling, and floating down in a suffocating tangle cloud while I was inside changing. We finally repurposed it as a tablecloth, and I accepted the “porta-closet” as it came to be known, in exchange for unlimited borrowing rights to Hallie’s clothes and a future date with someone from her office. She’d just gotten a paid internship in the publicity department of a men’s lifestyle magazine. I was waiting tables at a crêpe place down by NYU. We both agreed her connections were better than mine.