How Did You Get This Number (6 page)

I knew I could be a healthy, successful, content person in these apartments. And Mac knew it, too. I could see it in his face. We would be generous with our friends—come, use our rooftop sauna! Come, pull up a stool to the kitchen island and drink our small-batched liquor! Spend the night in a room with a door! But when they left, we would have the secret to life: all the perks of comfortable adulthood and all the joie de vivre of people who eschewed landlines and partook of Scorpion Bowls. Like polar bears in the Arctic, our friends were content to float on blocks of ice no bigger than their butts. But Mac and I were destined for something greater. A refrigerator taller than our hips, for instance. As we toured apartment after apartment together, me happily playing the role of stray animal, all I thought about was that my bedroom would have a knob that was housed in a door that was housed in a wall that was housed in a building that probably wouldn’t fall down. What else could I need?

There were, as there almost always are, signs this was never going to work. As it was with the leaking Red Hook ceilings I had narrowly avoided sleeping under, the cracks were beginning to show. I was dealing with normal people. In situations like this, it’s best to deal with the obscenely rich or the obscenely stupid. Preferably both. But Mac’s was a more-than-nice family of more-than-moderate intelligence. They rationalized an additional mortgage as an investment. At heart, they were not a buy-my-grown-child-an-apartment kind of people. Though ... at one point they did express concern that their freshly minted adult would be sleeping on a futon. They went on and on about the ramifications of this, both physical and psychological. Apparently, footing the entire bill for his housing glided down a separate stream of consciousness, a ship with no raised flags. But a futon? How juvenile.

The problem began with the fuzzy moral area of contributing to someone else’s mortgage, knowing your short-term funds were being poured into their long-term venture. With each apartment we viewed, my contribution incrementally increased. For a while this was an easily overlooked dilemma. I was still paying less than I would have on my own, and I was not particularly concerned with their financial compartmentalization. I had no concept of how long it took to actually purchase and move into a home (months) vs. how long it took to rent one (seconds, depending on how fast you could sign your name and throw an elbow at the prospective tenant coming up the stairwell behind you). Before the economy imploded, renting in Manhattan was a boxing match between how you were raised and how much money you had from week to week. You would pay and do just about anything for a livable space. A room of one’s own was probably not in the cards, but a bamboo folding screen might be nice. As you flipped through the backs of local magazines en route to the crossword, you’d find yourself hovering for a moment over the escort agency ads and thinking,
How bad would that really be?
And with thoughts like these in the mix, the lesser moral infractions seemed less infractiony. In this corner, measuring all the life you’ve led by all the life you have yet to lead, weighing the sum total of your sense of right and wrong, is your Morality. And in that corner, containing a twenty-dollar bill and a half-stamped coffee card, is ... And we’re done.

Plus, Mac was my friend. Friendship is a Spackle in itself. You’ll forgive your friends a lot, and if you’re a woman, you’ll forgive your straight male friends even more. They represent the possibility of mutual toleration between the sexes, a keyhole into the mind of the Other, and the promise of one day meeting someone just like them except that you want to sleep with them.

The situation became palpably tense as Mac’s parents began to feel a sense of unfairness that I would be paying so little each month, even with the steady increases in my contribution. It was not a buyer’s market. Mortgages would have to be recalculated. Bathrooms would have to be retiled. Places were too small or too dark or too far away from the subway—a henna tattoo of a problem for a renter but a more enduring concern for a buyer. As their comfort faltered, unsubtle suggestions that I contribute more were floated my way.

“They think you should pay more,” said Mac.

“How much more is more?”

We had long since blown past the monthly maintenance mark. We had doubled it. And yet, miraculously, the dimensions of my closet remained the same. I was a second-class citizen paying first-class prices. One evening, after his parents had gone back to their world of doormen and digital cable, I offered to buy Mac a slice of pizza. I put down our tiny cups of water and reached for my wallet. The only cash I had on me was a one-dollar bill.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mac said. “You’ll get me next time.”

But I was worried about it. Disproportionately so. He wasn’t the one with the frowning face of George Washington folded into the fetal position in his back pocket. If I felt this indebted over pizza, how was I going to cope with floor-to-ceiling French doors? I could feel the resentment bubble. Not like a cheese bubble, which is very noticeable, but like a little pocket of raw guilt heating into something altogether different, something that muttered,
You’re not even paying rent, asshole, your parents are.

I had to get out. I cited my own impatience with suburbia and my call time at my first job, which remained stubbornly at eight-thirty a.m. ten months into it. I couldn’t keep waking up before sunrise to get to the train station, deactivating the alarm in my parents’ house like I was in high school. It wasn’t him, he had to understand, it was me. Maybe we could, you know, try to see other roommates. Fortunately, Mac accepted this. But it was too late. I had watched all my other viable roommate options, those vetted by the four-year background check called “college,” chip off the real estate glacier. I was stranded. So I turned to that mecca of desperation, the Internet. But instead of tormenting myself with panoramic videos of views I’d never witness from balconies I’d never stand on, I went on Craigslist and found Nell.

Nell was a closet anorexic and a casual kleptomaniac. Neither affliction you’d think would be a problem when considered carefully. For starters, I’d never have to worry about her eating my food. Indeed, on more than one occasion I’d be brushing my teeth and she’d appear in the bathroom door with two versions of the same product in each hand.

“See, my peanut butter has more carbs”—she’d raise one container like a barbell, her parenthesis of an arm muscle straining from the process—“but your peanut butter has more saturated fat.”

Our refrigerator was becoming a condiment ark. We had two of just about everything. It was like we were kosher but instead of doing it out of piety, we were doing it out of hostility. I would turn to face her in slow motion, still brushing. And she’d wait for my reaction. Wait, brush, wait, brush. Until I’d spit and say something through the toothpaste foam like “That’s a solid point you make” or “Yeah, I’m thinking about switching.”

What can I say? Anorexics are very neat, and they pay their bills on time.

The kleptomania had also not been cause for concern. At least not at first.

A. None of my clothes would fit her without the aid of belts or a staple gun.

B. Her thievery was so open, I never had that panicky feeling that I’d left a sweater in the bar or lost it to the dry cleaner. A quick peek in her room would reveal the item, cuffs rolled up, laid tidily on her bed.

But what I hadn’t taken into account were accessories. Nary a woman has bloated earlobes. Handbags, in particular, are one-size-fits-all.

The result was a lot of conversations that went like this:

“Nell, is that my necklace?”

“Yes,” she’d say, touching her neck to confirm the fact.

“Where did you find it?”

“In your jewelry box.”

It seemed ironic that someone who adamantly eschewed all street foods could possess such sticky fingers. If I bought clothing, I’d sneak the bags into the apartment. If I left for the weekend, I’d drop off my laundry at the laundromat beforehand to get my stuff off the premises. When Nell took a shine to my loofah, I started using a plastic shower caddy, which I made a big show of escorting from my bedroom to the bathroom each morning. Instead of growing into my first year of adulthood, I was reverting back to freshman year of college. It was a futon mentality.

Thus commenced a passive-aggressive note-leaving campaign in which I found myself doling out unwelcome life advice like the old man in the Werther’s Original commercials.
Timmy, sometimes, when people own things, they like to keep track of them. And sharing is different from stealing, even if, as you say, I wasn’t here to ask.... We’re not possession-renouncing monks, Timmy, much as we’d like to be.

Alas, the notes fell on deaf ears. Deaf ears with my earrings sticking through them. I found myself storing my grandmother’s pendants in half-empty jars of fatty peanut butter.

Then came my big break. Nell packed up her Purell and her Luna bars and left for a monthlong trip to Nepal to find herself spiritually. I felt as if I’d won an all-expenses-paid, all-nude-all-the-time vacation in my own home. Or at least the right to leave my headphones on the coffee table, safe in the knowledge they’d be there when I returned. Every roommate feels a sense of unexpected calm when they are given a reprieve from the mate and left with the room. It’s not that you do anything more scandalous than walking around in ridiculous outfits, leaving cereal bowls in the sink, and smoking something low-grade out the window, but the air is filled with the idea that you
could
stay up all night blaring Hall & Oates, that you
could
sacrifice a live pigeon in the bathtub, that you
could
have a crazy scarf orgy in which you invite a bunch of people over and each person takes a scarf from your roommate’s closet and has sex wearing their scarf of choice.

As the days rolled on, I grew accustomed to thinking of myself as someone with a guest room. I never entered the room—save for an initial ransacking sweep of my own possessions—but I liked to think of it like an annex. I decided her bedroom was like one of those preserved boudoirs you see on tours of Hyde Park or Versailles fitted with Plexiglas dead ends that will allow you in only so far, spaces you can walk into but not walk into.

One night, after too much eating-of-the-cereal and smoking-of the-things-out-the-window, I tore up a cardboard box and taped two panels to the inside of her door frame, with a third panel at the end. Then I took a long red ribbon and hung it limply with thumbtacks. I had just opened my laptop to create an ersatz historical plaque when my phone began to vibrate. I could hear it rumble beneath the surface of clothing and magazine sediment that had built up in the past week. I picked up on the swan-song ring. It was Mac. Mac, with whom I hadn’t spoken since the Great Apartment Debacle of Four Months Ago. Mac, who caught me at the right moment. It is impossible to be angry and write fake museum-exhibit copy at the same time.

In the end, Mac’s parents had purchased him a spacious alcove studio in Gramercy Park. Free of the uncomfortable albatross that was my presence, their generosity flourished. They agreed to pay both his rent and monthly maintenance in full. Which was really their rent in full, since their names were on the mortgage. Mac was bashful when I pressed for this information, which I already had. It had come to me through mutual friends. Friends who were, at this very moment, sharing greasy take-out food beneath duct-taped TV sets and laughing at each other’s jokes. What Mac did tell me was how guilty he felt about what had happened between us, and that he, too, had been robbed of those innuendo-free nights of roommate bonding. He had been given a great gift, but with great gifts come very judgmental doormen.

Then he told me about an artist’s loft he knew of. I protested, citing false loyalty to Nell. She would be unreachable for another two weeks. I couldn’t have her come back to an apartment with my furniture cleared out and my closets empty. For Christ’s sake, what would she wear? Of course, the real source of my hesitation was the phrase “artist’s loft,” which I took as a euphemism for “bad art” and “no heat.” I knew even fewer successful artists than I did writers and musicians. I imagined a great deal of splatter paint and acrylic. Obscure animal hair. Maybe a couple of chairs that I would be scolded for defining as such. I also had questions about the legitimacy of the word “loft,” which gets tossed around so easily when preceded by “artist’s.” Not all shabby is chic, just like not every porn actor is a star.

“But it’s twenty-five hundred square feet,” Mac said, a fact that in Manhattan inspires all acts short of murder. Even then, people have killed for less. Like fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartments. At twenty-five hundred square feet, I could do triple salchows. I could set up a full-sized tennis court and still have room for my bed behind the baseline. I would barely even have to see my roommate. We could be like an estranged couple who live under the same roof for the sake of appearances but confine themselves to their respective wings.

I looked around at my home. Modestly blueprinted, it was more like the set of a play than a place where humans actually lived. All four doors (front, bathroom, and two bedroom) opened onto the living room. The living room bled into the kitchen, separated only by a sheet of fake floor tile when you crossed over. Our one window faced a view-obscuring metal pole. I settled my gaze on my bedroom door. I remembered the time I found one of my Werther’s Original notes retaped to the middle of the door. Nell had shoe-napped a pair of three-inch heels, leaving me to play Melanie Griffith in
Working Girl
for the day, my hosiery-encased feet slipping out of my Converses. Meanwhile, in an organic juice bar somewhere across town, my roommate was traipsing around in brand-new cow skin. That called for a note. When I returned home, I found Nell looking straight ahead at the TV and watching a show called
Movie and a Makeover.
She ate baked potato chips slowly and methodically, like a drugged-out woodchuck. The program did an impressive job of tying together
Sleepless in Seattle
with home spa recommendations. I tugged the paper down and approached Nell.