Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (7 page)

These weren’t just little mind games. Over my remaining
two years at Vassar, I would move seven more times. Please know how much this admission makes me cringe. Counting the moves up just now, I died a little death, not only at the thought of how many books I could have read or chemistry labs I could have taken (though considering I barely got through high-school chemistry, who are we kidding?), but also at the sheer amount of money and time I wasted doing everything in my power to avoid being a regular college kid who did regular college things.

The summer after my sophomore year, instead of working as a camp counselor or getting a Eurorail pass, I insisted on living in Manhattan, where I’d been hired as an intern (at $200 a week, which thrilled me) at an office at Lincoln Center. Having finally acquiesced to my pleas to not spend another summer in Ridgewood, my parents allowed me to sublet the Upper West Side studio of a woman my father knew through work colleagues. The apartment had exposed brick walls and a sleeping loft and, as it happened, was a fifth-floor walk-up in a brownstone (curiously, this fifth-floor situation had none of the unpleasant side effects of the fifth-floor dorm room). The woman who occupied it most of the time was a former actress who was now pursuing a career writing children’s musicals about the rodeo circuit. She charged me $800 a month, and I worked out an arrangement with my parents wherein I paid half and they paid half. Astonishingly, I managed to be frugal enough to hold up my end on my $200-a-week income.

It was a hot, hungry, lonely, glorious summer. I was twenty years old, and my life felt like a vast ocean before me. I loved having a real job and living in the city. Though there was no air-conditioning and I had cheap, unflattering work clothes and was so strapped for cash that when I spilled my dinner on the floor one night, I went to bed famished because there was
nothing else in the cupboards and I literally couldn’t afford to go out and buy a sandwich, I found myself in a state of unparalleled happiness. I loved the buzz of the office, loved the table and chairs on the tar rooftop of the brownstone, and loved the smell of ammonia on the sidewalks outside the Korean grocery markets in the morning.

I loved the people at work so much I wanted to round them up and yoke them to my shoulders as I plowed my way into adulthood. Though I would later realize that most of them were fairly ordinary New Yorkers trying to live decently on the middling salaries of the nonprofit world, I saw them at the time as wildly sophisticated. From my desk in the office, where I typed address labels and stuffed envelopes with a glee I’d never known before, I observed their behavior and listened to them talk on the phone. As far as I was concerned, I was researching the role of my future self. I had crushes on all of them: the men and the women, the old and the young, the glamorous, high-rolling executives and the Brylcreemed accountant. At night, as I drifted off in the airless berth of the sleeping loft, the echoes of their voices in my head were as soothing as the sirens outside.

When my sublet ended in mid-August, I moved back to Ridgewood for a few weeks and completed my internship by commuting to the Port Authority on the Short Line bus. When that was over, I packed up and returned to Vassar. The under-whelm was palpable. The school, which had long ago started to feel like some kind of amusement park for overgrown adolescents, now seemed to have shrunk into an architectural model of itself. It was hard to say what felt more oppressive, the self-congratulatory pride the place took in its ability to offer both limitless freedom and near-foolproof safety or the
fact it attracted so much wealth that one student had an original Warhol on the wall of his dorm room.

Despite my new level of exasperation with Vassar, I had a good semester, the best of my whole college experience by far. I lived with three friends in a unit of modern-looking campus apartments designated for upperclassmen. Normally, this housing, which had an open, multilevel design I’ve always associated with late-1970s-era condos in which groovy singles with feather earrings would play Christopher Cross albums, was reserved for seniors. I, however, had been allowed to enter the housing lottery with three senior friends, and to our delight we’d been granted an apartment. In a statement of opposition against the cult of covering the walls with tapestries and/or huge posters depicting high-contrast black-and-white art photographs, we refused to decorate at all. We were righteous minimalists.

Soon, however, I found myself caught inside yet another escape fantasy.

I did not want to be a college student anymore; I wanted to be a working person living in New York. Now that I had tasted independence, now that I’d known the exultation of turning a key in the solid, wheezing front door of a brownstone, now that I’d known life under the vast canopy of the city, the smallness of the college bordered on the intolerable. In desperation (though perhaps in a stroke of genius?) I applied for and received a one-semester transfer to NYU. I called my beloved colleagues from the Lincoln Center office and talked them into hiring me as a part-time office assistant. I found a $700-a-month one-room apartment in a mildew-scented building in Greenwich Village (another fifth-floor walk-up, as it happened). I then—and this still astounds me—crunched the
numbers in such a way that I was able to convince my parents that this scenario wouldn’t cost them a dollar more than if I were to finish out the year at Vassar. As I had the previous summer, I’d be paying half my rent—this time $350 per month, which I would easily earn at the Lincoln Center job.

Too distracted by the coming storm of their marital dissolution to put up a fight, my parents granted me permission. And so at Christmas break my father drove the Plymouth Horizon up to Vassar and helped me take the futon mattress and the stereo components (still connected) as well as my computer and books and clothes and a high-contrast black-and-white art photo or two back to Jones Lane. A week later, I loaded it all back into the Horizon and enlisted my father to drive me into the city. I’m pretty sure he did so with reasonable graciousness, which in retrospect seems too kind given the manic, almost embattled attitude I’d developed about my need to get away from both my family and my college. Once installed in my new digs, I stocked the kitchen with ramen noodles and spread out the Guatemalan blanket. I put the Suzanne Vega CDs on the shelf and plugged in the computer. And although I felt like an impostor of staggering proportions, I also couldn’t help marveling at myself just a little bit. There I was: a twenty-year-old with her own job and Manhattan apartment. Smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall had taken on entirely new dimensions.

The sped-up version of the subsequent year and a half goes something like this: I lived in the one-room apartment, worked at the nonprofit arts organization, and took NYU classes in dramatic writing (apparently, I was now a playwright). The following summer was the summer that my mother moved out of the house on Jones Lane, and as my parents were no longer able to supply me with $350 in monthly rent money, I was
forced to return to Ridgewood and, yet again, commute to Lincoln Center on the bus (it was around this time that I visited my mother’s new house and ate polenta with her). In the fall, I returned to Vassar, where I lived in a spacious senior dorm room until I decided I could no longer tolerate eating in the dining hall. At the end of the first semester I rented an off-campus apartment—the second floor of a shabby row house several blocks from campus—with my friend Claire, a premed student whose reasons for living off campus I can no longer remember.

Not that I was planning to live there full-time. By that point, I had amassed almost enough credits to graduate; all I needed to do was write my thesis and attend its accompanying weekly seminar. I no longer wanted to be a playwright, but, rather, a journalist, so I applied for and was granted a three-day-a-week internship at an art magazine in Manhattan. The idea was that I would crash in the apartments of various friends who had already graduated from Vassar or (in a pinch) stay in Ridgewood for the part of the week in which I was doing the internship. I would then return to Vassar once a week for my thesis seminar. Since the campus was only a two-hour train ride from Grand Central Station, this scenario was not implausible, though not exactly advisable either.

I implemented this plan for four days until, on the fifth day, the art magazine went out of business and the entire staff was laid off. Having cleared my calendar of nearly all campus-related activities, I finished out my college career sprawled in front of the television in the row house apartment watching
Little House on the Prairie
reruns and, eventually, news coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots. By graduation day, I had ten addresses under my belt and had moved the futon mattress up and down a total of twelve flights of stairs. My parents drove
up and watched me collect my diploma. They told me they were proud. This made me incredibly guilty and, by extension, incredibly sad.

But guess what was coming my way? A slightly shabby prewar apartment on 100th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. I had a friend named Lara, whom I’d met at the Lincoln Center office, and together we’d decided to look for a place somewhere on the West Side, between Ninety-sixth Street and the Columbia University campus. Though she’d been living downtown, she was set to enroll in film school at Columbia, and though I’d be working in midtown—I’d reluctantly accepted a job as an editorial assistant at a beauty magazine—I still wanted to live among the Gothic spires and bearded socialists of the upper stretches of West End Avenue. So during the first month or so of that job, while I commuted in from Ridgewood on the dreaded Short Line bus, Lara scoured the apartment listings until she happened upon the place on West 100th Street. And when we looked at it and were told we didn’t have enough income to qualify, Lara visited the management office, security deposit and first month’s rent in hand, every day for three weeks until the landlord finally broke down and rented it to us. Preposterously, we both had to get our parents to sign guarantors’ letters stating (falsely) that their yearly incomes were a hundred times the monthly rent. I have known very few young people who’ve managed to get leases in New York City without producing this kind of document, which all landlords know is bogus but seems to comfort them nonetheless. The rent (this figure is permanently etched in my mind) was $1,776.76. Since we still couldn’t afford the place without a third roommate, I called a
Vassar friend, Ben, and offered him in on the deal. He immediately agreed.

As far as I was concerned, this apartment was paradise. Not to mention huge. A long hallway ran the length of the place, off of which lay a decent-sized living room, a dining room, and a large bedroom. At the end of the hall was a tiny bedroom, and adjacent to that was the bathroom and kitchen, both of which I also considered ample and therefore evidence of my ascending station in life. My room was the dining room, which had been converted into a separate bedroom. Lara, being enviably assertive (she is now a movie director), had the large bedroom, and Ben, being gracious and patient to a fault (he was then a third-grade teacher), took the small room. The whole apartment was probably about eleven hundred square feet. My share was $550.

Oh, and the bathroom, whose sole window afforded privacy by way of a faded and paint-splattered stained-glass panel in a Victorian fleur-de-lis pattern, had the original porcelain hexagonal tiles. Clearly I was where I was meant to be.

With the exception of my job, which reverberated with so much displaced female anger that I often broke out in hives, I adored my life here. I adored Ben and Lara and I adored the apartment and I adored just about everything we did in it: the meals we ate, the episodes of
Northern Exposure
that Ben and I watched, the parties we threw in which strangers crowded in the kitchen and lit their cigarettes off the stove. I had a boyfriend—a twenty-nine-year-old journalist who seemed extremely grown up—and even though he had his own apartment downtown with a doorman and air-conditioning, I often wanted nothing more than to be sprawled out on the couch in the apartment on 100th Street with my age-appropriate peers
doing age-appropriate things like eating lentils from the 99-cent store.

The building, which wasn’t in any way fancy but had a handsome marble lobby and ornate ironwork on the front door, was, as far as I was concerned, one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It smelled like a combination of that musty, uriney smell that imbues all New York City buildings and the chicken and plantains that were frequently cooking in the ground-floor apartment of the Puerto Rican superintendent, Carlos, and his enormous extended family. One member of this family, a woman of indeterminate age named Carmen, had a habit of using the super’s keys to enter apartments when tenants weren’t home. She wouldn’t steal anything but, rather, identify certain items that appeared to be broken or not in use and later ask if she could have them. I remember her approaching me while I was retrieving the mail and informing me that my Walkman, which I kept in a desk drawer, didn’t rewind properly but that she’d take it off my hands for five bucks.

The neighborhood was hardly unsafe. But back in 1992, if you worked at a magazine for which the question of how best to apply lip liner required regular summit meetings, it was considered a bit unusual to live north of Ninety-sixth Street. Many of my co-workers were comely trust funders with co-op studios on lower Fifth Avenue and time-shares in the Hamptons, and I remember taking a smug delight in their bewildered, slightly appalled reactions to my address. “One Hundredth Street?” they’d ask. “Isn’t that Harlem?”

Eventually, Ben and Lara moved out and got their own places. I stayed for five years (mind-blowing considering my college record) and rotated through five more roommates, a few of whom became friends for life and a few of whom I can
barely remember. One roommate incident that I do remember but wish I could erase from my mind involved a certain Columbia grad student I’ll call Brad.

I cannot overemphasize the degree to which this apartment was a highly desirable “share” situation. Given that the building was rent stabilized, the unit was at least 20 percent cheaper than most Manhattan apartments—and significantly larger and nicer to boot. Whenever a roommate moved out, the only action necessary to replace him or her was to post a Room Available sign on a handful of telephone poles on Broadway. Within an hour, at least a dozen people would have called and begged to come over “right away” before someone else snapped it up.