Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House (8 page)

Partly because we were busy and partly because having a coveted apartment tends to strip its occupants of all traces of empathy, it became a tradition that roommate candidates would be interviewed on a single day, one after the other. We’d show them the place, make them explain themselves, and then tell them we’d call them if we were interested. Brad was among a group of candidates being considered to replace Pat, a particularly beloved roommate who’d been attempting to write her doctoral dissertation in the tiny room once occupied by Ben. The remaining roommate was Stephanie, a struggling actress I also adored and with whom I’d be deciding who should be crowned Our Next Roommate. On the day we interviewed Brad, we’d also interviewed several other nice people. One was a woman who was a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia but spent most of her time in Russia. Pat, who’d overheard some of the interviews as she was packing up her room (and who was also more than a decade older and much, much wiser), suggested to us that the Russian scholar was the way to go, since it would be like hardly having a third roommate at all.
Brad, she’d pointed out to us, seemed immature and puppy dog–like and, did we happen to notice, mentioned his mother no fewer than twelve times.

Being twenty-five and all, we chose Brad anyway. The reason we did this is that we wanted boyfriends (I was long done with the twenty-nine-year-old journalist; Stephanie was doing too much musical theater for her own good). Not that we wanted
him
as a boyfriend. But Brad had the distinct advantage of being a boy. And since he’d be attending graduate school at Columbia in the fall, it was likely he’d be bringing friends to the apartment. Possibly those friends would be cute and smart and the kinds of people we might date. Never mind Pat’s point that Brad was in the English department, where there were considerably more women than men. Never mind that by then I, too, was in a graduate program at Columbia and should have known that if you wanted a boyfriend, the chances of finding one in a humanities department were only slightly better than the chances of finding one in a handbag store. At that point in my life, hard evidence was less compelling than sweet, soft fantasy. I took Brad’s deposit check and handed him a set of keys.

Brad’s first offense was to bring in a large piece of baby blue carpeting and unroll it in his room so that it covered every inch of floor. He then moved in a shiny brown Formica desk of the sort you see in bank branches. Then an enormous bright orange recliner.

I need to say a few things about the decor and overall architectural style of this apartment. By no means was it luxuriously or even interestingly furnished. Just about everything was a hand-me-down from someone’s parents’ house or some kind of “gem” (when you’re in your early twenties “gem” is a broad category) dragged in from off the street. We had a large, comfortable
sofa whose appearance I no longer recall but that I have no doubt was reasonably attractive or at least minimalist and nonoffensive. The walls were lined with bookshelves, over which Calder prints and collector’s edition posters from events sponsored by the Lincoln Center office hung in stark black frames. In the kitchen we had a sea green 1950s-era breakfast table and two matching adorable if somewhat rickety chairs (there had been three until Ben sat down in one and it splintered into pieces right out from under him). Our bedrooms were generally spare and book filled. Worn, faded Oriental rugs seemed to slide in and out as roommates moved in and departed. Houseplants would thrive for a few weeks, then singe to their deaths in the sunlight from the south-facing windows, the desiccated leaves falling behind the couch never to be swept up. We occasionally vacuumed and dusted, but we never waxed the floors. Dried flowers in random-sized clay pots popped up in unlikely corners. When we played music, it was often jazz or the work of esoteric South American folk musicians. When people came over for the first time, they said,
“Amazing
place.” You get the picture.

Brad, for his part, did not get the picture. In the first weeks, he holed up in his carpeted room, listening to U2 and reading his Melville and his Hawthorne and occasionally wondering aloud to Stephanie and me why he wasn’t quite “clicking” with anyone in the English Department. In the weeks after that, he became so aggrieved at the conditions of the cupboards in which he’d been forced to store his mother’s expensive cook-ware that he embarked on a cleaning frenzy whose results defied everything he thought he knew about the physical laws of hygiene.

Unlike the disinfected Westchester County house in which Brad had grown up, the apartment on 100th Street was one of
those unrenovated prewar New York City dwellings for which total cleanliness was simply impossible. No matter how hard you scrubbed and how many cleaning products you used, there would always be a layer of grime on the counters, on the windowsills, and in crevices of the woodwork. No matter how many roach traps you set down, there would always be that momentary flurry of activity when you turned the lights on in the middle of the night. No matter how pristine the contact paper on the bottoms of the drawers or the shelves of the cabinets, there was never any guarantee that at some moment in the recent or distant past, a mouse hadn’t padded across someone’s mom’s Le Creuset frying pan like a mischievous cartoon character. For Brad, there must have been something almost primitive about the place. Appalled by our sanitation standards, confused by our decor tastes, and, as time went on, so tongue-tied around us that he resorted to making embarrassing puns or recounting his college days in excruciating—and mind-numbing—detail, Brad grew both more irritated and more irritating by the day.

I, in turn, grew despairing. This was an intruder. There was no other way to put it. For the first time in the three years I’d lived in the apartment, I felt as if I’d lost control of it. And since the place almost literally reverberated with the echoes of my own self-approval—the slam of the lobby doors, the lurching and cranking of the elevator, the tinny rattle of the mailboxes; this was the sound track of my life as the person I’d always wanted to be—I couldn’t keep myself from feeling that something precious had been snatched away. Whereas once the apartment had been a cozy backdrop for an ever-evolving production of
Three’s Company
as reimagined by Woody Allen, it now seemed as impersonal and juvenile as a college dormitory. Whereas once I’d actually looked forward to the sound of
my roommates’ keys in the door, I now held my breath when I heard footsteps in the hallway. Whereas once I’d been convinced that the threesome dynamic offered the best chances for roommate mental health and harmony (if one person didn’t feel like making macaroni and cheese and whining about entry-level jobs, someone else almost certainly did), I could now feel the balance shifting toward something that looked like war.

And then came the first shot. One evening, as I was writing in my room, Brad knocked on the door (doors were always closed now) and asked if he could borrow my suede jacket.

This jacket, a slightly too large 1970s brown car coat with a torn satin lining and wide lapels, had quite possibly been my greatest source of happiness in college and was now my second-greatest source of happiness (the first, of course, being the apartment in its pre-Brad incarnation). Brad had complimented it many times before and even asked once to try it on (it fit him, if snugly) but had never asked to wear it. Faced with this sudden boldness, I was too stunned to know what to say. Finally, I asked how long he planned on wearing it, and he said it would just be for the night. Still dumbfounded, I said okay (I could not at that moment find the words to say anything else), and he took the jacket from my bed, put it on, and left the house.

What happened next—or, I should say, what happened soon after this—still horrifies me a bit. When I allow myself to shuffle through my life’s most guilt-producing memories, this one invariably rises to the top of the pile. What happened was that I became absolutely convinced that Brad had to leave the apartment. Though I knew perfectly well that the reason he was there was because I had made the selfish, myopic mistake of inviting him, though I also knew that he’d borrowed my
jacket because he was as lonely and desperate for social connections as anyone I’d ever known, I also knew that if he remained in my space for another week, I might choke on the bile of my own pitiable mistake.

Still, weeks passed and I did nothing, which is to say I did nothing but complain about Brad to anyone who would listen. I knew kicking him out was unconscionable, but I also believed that every day I continued to live with him was a day so miserable I might as well have spent it in an iron lung. Pretty soon, the dilemma became the central problem of my life. It consumed me. As though I were sending copies of the same letter to multiple advice columnists, I laid the scenario out to my friends, my co-workers at my various temp jobs, and, of course, Stephanie, who was similarly annoyed (if not totally vexed) by the situation. I even considered actually writing a letter to an advice columnist but, knowing the likely response, did not. Meanwhile, the advice I received felt lukewarm. People who were more compassionate and even tempered than I told me to suck it up and cope with him at least until the end of the school year. People who’d known me for longer pointed out that I already knew what I was going to do so why not just get it done. My mother told me it was unfair to throw him out for no reason but that the baby blue carpet really did sound awful. My friend Alison, a Columbia classmate who was by now my best friend, labeled my Brad-related strategy sessions “bradegizing.” Finally she suggested I simply lay his carpet out on the sidewalk along with his bed and his reclining chair and hope he wouldn’t notice that his room had been relocated.

In lieu of that option, I summoned Stephanie. I told her we had to ask Brad to leave. I told her that our lives were passing us by, that we wouldn’t be young and carefree and living in this apartment forever, that it was criminal to waste our salad
days, not to mention our wonderful, majestic, perfect-in-a-way-Brad-was-incapable-of-appreciating apartment on someone who covered the oak parquet floors with baby blue carpet. Stephanie was hesitant, but she acquiesced. (I’d like to think this was because his presence was as intolerable to her as it was to me, but in truth it was probably because I was the “senior roommate” and she felt pressured.)

That evening, we knocked on Brad’s door and asked to speak with him. He was, as usual, listening to U2 and staring numbly at his computer screen. I remember that I was shaking with anxiety and that I felt like an unforgivable asshole even though I hadn’t said anything yet. I remember that my jacket, which had been promptly and safely returned by Brad after his night out with it, was hanging on the back of my desk chair in my room, no worse for the wear. I remember knowing at the time that none of what I was about to say had anything to do with the jacket, but that I was planning on leading with that subject anyway.

There’s very little else that I remember.

There was a look of shock and anger, some stammering, and some silence. Stephanie and I finished the deed (did she say anything during the exchange? I honestly can’t recall) and retreated to my room with the door closed, hearts beating as though we’d just averted a mugger on the sidewalk. After a few minutes, we heard Brad storm down the hallway, open the front door, and slam it with a force whose sound I can still conjure today. The framed Calder prints rattled on the walls. The
New Yorker
magazines fluttered momentarily in the gust. Stephanie and I probably said something to each other like “At least it’s done.” Or maybe she said nothing and I wrung my hands and made murmurings about how I’d had no choice, that I knew that asking him to leave on the grounds of simply
not liking him was really, really, really terrible but I just couldn’t go on otherwise.

In any case, it was both done and not done. Brad did not speak to us anymore, but nor did he move out. Like a breakup that can never make the leap from imminence to actuality, Brad’s time on West 100th Street stretched into another tortured two months. When he failed to pay his rent, I knocked on his door once again and asked if he was planning to use his security deposit in lieu of a check. He shrugged and mumbled something that sounded like yes. When another month passed and he had neither moved nor paid his rent again, I told him he had a week to get out. I honestly can’t remember what happened after that. I have no memory of him rolling up his carpet or moving his furniture, nor do I recall getting his keys back or saying goodbye. I do remember that the pickings were rather slim on the next round of roommate selections and that the woman we chose to replace him, a twenty-two-year-old aspiring advertising executive with a baby voice and a penchant for rubbing her toes with nail polish remover while smoking Merit Ultra Lights, was almost as disturbing a presence as Brad was, albeit in a totally different way.

While I try to piece together the order of events surrounding Brad, what’s most striking is the amount of amnesia that set in even within weeks of the initial confrontation. In the fourteen years that have elapsed since this took place, I have not until writing this book forced myself to recount the details of what I did. I’ve casually said to people, “I kicked out a roommate once,” but I suspect that even as I’ve said it, the words had already twisted themselves around a false mythology. Surely, I’d kicked out my roommate because he was crazy or abusing drugs or not paying his rent. Surely, some sacrosanct line had been crossed, and I’d kicked him out because that’s
what a reasonable person does in that situation. Since I am a generally good-natured and fair-minded person, it couldn’t possibly have been any other way. Could it?

If this had not been a matter of real estate, if my relationship to Brad had been circumscribed within the context of work or casual friends or some kind of extracurricular activity, it’s almost certain that when faced with the sudden desire never to see him again, I would have acted judiciously, or at least agonized about it for far longer than a few months. But just as my various college residences had engendered in me a sickness whose only cure was to move out as quickly as possible, the presence of Brad in the West 100th Street apartment seemed more like a form of psychological torture than the simple bummer that it actually was and should have felt like. And because that apartment was the first place I’d lived in either my childhood or my adult life that not only felt like home but also embodied everything I’d ever fantasized about a home, I was willing to sacrifice not only my manners but even a little bit of my humanity in order to protect it. As a result, I did to Brad what I refused to do even to the cockroaches in the corners. I stepped on him and then erased him from my mind.