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Apartment, part one
Around ten years ago, I was trying to sublet my apartment in New York City. I was trying to do it legally, so I sent the landlord, Gertrude Wexner, a certified letter. After two weeks, the letter hadn’t arrived, and time was running out. If I didn’t have a tenant and I signed the lease, I would have to spend six months and one day of each year in the apartment or lose it.
During this time, I was spending most of the year with Richard in Arizona. I wanted to keep my apartment because me and Arizona, I mean the first time I got off the plane to visit Richard, I took one whiff of the strip malls and condo complexes and thought to myself, “Oh, my fucking god, kill me now.” I mention this to illustrate what love can make you do.
Monday morning I went to the post office. The supervisor, Miss Giles, had said, “Call me Monday morning.” I called Miss Giles, and I was placed on hold for 30 minutes. I was on hold, calling the place I was standing in.
Jean-Luc Godard once observed that waiting is a form of enchantment. The seconds tick along like little pulse beats, but time also stops, and you gain a kind of immortality. Maybe we are always waiting. Later, back at the apartment, when I told Richard about being placed on hold for Miss Giles, he said, “I would never have believed her in the first place.” In England, he says, “workers hate providing service and they loathe you for expecting it. English people accept this and muddle through, even though they are seething inside. They are always seething inside for one damn reason or another.”
During my first few years with Richard, my friend Adam had lived in my apartment and paid the rent. I’d told Gertrude he was my fiancé. She’d cast a yellow glare through her black-framed glasses but hadn’t interfered. Now, Adam had moved in with a woman, and I needed another tenant.
In the post office, I was standing in front of a window with bars, and the radiators knocked and kicked. Behind the bars, the postal workers looked like bears at a shooting gallery, gliding along mysteriously. The window reminded me of a cage I had seen containing a snowy owl. I was in Alaska, and the owl had been rescued from an oil spill, and it stared out with its look of permanent surprise. I’d flown to Alaska to help animals caught in a human mess, but it turned out I couldn’t do much for the animals except identify with them. People were swarming over the state, caring for otters and birds. It was better than doing nothing, I thought, because, really, what else can you think in a situation like that? The snowy owl was recuperating in a raptor center paid for by Exxon. People profit from disasters. To profit from a disaster, you have to believe in the inevitability of failure. You have to think, more or less, like the English.
While I waited for Miss Giles, I felt like the snowy owl, squeezed between forces beyond my control. Richard favored shipping my belongings to Arizona, sublet or not. We had hired movers. I had sold my bike, some furniture, and hundreds of books. But of all the things I’d ever considered in my life, moving my things to a place I did not want to live in seemed the craziest, and I imagined passing my file cabinets and couch in a revolving door, as I swept off yet to someplace else.
The snowy owl had stood in its cage without flapping around, and as I recalled its stoicism—or owlism—a recent meeting came to mind. I was walking down Columbus Avenue, circling my life choices, when I slipped into a L’Occitane shop. One of the attendants offered to massage my hands, and my heart leapt, and I thought, Oh, dear city, this is where I belong. The woman was wearing a green suit from another era, something you’d find in a vintage shop. She’d been hired to give massages to anyone who wandered into the store. The hidden hand of the city was moving to embrace me.
I asked the woman her name, and she said, Vicky, as she squeezed lavender lotion onto my hands. She said lavender was calming, and I sensed she needed to be calm as much as I did. She had a soft smile and a saddle of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and as she worked on my hands, I saw she was sad. She said she had been unemployed for two years and had lost her sense of self. I told her I, too, had lost some sense of myself in the desert. I asked her how she coped, and she said she prayed, and I asked how she prayed. I had not asked this question of anyone before in my life, but I was curious about Vicky, and I wanted to show an interest in something she cared about. She said, “I petition God, and I believe he hears me, even if he doesn’t answer.” She said, “It gives me peace to imagine him listening.”
This reminded me of Beckett’s play Happy Days, where, in Act One, Winnie is buried in the ground up to her waist and in Act Two she is buried up to her neck. Still, each morning, she welcomes another “happy day” because her love, Willie, is nearby. In reality, Willie ignores her and occasionally grunts an irrelevant remark to her. But anyone who studies the play will find analogies to their own life. For example, I am super grateful for Richard when I imagine life without him and myself alone in New York. I see a woman pushing a shopping cart. I once thought of buying a metal shopping cart from two Taiwanese students who were moving to Indiana for jobs. I bought their microwave oven and an Ikea gooseneck lamp for reading in bed. I considered ferrying the objects home in their shopping cart. It was on the wobbly side, but really I turned it down because I got an image of myself as a doleful, wiry person plodding along behind the trembling contraption, and I could see my life.
In the post office, I could see a similarity between waiting and praying, in that in both situations you are dangling before you receive an answer. I was in front of window 15. I had rested my phone on the marble counter, certain that Miss Giles was never coming, and I began to cry. I wasn’t embarrassed. I wanted to be a symbol of what the post office can do to you. I wanted people to look at me, although they were sealed inside the fortress of solitude New Yorkers erect in the face of chaos. Every time I thought of not crying, I cried more. Maybe it was a performance. Sometimes you don’t know if you are acting. For example, I wonder this about people who say they have met their perfect mate. They are in a thing like Romeo and Juliet or like Lucy and Desi. I wonder if, on occasion, they, too, might like to be in two places at the same time. In the post office, even if I was acting, I didn’t care. I was a New York character in a leather coat and blue-framed glasses. I was my mother, and I missed her because she was never going to enter my apartment again and ask me why I was not married and publishing more. I wondered if we only longed for things there was no chance of our ever getting.
The woman behind window 15 disappeared without looking up and after a while a new woman stepped into the frame. Her name tag said Miss Tuttle. She had light brown skin, a crown of braid extensions, and a space between her front teeth. She had on a rust colored sweater and a blue scarf tied stylishly at her throat. After a moment or two she leaned forward and said, “Why are you crying?” I said, “My landlord is measuring me for a coffin.”
Maybe I was exaggerating, although I did think Gertrude Wexner would not have been vexed to see me carried out in a box. Over the years, several people in the building had died, and I could not recall a kind word from her to the tenants. I told Miss Tuttle about the envelope, the delays, and Miss Giles. Miss Tuttle stood up a little taller and said, “Go to window three. I will meet you there, and I will help you.”
I flew to window three while Miss Tuttle moved to the end of the bank of windows and stepped out the door. She put her arms around me and said, “It’s okay, I’m going to call the stationmaster.” She tilted her chin and said, “You can’t be crying about an envelope.” I said, “I know, right?” She said, “Relax, baby.” She was like a mother. Not my mother, but someone’s mother. I thought an answer was on its way, although maybe, as in Zeno’s paradox, on each trip the answer could only travel half the distance between its origin and me—and therefor never arrive.
Miss Tuttle called the stationmaster on a walkie-talkie and asked him to meet us at window three. As we waited, we hugged again, and I felt something open in my chest. The envelope was still in limbo, but I didn’t care, and I became interested in the fact that one minute you could be panting after something and the next minute it could be hazy, this wanting, and I could see that a substitution had occurred. Miss Tuttle had replaced the envelope. We rocked together, and when we pulled back, I said, “Why are you being so kind?” She said, “Because I am exactly like you. I feel things deeply. I am an emotional person, and I can’t hold back.”
I thought this kind of experience could not happen in Arizona. In Arizona, everyone was nice all the time. After the housing market tanked and retail sales went bust, friendly service was all that was left of the economy. This scene could not have unfolded in Arizona because people didn’t rub up against you all the time. They kept their distance, and there weren’t that many of them. I thought that for every Miss Giles there was a Miss Tuttle, and for every Gertrude Wexner there was a Vicky. In England, for every resentful clerk there was probably a beautiful garden. But for there to be a Miss Tuttle, there also needed to be a Miss Giles. It was part of New York’s ecology of irritation, part of the way it made you grateful not only for civility but for the feeling of rescue from drowning. I recognized myself. I was the place that had made me.
END OF PART ONE
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Always a delight to read what you’ve written...
When I first moved to NYC in the 80s, people were so kind.