Apartment part 2

On keeping a rent stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side

The apartment I was trying to keep with a painting by Gardner Leaver and several pieces of the furniture he designed.

In "Apartment part 1,” Laurie, otherwise known as I, am trying to keep legal rights to my apartment while, at the same time, I am living most of the time with Richard in Arizona, where he is director of the Museum Studies department at Arizona State University. In part 1, I’ve sent a letter through certified mail to my landlord, requesting permission to install a sublet tenant for two years. The letter has gotten lost, and we pick up with me in the post office. I have been crying there, out of frustration, and kindly Miss Tuttle intervenes to help me. She comes out from behind the bank of windows, and we hug. She calls the station master, and we wait for him to arrive. The story picks up at there.

I said to Miss Tuttle, “Do you think we’re supposed to hold back our emotions?” She said, “Other people might like it if we did, but that is not who we are.” I said, “You are changing the course of my day.” I thought she was changing the course of my life, but that sounded too much, even for me. After Vicky had finished massaging my hands, she’d said, “I will pray for you. There is something you need, and I will pray for that.” I had thought, This is your way of saying we’ve made a connection. I wanted to say something like that to tell Miss Tuttle. I said, “I will remember your smile and the feeling of your arms.” I didn’t specify for how long.    

The stationmaster, Mr. Creighton, arrived. He was tall and dignified with deep creases in his cheeks. He was wearing a brown suit and a striped tie. All the postal workers looked worn out. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting. I didn’t want to think about how I looked, streaked with tears. Maybe I had become the women with the shopping cart although without the shopping cart. Mr. Creighton said he would search for my envelope, and after twenty minutes, he returned with it in hand and said I could carry it to Gertrude Wexner myself. I said it had to go through Certified Mail for legal reasons. He said it would arrive in the afternoon. I said, “Thank-you,” knowing that by then Gertrude Wexner would be gone.  

Indeed, when the letter arrived, she was not in her office, and the mail carrier said he would return the next day. Now, I was a character in Beckett’s more famous play, Waiting for Godot, and it was time to pick up Richard from the airport. He was flying in to help me prepare for the movers, who were coming on Thursday for a final estimate. I had borrowed a friend’s car, and on the drive to Newark, I hit traffic. It took an hour to inch five blocks south on 9^th Avenue, toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and as I sat in the snarl, I thought about the dwindling days I had left to sign the lease. If I signed it and then couldn’t install a sublet tenant, I’d be responsible for two years’ rent. So what, you say. It’s only money. You could look at it as a bet you lost in a poker game. I wanted not to care about money. I wanted to spend every dime I had and die with an empty bank account, but how do you know when you will die, and what if your money runs out before you do? Also, I don’t play poker.

I was listening to WQXR on the radio, my old classical station, and I was happy to hear the music, but the traffic was making me feel stupid for clinging to New York. I called Richard to say I would be late and to arrange a spot to rendezvous, but his phone was turned off. His phone had been losing power, and he switched it off most of the time these days, which defeated the purpose of a cell phone, especially at a time like this. I thought he should swap his phone for a new one, but to him the thought of a swap, involving disgruntled store clerks or, worse, a superior-sounding voice in customer service, made his throat seize up. I thought this was idiotic, but what can you do? His phone was off the whole time I was driving out to pick him up, and by the time I found him at the arrival zone, I wanted to rip his head off.

I had to honk to get his attention, and as he ducked into the car and threw his suitcase on the back seat, a cop tapped my window. The fire in my head was so loud, I didn’t hear her tapping, and Richard had to tell me to lower my window. The cop rebuked me out for honking, and I explained about Richard’s phone and I apologized. Apologizing always calms me right down.

This was not the reunion Richard and I had hoped for, and as we snailed back to the city in more traffic, we had to work, each in a separate cocoon of misery, to remember why we were together. We had softened by the time we reached Manhattan. It was dark as we moved north to my neighborhood. I found a parking space that was good for the entire time of Richard’s stay, and I was feeling proud of the way I could find parking spaces when Richard opened his door and stepped into a wad of gum. The gum infiltrated the tread of his sole, and he cried out. He said he could feel the city sucking him into its bowels. What he actually said as he fought to unglue his foot was, “I hate New York.” He said, “I hate New York,” but what I heard was, “You hate Arizona.” Then we held hands, making our way to a baleful restaurant we hadn’t yet tried.

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In the morning, sitting on the floor surrounded by file folders and silverware, I wondered why people owned so much stuff. Our house in Arizona was practically empty, and I liked it that way. The last few weeks, while weeding out my belongings, I’d wanted to feel light and free, but as I was sorting through my life I felt sorrow building, piece by piece, in the way that sorrow is a museum of sorrows. A single joy is not a museum of other joys. Joy is spontaneous. Sorrow is historic. Richard needed milk for his coffee, and I went down to the Gourmet Garage, where I also bought bagels and goat cheese.

I was in the lobby, waiting for the elevator, when Gertrude Wexner leaned over the balcony of her office and crooked a finger for me to come up. Her hair was red and in a bouffant style, flaming skyward, and I felt afraid. I realized I had always been afraid of Gertrude, and I wanted, finally, to be rid of the apartment. It would be worth it never to see Gertrude again. I walked up the stairs to her office and sat across from her. On top of her desk were pictures of a white toy poodle and a blond little girl. The poodle had sat in her office for years before it died. The child was grown, and we didn’t see her around anymore. I thought Gertrude must be lonely, and her real estate was what she had, a building filled with people who wished for one of the loose gargoyles on the roof to come crashing down on her head.

She’d put on some weight, and her skin looked like it could use a sanding, much like the floors in the apartments. She said my sublet request had arrived, and she waved the letter in the air, and for a moment I thought I was getting somewhere. But Gertrude’s mouth was turned down, and the furrows between her eyes were deep. She said, “I don’t believe you need to live somewhere else for two years, and unless you can prove this with signed affidavits about where you will be housed and working, I will refuse your request. In addition, I will need to see the tax returns for the past three years of anyone you intend to sublet to, as well as proof of their employment. If I find out you have signed a lease elsewhere, I will evict you.” I said, “Why are you doing this?” She said, “Because I can.”

Upstairs I told Richard about my meeting with Gertrude, expecting him to say, “Let it go. You don’t need the aggravation.” He said, “Get a lawyer.” His voice was iron, his brown eyes flashing. Everything in him that did not like to be pushed around had come uncorked. Maybe it was New York. Maybe it was love. Whatever the cause, in that moment I wanted us never to be apart. I said, “Okay.” He said, “I’ll pay.” I said, “It’s my battle.” He said, “It’s our battle.” I said, “It is?” He said, “You don’t have to ask.”

I consulted friends about lawyers, and everyone said, “Call Harvey Finklestein.” Harvey Finklestein had written the book on rent-stabilization. When I called Harvey, he said he charged $350 an hour for the first hour. He hoped I would not need more time. He asked me who the landlord was. I said Gertrude Wexner. He laughed.

The next day I rode the subway to Wall Street. Harvey Finklestein’s office was neither fancy nor plain. People in the waiting room sat with worried faces. Everyone looked as if one giant shoe had already fallen on them and they were there, suspended, waiting for the thud of the other shoe. When it was my turn to face the lawyer, he spoke quickly and to the point, and I thought, This is how he gets to charge so much. He said, “Legally, Gertrude Wexner can vet any prospective subletter as if they are a new tenant.” He looked at me with his snowy owl eyes and said, “The only way to maintain a rent-stabilized apartment in New York is to sleep in it half the days of the year plus one. Landlords can discover where you fly and where you use your credit cards. They can mount cameras in hallways and in the lobby and prove the days you aren’t there.” As I listened, the room tipped, and my plans pooled in a corner. The artist I had lined up for my apartment was unemployed. Harvey Finklestein reached across his desk and shook my hand. He checked his watch and said, “You have some time left on the meter. You can email me short questions, if you like.”

Back home Richard was on the couch, reading. I sat across from him and scanned the ruin of my place. Adam was a good friend, but he had left the walls coated with barbeque sauce and soot. Doors were broken off hinges. Walls were bashed and marked, pots burned, linens left stained and threadbare. You might have thought he was a rock guitarist instead of a shrink. Quentin Crisp used to say, “After the fourth day of dishes in the sink and dirty clothes on the floor, a place smells the same from then on. You just have to wash after the fish course.” The quip is amusing but inaccurate. In New York, one day you don’t clean, dark grains collect on surfaces and fuzz balls from god knows where tumbleweed around your ankles. What would it take to restore my apartment? Did I want to?

Richard speaks about the natural history of objects, migrating in and out of museums. Inside a museum, an object becomes detached from its former uses. If the object leaves a museum, it may be able to circulate in the world again, but that seldom happens. In this way, people and objects are not that different.

Light straggled through a grimy window and lit up Richard’s hair. I needed my city in order to feel alive, but I did not want to be here without my love. I looked into Richard’s eyes and said, “I can’t move.” The words just floated out. His eyes were kinder than I had ever noticed, and I remembered something else Godard had said: “A film is a girl and a gun.” Maybe so, but a film is also a change of plans. Richard said, “Live in the apartment.” He sounded sincere, but who knows what resentment was secretly brewing inside him? He was saying what I wanted to hear, and I believed him. I said, “How will we make it work?” He said, “We just will. You’ll be here as much as you need to, and I’ll come when I can.” I said, “You hate New York.” He said, “Sometimes.” I said, “Why?” He said, “It’s big and beautiful and rushing, and it makes me feel I don’t belong anywhere. But you belong here. It’s your home.”

Maybe it was, but New York also scared me, and when I thought about being here alone I had an image of being eaten by an anaconda, slowly but completely, so it would seem I had never existed. Richard said, “You need to be happy.” I thought, “I am happy. This is what happiness feels like.” What else are you going to believe in a moment like this?

He began to unpack a box. I said, “I’ll get rid of most of this stuff.” I liked the look of the apartment thinning out. The living room would be light and open as never before. It would look like the hotel room at the end of the universe I sometimes thought it would be nice to live in. He said, “Sign the lease.” I said, “Okay,” and I took it from the refrigerator door where it was pinned with a magnet. I signed both copies and slid them into an envelope. I went downstairs, and dropped the envelope through a slot in Gertrude Wexner’s door.

Have you ever made a decision you were certain of? Like in the movies, chin up, eyes forward? I have never made a decision like that. But as the envelope swished to the floor, I felt its power dissolve. Gertrude Wexner was powerless, too, as long as I paid the rent. Maybe she had been the MacGuffin all along. The MacGuffin is what Alfred Hitchcock called the device that launched the plots in his films. In a movie about thieves, the MacGuffin might be a necklace. In a film about spies it could be the contents of a package. A MacGuffin is the inconsequentiality that is both indispensible and of no real importance. It interrupts the waiting. It prompts the move from point A to point B.

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