Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House

by Meghan Daum

  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.

  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. A
s 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.