We threw away whole pieces of our lives: the Care Bears, the wire shelving in the basement storage room, the boxes of bank statements, the posters we hung on the walls when we were young, the stereo speakers that no longer worked, the first computer we ever bought, the snowboard, the surfboard, the drum kit, the Portafiles full of documents relating to movies never made. I’d found a haven. The man I was seeing, whom I eventually married, managed to tip his way to a lease on a top-floor apartment. I mean, we’re talking about only $2.74 a day, which is less than a cappuccino at Starbucks. I was very fond of him and his sporty red Porsche, which he drove right up to the day he was taken to the hospital. It would never be tampered with. And all stories about love begin with a certain amount of rationalization.I had never planned to live on the Upper West Side, but after a few weeks I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, and I began, in my manner, to make a religion out of my neighborhood. When Delia and I worked together writing movies, it was a simple matter of her coming down from her apartment, crossing the courtyard, and coming up to mine; on rainy days, she could even take an underground route. Because it was on the unfashionable West Side, just living there made me feel virtuous and brainy. Apthorp Apartments converted to condominiums. He planted horrible white stucco urns outside the entrance, and dotted the courtyard with ludicrous statues of lions. I was going to have my rent raised. There he took his last kickback, from neighbors of mine, and died. Her voice dripped honey, which made her even more terrifying.
She informed me that my rent was going to be tripled. What’s more, it’s definitely warmer over here in winter, because it’s farther from the frigid blasts of wind coming off the Hudson River. Nora Ephron wrote a fabulous piece in 2006 Moving-On in The New Yorker. After all, what was fair-market value for an eight-room apartment in a city where there were almost no eight-room apartments for rent?The nineteen-nineties were cresting, and there was a huge amount of money out there in the streets of New York. I honestly believed that at the lowest moment in my adult life I’d been rescued by a building. And the architecture of the building added to the illusion.The Apthorp, which was built in 1908 by the Astor family, is twelve stories high and the size of a full city block. The lions lived in a large, comfortable space, like me, and had plenty of food, like me. I hadn’t been so mortified since the end of my marriage, and a great many of the things that went through my head apropos of that marriage went through my head now: Why hadn’t I left at the first whiff of the other woman’s perfume? I was never going to leave. She lurked everywhere. I would stare out the window of my Washington apartment, which had a commanding view of the lions at the National Zoo. The water in the bathtub often ran brown, there was probably asbestos in the radiators, and the exterior of the building was encrusted with soot. My sister Delia and her husband moved into the building; she, too, planned to live there until the day she died. It was part of my identity—or, at least, part of my wishful thinking about my identity. From the street, it's lumpen, Middle European, and solid as a tanker, but its core is a large courtyard with two marble fountains and a lovely garden. My sister was already on the street, looking for a new place, my sister—who had been quoted in the So we prepared to move. I never have. The beehive was so outsized and bizarre that it reminded me of the nineteen-fifties urban legend about the woman who teased her hair so much that cockroaches moved in. The landlords cleaned the building!
This was it. So wrote Matt Flegenheimer in his July 1st New York Times column, "Mourning the Wit and the Woman." I was willing to concede (well, not too willing) that under certain circumstances there might be some justice in the new law; I could understand that you could make a case (a weak case) that people like me had been getting away with a form of subsidized housing for years; I could see (dimly) that the landlords were entitled to something.