The building was five stories, brick, twenty-two units, no elevator, and a stairwell that smelled mostly of onions and partly of something older that nobody ever identified. I died in 4C in 1981. The water was still warm when I noticed, which I mention only because it’s the last interesting thing about me for seventeen years.
I was fifty-one. I typed bills of lading for a shipping office on Bushwick Avenue and I had a bank calendar on the wall and a jar of buttons on the sill that I could not have explained to you then and cannot now.
What I had, after, was the building. What I did not have was the sidewalk.
I spent about nine years finding that out. You’d stand at the door and put a hand through it and feel the hand keep going and then feel the rest of you decline to follow, and you’d try it again the next night, and after a while you’d get scientific — different doors, the fire escape, the roof at a running start. The roof is how I learned the shape of it. I went up and out and stopped in midair like a coat on a hook, four feet past the parapet, hanging over Kosciuszko Street with nothing under me and no way down, and then I was standing in the stairwell again feeling the way you feel when a joke is at your expense and the room is empty.
Whatever paperwork holds a person to a place, mine had been filed correctly. Twenty-two boxes and a staircase. I got very good at a game where I guessed which tenant would move out next and I was right about eighty percent of the time and there was nobody to tell.
Then in 1998 a man moved into 4C who did not sleep.
His name was Teddy and he was thirty-one and broke in the way that’s still charming to a person the first time. He wrote at the kitchen table because there wasn’t room for a desk, and he wrote at two and three and four in the morning, badly, for years, and I sat across from him for all of it, because after seventeen years of sleepers a man awake at 3 a.m. is a parade.
He started talking to the room the way you do when the room is the only thing listening. Weather. Complaints. A long stretch where he narrated what he was eating. I moved a spoon once, an inch, because I couldn’t help it, and he looked at the spoon for a long moment and then decided very visibly not to have seen it, and I respected that, and I left him alone for a month.
Then in March he pushed back from the table at four in the morning with his hands over his face and said, to the empty apartment, in a voice that was only half joking:
“Okay. If you’re real. Knock the bad page off the table.”
There were nine pages. I’d known which one for an hour.
I tipped it off the edge and it went down like a leaf and he watched it go and then he got out of the chair and sat on the floor and laughed until he had to hold his own ribs, and I will say plainly that this is the best moment of my existence, in either half of it, and nothing since has come near.
After that it was a system, and the system is the only marriage I’ve had. He wrote, I read over his shoulder, and when a page was dead I tipped it off the edge. He argued with me for about two years and then stopped, because I was right and he knew I was right. He named me Bev, because he had to call me something.
Bev is not close. I answered to Bev.
The book was about his father’s hardware store, which I did not see coming. Four years of a haunted apartment and what came out of it was a hundred thousand words about a man who sold nails. It took fourteen months at that table. I’m not claiming credit. I’m claiming presence, which is the only thing I have ever had to claim.
It sold, and then it sold well, and then there was another one, which he wrote half at that table and half at the new place and could never afterward sort out which halves were which. By 2003 he lived somewhere with a doorman and kept 4C the way people keep a lucky shirt.
He came back that spring to write. Brought a bag, brought coffee, sat down at eleven at night like the old days, and I was happy enough to rattle the window sash, which I hadn’t done in years, and he said “hi, Bev,” without looking up, and that was the last good part.
He wrote for an hour. He didn’t write for the next four. At three in the morning he had eleven pages and he stacked them and squared them and set them in the middle of the table and said, “Alright. Go ahead.”
I tipped one off.
He looked at it on the floor for a while. Then he said, “Which was it?”
And I understood the question, which was not which page. He’d known before. I only ever tipped the page he already knew was bad, and somewhere in the last two years he had stopped knowing first, and now he was reaching for the floor to find out what he thought.
He put his head down on the table and said, into the wood, “I can’t tell anymore if it’s you or me.”
Here is the part I have had forty years to work on and have gotten nowhere with. I couldn’t tell him. I don’t know either, and I never did, because I read over his shoulder and I had opinions and there is no way to establish, then or now, whether my opinions were any good or whether a man who is loved by a room will simply write better in that room for reasons that have nothing to do with the room’s taste.
He needed to find out. He had the one reason to leave I have never been able to argue with, and he took it.
He also never asked me my name. Not once in five years.
After that it went the way it goes. A weekend. Then a week, for a thing in another city. Then back, but with people, and he didn’t talk to the room anymore because the room had witnesses. Then a month, and the mail was a brick in the hallway and he apologized to the mail. Then 4C had a bicycle in it and a box of coats and a mattress with no sheets, and it was not an apartment, it was a shelf.
Then eleven months of nothing.
I tipped pages off a table that had nothing on it. For eleven months. You can call that pathetic; I’ve had four decades and I got there first.
He came back in April, thicker, in a coat that fit him, and stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets and said, to nobody, in the voice you use for nobody:
“I’m selling the place, Bev. It’s just square footage.”
There is no proof of what happened next. Cast iron leaves a wall for all kinds of reasons. The wall was old. The nail was old. If the skillet covered a distance that was arguably horizontal, I am not a physicist.
Four stitches, above the eye. He didn’t come back.
So I made it unsellable, and I need to do this part properly, because everything else in here I can dress up.
The buyers were easy. Faces in mirrors, the business with the taps, one very good night in the stairwell involving a smell I won’t explain because I’ve never understood it myself. Two buyers, a developer, a structural engineer, and a family from Ohio who had a little girl who saw me on the landing and waved, and I did it anyway.
A full building sells. An empty one sits. I worked that out in about a week, and the arithmetic took me from one apartment to twenty-two without much of a fight.
Then there was Halloran in 2B.
Halloran had been in that building since before me. He was seventy-one and his mother had died not knowing his face, and he was afraid of the same door closing on him — I knew this because I had watched him alone for two decades and you learn what a man is afraid of by what he checks. So he checked. The stove, twice. The lock, three times. He wrote the day of the week on a card by the bed.
I moved the card.
That’s all it was, the first night. I moved a card four feet.
I did it for nine weeks. I moved his keys and put them back. I turned the stove knob a quarter and left it. I took the card and returned it with the wrong day on it, in his own handwriting, which you can do if you are patient and have nothing but time and have watched a man write the same seven words for twenty years. I stood in his room while he sat on the edge of the bed at four in the morning holding his own hands and saying no, no, no, come on, quietly, to nobody.
I knew what I was doing on the first night. There was no slope I slid down. I did eight more weeks. Teddy got a skillet and Teddy had earned the skillet. Halloran had never done one thing to me in his life.
He moved out in October and for a while he slept in his car in the lot on Kosciuszko, which I could see from the fire escape, because that was inside the part of the world I was allowed to look at. Then the car was gone. I have never found out where he went.
By November the building was empty except for me, and I sat in the middle of twenty-two dark apartments feeling tremendous.
It took about six weeks to notice I had gotten exactly what I asked for.
Nobody came. That was the request. Nobody came.
The last time I saw him it was two years on and he was drunk and had gotten ugly the way money makes some people ugly, expensively and all over. He let himself in with a key that shouldn’t have worked, and put a hand on the wall, and looked up at where he thought I’d be, which was wrong. I was beside him. I was close enough to count the burst capillaries and the white line over his eye.
He said, “It’s mine. I can do whatever I want with it.”
Then he was sick in the stairwell and left.
He was right, and I dismissed it, because he was a drunk in a hallway making a claim he was in no condition to act on, and because everything with Teddy had always turned out to be about Teddy.
Four months later they knocked the building down.
I thought that was the end of me. Every story anybody has ever told you says the house is the ghost and the ghost is the house. I stood in 4C while the ceiling came in and I said a few words I had been saving since 1981.
Then I opened my eyes, and I was standing over a pile of brick, outdoors, with the entire sky doing whatever it wanted above me.
It was never the building. It was the parcel. Twenty-seven years of believing I was chained to a staircase and I had been chained to a rectangle on a map the whole time, and the rectangle had just been cleared.
Eight months of gravel and chain-link. I walked the perimeter like a dog on a chain, then like a dog on a very long chain, then like a dog in a yard at night.
Then they built this.
Understand what he did. Twenty-two apartments is twenty-two boxes and a staircase, and this is aisles, this is a produce mister that goes off every eleven minutes and a walk-in cooler I can stand inside without shivering because I don’t shiver, there is a mezzanine, there is a room with forty stationary bikes in it, every seat left at a different height, and at four in the morning it is mine, and underneath all of it there are three levels of parking and a helix ramp with an acoustic profile I have been studying for fifteen years and have not exhausted, and if you have never stood in an empty parking structure at four in the morning and listened to one car door close two floors below you, it goes on forever and it comes back different.
Twenty-eight thousand square feet. Plus the lot. Open twenty-four hours. Somebody is always here.
He said it was just square footage. He was more right than he will ever know, and he doesn’t know, and he won’t, because he is alive and rich and somewhere with a doorman, and I am the wealthiest woman in this ZIP code and my wealth is measured in feet.
I would give the whole thing back for one more page off a table.
Last month a stock kid found me in aisle nine at three in the morning. Actually saw me — that happens maybe twice a decade. He did the thing they all do, where the face goes and the box goes, and then he got a word out, which most of them can’t manage.
He said, “What are you?”
I looked at him. I looked at the aisles, the mister, the coolers, the ramp going down and down and down.
I said, “I just work here.”
He’s put in his notice. That’s fine. Somebody’s always here.
Somebody sleeps in his car down on level two some nights, near the elevator. I go and look at him. It is never Halloran and it was never going to be Halloran, he’d be ninety, and I go down and look at him anyway.
I don’t do anything. That’s the whole of it. I stand there until it starts getting light and then I go up and open the gym.