Suzy’s apartment on St. Marks Place is at the hub of downtown. It was the first place she saw when she moved back to the city five years ago. She had been in such a rush then that she just grabbed the first thing offered, although there had been a few more apartments to check out. Apartment hunters in Manhattan are truly desperate. At 7 p.m. on Tuesdays, they line up outside Astor Place Stationery, where the first batch of The Village Voice is delivered upon printing. That is where the apartment war begins, everyone grabbing the first issue and running to the nearest phone booth to call the handful of landlords who fill the ad space with “No broker, low rent!”
For three consecutive Tuesdays, Suzy stood in line with no luck. Although she had been worried that such a collective panic would make her so nauseous she would run straight back into Damian’s arms, she actually found it comforting to see that she was not the only one looking for a new home or new life in the streets of New York. Mostly they were college graduates fresh from Middle America who had watched too much MTV and decided to try their luck the minute they could scrape up some money to get to the city. They often appeared even hipper than the city kids. Clad in vintage velvet and leather, they looked everything they said they were. “We need a loft where me and my girlfriend can both paint; our paintings are huge, bigger than the stuff Pollock used to do,” one goateed boy declared, so loudly that everyone in line turned to him, as though he and his girlfriend were the newly crowned postmodern Abstract Expressionist royalty. Then others chimed in competitively: “New York rocks, man. I wrote like two hundred songs about it,” or “I’ll take anything on Avenue A; how could you be a poet and not follow Ginsberg?,” or “This casting agent says that I look just like Monica from Friends, and I’m, like, no way would I ever do TV!” Suzy would listen and wonder how many of them, if any, would attain their dreams, and she would realize that she, in fact, envied them all, these buoyant kids for whom life was just offering its first mysterious glimpse, while she, at twenty-five, had already given up. Then, one day, a boy who stood behind her tapped on her shoulder and asked if she needed a roommate. He was the first true redhead she had seen in a long time, and he wore a sky-blue bowling jacket that had “Vince” stitched above its right pocket. He could not afford to live alone, he said, and did not trust strangers to share an apartment, but she looked nice and he’d always wanted to live in Asia, and perhaps she was the closest thing he’d come to the continent. Then he held out his multi-ringed hand and said, “Hi, I am Caleb, I’m twenty-one, a philosopher and a performance artist.” She tried not to laugh as she shook his hand with “Suzy, twenty-five and unemployed.”
She liked Caleb. He was honest and surprisingly shy. He also brought her luck, because on that very night they found the apartment on St. Marks Place. She was amazed that it had been so easy, considering that she was unemployed, and as far as she could tell, his day job of working at a vegan restaurant on the Lower East Side did not quite fulfill the criterion of a desirable tenant. Then Caleb told her that his doctor parents who lived in Scarsdale co-signed the lease. When she asked if they knew that the beneficiary of their generosity was an unemployed stranger their son had met outside Astor Place Stationery, Caleb winked. “Darling, I told them that I had a mad crush on you. They would’ve bought the apartment for us if they thought we were actually doing it.”
The apartment was a typical East Village walk-up railroad, an elongated stretch of three connecting rooms. Suzy had to pass through Caleb’s bedroom to get to the kitchen, which led to the bathroom that was missing a sink. Neither noticed the missing sink until they finally moved in, when Caleb walked out into the kitchen with a seriously distraught look on his face and exclaimed, “There’s no place to put a toothbrush!” Suzy thought it could have been worse. Better a sink than a tub. She could not imagine surviving New York winters without the relief of a hot bath.
Caleb often brought home leftover tofu pancakes and nondairy crème brûlée from the restaurant. The only edible things there, he explained. The rest tasted so depressingly dull that it was simply cruel to put his taste buds through such an uninspiring challenge. A cleverly concocted diet plan, he claimed. Imagine working at a restaurant where the food is actually good! The philosopher-and-performance-artist bit was hard to figure out, though. Caleb never read books and was certainly too cynical to perform in front of a crowd. When Suzy finally approached the subject without wanting to sound either dismissive or disrespectful, he burst out laughing. “Oh, it’s a private joke with myself. My dad once said that homosexuality is for philosophers or performance artists. How could you grow up in Westchester and end up fucking boys? He wept when I came out at my high-school graduation, really. Imagine this Jewish optometrist in his fifties with tears streaming down his face. He didn’t use the f-word, of course.”
Suzy found it almost comforting to hear about Caleb’s unending drama with his parents, who phoned every Sunday and yet always managed to avoid addressing her directly. Soon they stopped calling. Caleb’s therapist, whom his parents hired and paid for, thought it was unwise for them to keep up with this weekly communication, which only encouraged resentment in both parties. “Once the homosexual issue is ‘solved,’ Dr. Siegel told them, then they can call!” Caleb exclaimed with the cheeky smile of a kid who has just pushed the bully off the merry-go-round.
“What about your parents? Do they know that you never get laid?” Caleb asked one night after three months of living together. It must have been Thursday, the crème brûlée night, which they often celebrated with an Australian Chardonnay from the “Deal of the Week” shelf at First Avenue Liquor.
“They’re both dead. But, no, I guess they never knew, or never wanted to know at least,” Suzy answered in the most matter-of-fact tone she could muster, which she hoped would make him feel less sorry about asking.
“Gee, I’m sorry, Suz, I didn’t know…”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s been a while. Besides, we never talked much when they were alive anyway.”
With that, Suzy polished off the last scoop. Caleb sat still, waiting for her to say more. But she didn’t. It was the first time she had said aloud that they were dead. It came out just like that, almost naturally. She had not talked to anyone she knew since the funeral. She had not seen anyone, except for Jen. She certainly did not plan on finding herself in an East Village walkthrough kitchen with a twenty-one-year-old boy whom she’d met three months ago and casually saying, while picking at a bowl of crème brûlée, that her parents were dead.
Suzy never mentioned her parents again, and Caleb never asked. Instead, she asked him about his. She inquired after his progress with Dr. Siegel, and if his father still occasionally cried, if his mother was curious at all about the supposed girlfriend who lived with her son. Suzy asked to see their photograph, which Caleb then stuck on the refrigerator door with a magnet that said “From Here to Eternity.” They looked almost exactly as Suzy had imagined, with Caleb’s red hair and extra-long eyelashes, posing before their unmistakable Stanford White house and the nougat-colored Mercedes Benz. Caleb would tell her all about his father’s glass-walled office in the center of Scarsdale, and his mother’s book club, which included other doctors’ wives from the better part of Westchester County. “Whatever’s on the Times best-seller list they’d read, especially the lewd ones, you know, books like Hollywood Madam, which I’m sure they took home to pore over only the dirty parts.” Caleb would steal a glance at Suzy as if he knew that she kept prodding him with questions so that she would not have to talk.