After the last tenant moved out of Solitary, Ronnie took to exploring the building. One morning, as dawn began to break, she found she still couldn’t sleep and decided to head out to a convenience store and buy a newspaper. But she hit the wrong button in the elevator and instead of the doors sliding open to reveal the garage, they parted on the hallway of the fourth floor. And on impulse, Ronnie stepped off and started to walk around. There wasn’t much to see. She tried the door to every apartment, but they were all locked. She got bored, forgot about the newspaper, went back up to seventeen, and took a bath and listened to the radio.
But the next morning, at dawn, she did the same thing, this time exploring the seventh floor and this time finding an open apartment. It was bare and still had an unfinished feel to it. The electrical outlets were missing faceplates and the carpeting was dusted with dozens of those stray fabric strands left after installation. But Ronnie spent a half hour in the apartment, enjoying the feeling that she wasn’t supposed to be there, savoring this imagined danger of being discovered.
The next night, for reasons she refused to analyze, Ronnie brought her sleeping bag down to the seventh floor and napped in the bare unit until 8 A.M.
Since then, she’s discovered another half dozen open doors. She’s slept in each of them at least once. But she’s made a rule that she’ll only play squatter once a week and so far she’s managed to obey herself.
She’s been in the building for over a year, which for Ronnie is a long stay. She rented it over the phone, long-distance, telling the broker her only requirements were “to be up high and have thick walls.” The height requirement was more for radio reception than view, but now, out on the balcony, seventeen floors over the street, she appreciates the perspective. It’s not that she’s treated to some stunning panorama each morning at two-thirty, coming home from the station, shedding her clothes and washing her face, throwing on her favorite white silk kimono and sprawling on the plastic-weave lounge chair she bought mail-order, snacking on “Cappuccino Commotion” Haagen-Dazs or microwave popcorn washed down with mescal and orange juice. It’s that at this height everything down in the street can seem like a distant film, some grainy B-flick thrown up on a weathered drive-in screen, something she could glimpse from a highway and pass on by. From this height, every action down on Main Street is void of the bulk of its sounds and smells, from the visceral impact of a real encounter. Living on the seventeenth floor is like continuing her radio show throughout the context of the rest of her life. The individuals that she watches in that hour after she returns from QSG are like embodied voices of her callers, their faces still hidden, their crises and obsessions and bizarre traumas all reduced to a distant summation. There’s all the qualities of the true confession, from boredom to physical danger, with none of the consequences of real interaction. She sometimes thinks of Main Street, between the hours of three and five, as her own enormous wide-screen TV, the biggest cathode-ray tube in the city. And the ability of her head to pivot on her spine is a deft remote control that allows her to flip from the gay pickup lines that roll in and out of the bus terminal to the homeless scavengers forever sifting through the Dumpsters outside the public library to the twin sisters who alternate tricks behind Kepler and Gleick’s All-Night Billiard Hall.
This downscale voyeurism has turned into something of a ritual over the past six months and Ronnie wonders what she’ll do when winter hits and she’s forced to lock up the sliders that lead to the balcony. The summer was wonderful. She’d finish Libido Liveline at two, then pack all her gear into her worn, faded-green Girl Scout knapsack, kiss Wayne on the forehead, usually leaving bright red lipmarks, and hand over the airwaves to Sonny Botkin’s Pagan Confidential. During the summer months, she kept the top off the Jeep and sometimes she’d jump up on the interstate before heading home, pick up the speed a little, and let the rush of warm wind drum on her body and head. When she felt fully decompressed, she’d head for Main Street and Solitary. She’d pull the Jeep into her empty underground garage and keep her thumb on the red button of her Mace tube while she waited for the express elevator. Then she’d ride up to her floor singing aloud to the Muzak versions of Supremes hits that played on a tape loop every night.
Ronnie doesn’t know where her habit of renaming things comes from. Technically, and as far as the post office is concerned, she lives in apartment 1707. But in the privacy of her own quirky brain, she insists on calling her place apartment 3G, after the classic comic strip that she only vaguely remembers from her childhood. Wasn’t it three gals in the big city, all roommates, all young and cartoon-glamorous and ready for new romance at every turn? All summer, Ronnie got a kick out of pretending her roommates were on lengthy modeling assignments in Europe. The vision of Lu Ann and Margo quarreling with a thin, slightly fascistic fashion photographer against the backdrop of spurting Roman fountains contrasted beautifully with the gritty Quinsigamond land-scape below the balcony. It was like mixing the sweetness of the gourmet ice cream with the saltiness of the microwave popcorn — it shouldn’t have worked, but for Ronnie it did.
Now she settles herself into the chaise lounge, scans the sky for traces of any sunlight, sees none, and is thankful she hasn’t completely blown the ceremony. She looks back over her shoulder into the dark of her apartment and instantly wonders what Flynn would make of her place. Would he be turned off by the lack of any feminine homeyness? Something about him feels a little old-fashioned, just a hint of anachronism about the guy.
Ronnie’s apartment is a spacious two-bedroom, two-bath “luxury” unit with a galley kitchen and a huge living/dining area that opens onto the balcony. It costs most of her salary, but she’s never been very concerned with savings plans or exotic vacations. Her idea of traveling is to make a job change every year or two and relocate to another part of the country, then dig in for a while, shock and build a virgin audience, and when she hits her peak and the national syndication people come sniffing around, pack the bags again and pull out the trade journals and the road atlas.
Vinnie, the QSG station manager, was shocked by her résumé and ratings sheets. “I don’t get it,” he’d said to her in their first interview. “These numbers, you’re a station saver, you’re a radio messiah. You could head to New York or Atlanta, name your price, let the big sales guys rent your voice coast-to-coast.”
Ronnie gave him her most libidinous smile and said, “I’d rather keep a low profile.”
And Vinnie gave his chronic, world-weary sigh and said, “You’ve come to the right station.”
A week later Ronnie signed the lease for 3-G, called a local rental franchise, and furnished the place in a day. Her only aesthetic requirement was neutral colors, neither too masculine nor too feminine. When the moving men left after delivery she had an earth-toned hotel room, all muted angles and practicality. This was exactly what she’d been after, a setting where she could go to sleep each night and dream that she was in an airport Ramada and due to board a flight at the terminal next door.
Her one oddball, nonrented modification was a huge antique bookcase she bought a week after moving in. Her first Sunday in town, she overpaid a Russian émigré down at the refugee flea market in the train lot on Ironhouse Ave. It was an ornate monster, old and battered and painted a flat black, but hand-tooled with a curving, scrolled headpiece and little pointed spires rising at the top. She had to pay again to have it hauled to the apartment, but it was her one concession to personalization — she loaded it with the contents of her steamer trunk.