On the occasion of moving in
“It’s only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love.” -J. Kerouac
I’m packing my apartment. There isn’t much. For two years I’ve been living out of suitcases, in furnished sublet rooms, keeping no more than I can fit into a gypsy cab. From Harlem to dog-n-baby-stroller Brooklyn to Washington Heights. My current roommate is afflicted with compulsive cleaning. Her gleaming floors and sterilized refrigerator have made the place downright idyllic but for the herd of Timberland-clad Dance Dance Revolutioneers upstairs. That and the heady fryalator smell that wafts up from the Broadway Chicken King downstairs.
This is my last night in her tidy cave. The last night I can shut a bedroom door and listen to Peter Gabriel without the shame of Scottish eyebrows raised. My boyfriend is Scottish, you see. A tall, dark drink of breakfast tea. With spectacles and chest hair. A PhD philosopher whom I met in the secret underworld of tango dancing.
Boyfriend. I still see that word in scare quotes. Our first date was an accident. I had laryngitis, but he talked me into Guinness after tango class. One pint turned into three pints. Three pints turned into off-season Negronis in a hotel bar. He draped his woolen arm over the woolen shoulders of my coat; we walked the awkward way new lovers walk, negotiating gaits. Our eyes teared with the cold. Stoplights blurred and it was Christmas, 34th Street, Herald Square. When he bent his face to mine, honest to god, I hadn’t seen it coming. We missed I don’t know how many traffic lights, how many little neon walking men.
A few months in, we had the talk. The “let’s not move in together for economics or convenience” talk that all responsible New York couples have, lest the cost of living extort nascent love. We took our time. He kept his accommodations and I kept mine. Of course, the modern femme perennially suffers here: the arrangement skewed in favor of the bar-soap finger-for-a-toothbrush type. She must carry on her person all the products necessary to maintain her poise. See her doing Gidget impersonations on the L train, as it bucks and weaves, buying her breakfast yogurt at bodegas. See her schlepping back and forth from transient sublet (twin-sized mattress on the floor) to boyfriend’s loft, the scare quotes at her heels. Her hair is flat; her socks are often three-days-worn. She carries underwear, both clean and unclean, wadded in her purse. She is in love.
Our first winter: porridge in bed (I believe I said the man is Scottish), laptop dates in hipster coffee shops, and strolls along industrial Flushing Ave. Everything smelled like snow, or Jiffy Lube or Rotting Chicken Plant or Auto Salvage Yard or Peking Duck Corp. Ltd. I found brittle winter Bushwick unimpeachably romantic, from her grey graffiti-graced facades to the oily patches on her frozen streets. I wore a black wool hat that fell over my eyes each time he pushed it back.
We spent the coldest months there, at his place, that scrappy den of whisky and projected films. Of wall-to-ceiling philosophic tomes, the bookshelves built by tattooed Loftmate One from giant planks of wood. It was a place I came to love. I learned its quirks, its rotting countertops, its molding tiles. And I was branded by it, having burned my forearms baking pie inside the greasy stove. Somewhere in there (unrelated), I herniated a lumbar disc, and my new love started carrying my baggage. And my groceries. And a few more burdens I could never name.
I think about my parents’ marriage—all that hope. I remember with a twinge the fact of gold rings packed into jewelry boxes and wedding photos shut in books or laid face-down in drawers; I confront these souvenirs with something not unlike embarrassment on their owners’ behalf. They must have felt excited once, at their beginning, though now the loud truth is: their end was never very far behind.
It always seemed to me the moment you commit to choosing something—places, people—is the last one you inhabit without fear, of losing farther, losing faster. I was, and still am, terrified of screwing up. The type of gun-shy single girl, conditioned to apologize upon forgetting my belongings at a lover’s house, so certain am I that he will think it was a ploy.
You left your sweater on my chair, he said one day—harmlessly, matter of fact. Or: your earrings on the nightstand. Your book of Bishop poems. Right away, Scylla (guilt) and Charybdis (shame) reared their ugly heads.
I’m so sorry! I replied.
Nonsense, he said, as though mine had been the aberrant reaction, I like seeing these wee bits of you you leave behind. It’s nice.
I detoxed on the fly. No time for steps or coins, just frantic sledgehammering at all my finest-mortared walls. I went slasher on the horcruxes of suitors past, the cast of bad news cads, ten years my senior, who wanted all the privileges of my companionship without having to companion back. The Manchildren, the Bartenders, the Pilot (a long-distance divorcé with infant daughters), the Gourmet (who called me a frigid prude), the Tango Cads (aged 38 and 43), the Photojournalist (a narcissist), and the Cinematographer with the velociraptor arms. Not to mention that one tipsy brush with my libertarian HR rep after a work event. They taught me well: A boyfriend by any other name was still an asshole. So I turned them into comic monologue; I called them other names.
But here he is, my boyfriend. The man who has resisted sobriquet. He isn’t perfect, but he’s good. He very rarely shampoos his hair. He’s a philosopher, so Reason is religion. He’s British with emotion, stoic, anti-sentimental, but he’s got me beat for joie de vivre—chipper as a doorbell dinging in a sitcom. He’s penniless, maybe even parsimonious. He makes sandwiches of beets and cheddar cheese. There are holes in all his trousers, which he mostly belts with string. He is stubborn. He is sometimes pompous. He is often kind. He wears a shirt that says: Give Blood You Selfish Bastard. He scats dorky jazz riffs in the shower. He helps old women get their shopping rigs up subway stairs. He may joke about the quantity and force of my emotions, but he is tender with them. His eyes are seaglass windows to a soundless room. Every day that I am with him is a choice to pour the bitter from the bottle down the sink.
He means to lean his bushy self into the scare quotes (and rest in love). My inner Groucho Marx balks at the thought; there must be something wrong with him, for choosing me. I feel like an imposter calling him that word—and not “the Scotsman” or “the Ethicist” or another title that would make it easier for me to hate him when he leaves. It means too little and too much. It feels possessive, where I have striven not to be possessive. It implies possession, too.
But we possess each other, month by month and artifact by artifact, and the environs of our courtship, the place of him, becomes the place of us. And we were interwoven. Of course, he’s very independent. He’s like a lion with his private space. So am I; that’s why this works. That, and I’ve never peed in front of him.
After thirteen months later, he asked me to move in.
Why don’t you come live with me next month? he said.
But I thought we weren’t going to do that for economics or convenience? I asked, my arms around his waist, my chin raised up to graze his five-o’clock-sometime-last-Tuesday shadow.
Yes, darling, but we shouldn’t not do it just because it happens to also be those things. His chest hair smelt like bar soap; I rubbed my smile in it. It fit, this idea, like a brand-new pair of skates, already broken in. I didn’t care that it would mean I had no place to run in the event of unanticipated heartbreak. Commitment—to each other, to one room—never comes with guarantees. I had only two demands: new sheets and a Hoover.
I know his place. It’s my place too. The building is littered with cigarette stubs and ungrammatical graffiti: everything is a lot of things… no your rights… penis. The other floors are woodshop, papershop, and printing plant. When the press is running, the floor below us thumps as if a Balrog stirs downstairs. It smells of buzz-saw dust and glue. The hallway walls are Bushwick grey (once painted white), the dust is inches thick. The key sticks in the door.
The living room floor is painted aqua blue. The ficuses are dead or dying. Two salvage couches, one plaid, one tan, complement the out-of-tune upright piano and a tasseled lamp. The overall effect is window, window, window. Flat cubes beyond the factories, the loading zones. The sky that comes in so strong each morning, the walls burn white. Four rooms section off: the top left one is ours. The ceiling is low. Concrete beams rain plaster bits onto the carpet. I concuss myself when getting dressed. He has saved every rose he ever bought me and tucked them humorously around the room. A black lace something I once wore hangs from an exposed pipe.
Next to the bed, there is a pile of books. I imagine this will double, triple. The first time the wily devil showed me up here, he took me to his bookshelf first, to his hardbound Henry James. Bending from his balding yard-sale armchair to kiss me. That was the night of our first proper date. Just before the door burst open and his loftmates infiltrated, bearing grocery bags and cigarettes. Loftmate Two, in paisley ascot, started making puttanesca, chopping olives, flinging capers, sneaking ketchup—his signature ingredient—into the dish. We drank cheap wine from jelly jars, then sat down to steaming plates at five am, candles lit with dried spaghetti strands. The night behind the massive window dialed one notch up from black to blue. Later, on the roof, we watched the red ball sun rise over the Verrazano Bridge. It was cold. (That’s winter for you; I always fall in love in winter.)
For fourteen months, I tried to take up very little space. Years of indoctrination taught me how: never leave your earrings on the nightstand, never overstay your welcome. Still he weighed me into place: one sweater teased off at a time and tucked into a cupboard with his sweaters, my books mingling with his books, my lingerie slung from the water pipe. Wee bits of me to leave behind.
I know what happens next; not much will change. One or two strictly preserved nights apart will cease to mark the passage of the weeks. My underpants will all be in one place. I’ll trade solitude for four philosophers and a leaky kitchen sink. I’ll leave the nosebleed section of Manhattan for this ragged loft in Bushwick and the man who’ll lug my stuff up all four flights of stairs. I’ll say a passing prayer to be the one that loves the less. But though I know I won’t be—it took him a year to admit (out loud) he loved me—I will lean my head into the scare quotes too. He is worth the risk.
So I am packing: suitcases and books. Peter Gabriel is still singing about stranded starfish. I’m working my way through a box of Valentine chocolate from my dad. It’s like that time the snow fell up. Sixty degrees on February 22nd, and I am preparing to plant myself in someone else’s terracotta pot. This from a woman who taught herself to grow in windowsills. My childhood boomeranged from coast to coast, always packing, always going somewhere else. I don’t do roots; I never did. Perhaps I have the most to lose. But he is my (type it!) boyfriend, and I am moving in. I may streak down 170th Street. I may cry. Thank goodness for this two-pound box of nuts n’ chews.
Once as an act of courtship, he sent me a Seamus Heaney poem. The Rescue: In drifts of sleep I came upon you / buried to your waist in snow. / You reached your arms out: I came to / Like water in a dream of thaw. That’s how it feels: a dream of thaw. It is February, 58 degrees, the eve of something I am moved to measure. Winters are milder, inside and outside. Who knows what claim we have to permanence. But here I am, packing my suitcases. Or not, which is to say: I’m writing this. The very act is anti-superstition. May the ceiling crumble, but the sky not fall.
Any second thoughts? I write to him.
On the contrary, he replies. I’m clearing you some space.