How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley Read Free Book Online

with gravity, as sets hung from the ceiling for want of shelf space. Flat screens existed, but they were prohibitively expensive for the people who needed them most, people who needed their heads uninjured and their hallways unblocked. All immediate hints of purpose went out of the rooms themselves. Showers in kitchens, toilets in living rooms, sinks in bedrooms. It was as if Picasso were born a slumlord instead of a painter. Nothing was where you thought it would be, which would be eccentric in a mansion but was disarming in an apartment. Once, at a party, I opened a door expecting to find a toilet but found a stove instead. Just a closet with a stove in it. And a bare bulb hanging, as if to say, “Here is where we roast the children.”
    Meanwhile, Mac and I were taking tours of rooms that made sense, in apartments with full-on hallways. I took the train in from Westchester, dreaming of where I’d meet Mac and his parents next. Home was just around the corner. I had set sail on a little ship called Sponsorship, part of the Fleet of Parental Enablement. The horizon of happiness was as clear and measured a line as the walls that met the floors without wobbling. Mac and I could even pick the neighborhood, a fantasy I indulged by going on real estate websites and hovering my giant arrow over the lower portions of Manhattan. I amused myself with the concept that there would be a “minimum” a tenant could pay. I liked to imagine myself as one half of a couple, both of us in panther-skin shoes, storming out of a converted candy warehouse upon discovering that it was too cheap. It was all very Brewster’s Millions.
    And, oh, the apartments I saw! The appliances gleamed in defiance of our slovenly and disaffected youth. Faucets arced up from the backs of sinks, stopping in midair to fan out wide. They seemed more comfortable in the world than I did. I understood I was about a decade too early to live a life in which I casually washed my hands in freestanding square sinks. There were living rooms with dark wooden floors and vaulted bedrooms with skylights. A few of the apartments were duplexes with winding staircases that led us to roof decks, where upon arrival our broker would apologize for an archway covered in roses.
    “We can get rid of this.” She’d gesture at the problem without deigning to look at it. “You are a person of importance, and if you want us to behead flowers for you, we’ll gladly do it.”
    I knew I could be a healthy, successful, content person in these apartments. And Mac knew it, too. I could see it in his face. We would be generous with our friends—come, use our rooftop sauna! Come, pull up a stool to the kitchen island and drink our small-batched liquor! Spend the night in a room with a door! But when they left, we would have the secret to life: all the perks of comfortable adulthood and all the joie de vivre of people who eschewed landlines and partook of Scorpion Bowls. Like polar bears in the Arctic, our friends were content to float on blocks of ice no bigger than their butts. But Mac and I were destined for something greater. A refrigerator taller than our hips, for instance. As we toured apartment after apartment together, me happily playing the role of stray animal, all I thought about was that my bedroom would have a knob that was housed in a door that was housed in a wall that was housed in a building that probably wouldn’t fall down. What else could I need?
    There were, as there almost always are, signs this was never going to work. As it was with the leaking Red Hook ceilings I had narrowly avoided sleeping under, the cracks were beginning to show. I was dealing with normal people. In situations like this, it’s best to deal with the obscenely rich or the obscenely stupid. Preferably both. But Mac’s was a more-than-nice family of more-than-moderate intelligence. They rationalized an additional mortgage as an investment. At heart, they were not a buy-my-grown-child-an-apartment