The Fall of Princes by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online Page B

guess, and the other the dining room, which looks out into a large, wintry garden filled with Italian terra-cotta urns. Then there is a handsome galley kitchen with its own washer/dryer combination. The ceilings are low and the rooms are dark.
    There is a treacherous cantilevered staircase jerryrigged to get up to the second floor, which is perfectly wonderful.
    There is a ballroom-size sitting room with fourteen-foot ceilings. You could have a twelve-footer in here, easy. There is simple but elegant plaster molding. The windows look out onto the garden, and would be just at leaf level in the spring and summer.
    Behind this there is a large bedroom, which is closed off from the living room by elegant sliding etched-glass doors, and an art deco bathroom with a real deep cast-iron tub. It is all magnificent.
    I am trembling with excitement. You can feel the weight of the lives lived in these rooms. It has an upstairs and a downstairs, like a real house. Once the whole brownstone was home to a single family, now it is carved up into separate spaces, disparate lives. You can almost hear the rustle of their skirts as the other agent slides the glass doors back and forth.
    The other realtor turns to her young English client. “But where would you put the baby?” She asks, and he says exactly and they leave right away.
    I want to stay there, listening to the sounds of my wife and children, watching the tree glisten in the early winter afternoon, but my ten minutes are almost up, and I don’t want Chris to get overstimulated or he’ll never leave me alone.
    But I can see them. I can smell them. I can lie down in the bedroom, rich or poor, and sink into the comfort of twenty years of marriage to a woman I love. I can see the posters of the rock stars and the sports heroes on the walls of my children’s bedrooms.
    I’m not a fantasist. I know the place where I really live. The one room is comfortable to me, and it isn’t so bad. It is dark and it is small but it’s also pretty much free from memory. There’s a lot you can do with a one-room apartment if you use your imagination.
    I know what I do and where I am in the world, which is pretty far down the
People
magazine Most Beautiful People ladder.
    But I want things. The things I had in another life. I’m sorry I threw it all away. I feel terrible about fucking it all up, all the time. I want to tell Chris all this, I always do, but I don’t say anything. I just take another tour through the rooms, remarking mostly on how they cut these brownstones up in such peculiar ways, and then we leave.
    I look again at the twinkling tree, so brief, so fragile. I look through the tall windows into the garden where I might barbecue for friends on a summer night, white wine and chevre. Diana Krall. The
New York Review of Books.
    I kiss my wife good-bye. I kiss my loving children on their foreheads and Chris and I go back out into the fading sunlight. It’s really cold now.
    This apartment costs $6,000 a month, more than three times what I’m paying now.
    On the way back to the office, I tell Chris that his job must be very frustrating, showing all these apartments to people who are so hard to satisfy. He says that it’s OK, he likes people. He says he has one client who’s been looking for an apartment for five months. He says he just takes it one day at a time.
    That’s the way you ought to take it, pal, I think. One day at a time.
    I shake his hand, promise I’ll call him tomorrow. I walk home through the chill afternoon, passing the tree stand again. Maybe this year, I think. Maybe next week.
    The windows we look through to glimpse the happiness of families.
    All the rooms we might have lived in. All the lives we might have led.

CHAPTER SIX
    One Reason I Don’t Go
to the Beach Anymore

    M ore than a decade ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool and five bedrooms and a sunroom and