How Did You Get This Number Read online

  As the days rolled on, I grew accustomed to thinking of myself as someone with a guest room. I never entered the room—save for an initial ransacking sweep of my own possessions—but I liked to think of it like an annex. I decided her bedroom was like one of those preserved boudoirs you see on tours of Hyde Park or Versailles fitted with Plexiglas dead ends that will allow you in only so far, spaces you can walk into but not walk into.

  One night, after too much eating-of-the-cereal and smoking-of the-things-out-the-window, I tore up a cardboard box and taped two panels to the inside of her door frame, with a third panel at the end. Then I took a long red ribbon and hung it limply with thumbtacks. I had just opened my laptop to create an ersatz historical plaque when my phone began to vibrate. I could hear it rumble beneath the surface of clothing and magazine sediment that had built up in the past week. I picked up on the swan-song ring. It was Mac. Mac, with whom I hadn’t spoken since the Great Apartment Debacle of Four Months Ago. Mac, who caught me at the right moment. It is impossible to be angry and write fake museum-exhibit copy at the same time.

  In the end, Mac’s parents had purchased him a spacious alcove studio in Gramercy Park. Free of the uncomfortable albatross that was my presence, their generosity flourished. They agreed to pay both his rent and monthly maintenance in full. Which was really their rent in full, since their names were on the mortgage. Mac was bashful when I pressed for this information, which I already had. It had come to me through mutual friends. Friends who were, at this very moment, sharing greasy take-out food beneath duct-taped TV sets and laughing at each other’s jokes. What Mac did tell me was how guilty he felt about what had happened between us, and that he, too, had been robbed of those innuendo-free nights of roommate bonding. He had been given a great gift, but with great gifts come very judgmental doormen.

  Then he told me about an artist’s loft he knew of. I protested, citing false loyalty to Nell. She would be unreachable for another two weeks. I couldn’t have her come back to an apartment with my furniture cleared out and my closets empty. For Christ’s sake, what would she wear? Of course, the real source of my hesitation was the phrase “artist’s loft,” which I took as a euphemism for “bad art” and “no heat.” I knew even fewer successful artists than I did writers and musicians. I imagined a great deal of splatter paint and acrylic. Obscure animal hair. Maybe a couple of chairs that I would be scolded for defining as such. I also had questions about the legitimacy of the word “loft,” which gets tossed around so easily when preceded by “artist’s.” Not all shabby is chic, just like not every porn actor is a star.

  “But it’s twenty-five hundred square feet,” Mac said, a fact that in Manhattan inspires all acts short of murder. Even then, people have killed for less. Like fifteen-hundred-square-foot apartments. At twenty-five hundred square feet, I could do triple salchows. I could set up a full-sized tennis court and still have room for my bed behind the baseline. I would barely even have to see my roommate. We could be like an estranged couple who live under the same roof for the sake of appearances but confine themselves to their respective wings.

  I looked around at my home. Modestly blueprinted, it was more like the set of a play than a place where humans actually lived. All four doors (front, bathroom, and two bedroom) opened onto the living room. The living room bled into the kitchen, separated only by a sheet of fake floor tile when you crossed over. Our one window faced a view-obscuring metal pole. I settled my gaze on my bedroom door. I remembered the time I found one of my Werther’s Original notes retaped to the middle of the door. Nell had shoe-napped a pair of three-inch heels, leaving me to play Melanie Griffith in Working Girl for the day, my hosiery-encased feet slipping out of my Converses. Meanwhile, in an organic juice bar somewhere across town, my roommate was traipsing around in brand-new cow skin. That called for a note. When I returned home, I found Nell looking straight ahead at the TV and watching a show called Movie and a Makeover. She ate baked potato chips slowly and methodically, like a drugged-out woodchuck. The program did an impressive job of tying together Sleepless in Seattle with home spa recommendations. I tugged the paper down and approached Nell.

  “But this doesn’t apply to me,” I offered.

  “Well”—she perked up, snide and prepared—“you want everything back that’s yours. The note is yours.”

  Mac was waiting for an answer. I put the pot in a drawer and the cereal bowl in the sink. I ripped down the ribbon, the thumbtacks rolling to some secret place between the floorboards where one of them would retaliate by stabbing me in the toe two days later. On my laptop, I closed out of my museum copy without saving it, double-clicked on Netscape, and waited for my e-mail to open.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Send me the goods.”

  FOR A YOUNG RENTER, IT’S FAIRLY COMMON TO receive e-mails calling for roommates and sublets for unreasonably brief periods of time. Fully furnished bedroom available in three person apartment for January and February! Wait—and February? Pinch me.

  Unless you are a Japanese businessman, why anyone would desire an apartment furnished with someone else’s crap escapes me. I don’t know any Japanese businessmen. Nor, to my knowledge, do I know anyone who knows any Japanese businessmen. To whom are these e-mails directed? I don’t feel entirely comfortable using someone else’s Brita filter; forget sleeping on their mattress. There’s also the odd specificity of these e-mails. The more detailed they are, the more they make me uncomfortable. It’s the strange marriage of the personal and the practical. In New York, you can be reasonably good friends with someone for years and never see the inside of their apartment. It takes a year to narrow down their neighborhood.

  You live in the West Village, right?

  East.

  Are you sure you don’t live in Brooklyn? I find that hard to believe.

  Believe it.

  Well, Jane here lives in a studio in Hell’s Kitchen.

  No, I don’t.

  You don’t?

  I live in a two-bedroom with my boyfriend in Inwood.

  Shut up. You’re dating someone?

  So, to be suddenly thrust into the space where casual acquaintances slap their alarm clocks each morning is to be given more information than your relationship requires. Yesterday you knew what department they worked in and whether they smoked cigarettes. Today you know where they get their coffee and prescription drugs, and that if you don’t jiggle their toilet handle, the toilet will run all day. These descriptions are like an advertisement for the person as much as for the apartment. Their long-term costs, their dimensions, their quirks, their capacity to receive sunlight. Therefore, mystery is not the name of the game when sending out an apartment listing. Charm them with your cool-but-not-overtly-cloying language; let them know this is a safe place, a cool place; head all questions off at the pass. This listing was the opposite of that.

  I double-clicked on the bold “FW: INSANELY huge, available immediately/slightly flexible.” I marveled at my lax spam filter. The e-mail read as follows:Roommate needed for artist’s share

  295 Bowery

  washer/dryer

  2,500 sq. ft.

  $800 a month

  Call. DO NOT BUZZ.

  The whole thing was suspect. Not only did the e-mail lack details, but it was yelling at me. And eight hundred dollars a month? Eight hundred dollars a month was so amazingly gift-from-the-gods cheap that it aroused suspicion. I couldn’t imagine what was wrong with this place, but it had to be something. Maybe there was no retaining wall. Maybe there were no walls, period. Just a converted pigeon coop and an intricate series of shower curtains. Perhaps if you buzzed, it disturbed the colonies of rats living under the floorboards? Meanwhile, I longed for the days when “artist’s” was accompanied by “loft.” A “loft” left you in peace; a “share” dead-fished you into a group hug. Would I have to participate in the artiness? I didn’t feel a strong desire to paint canvases with beetle dung and fashion toothbrushes using human hair.

  What hooked me in t
he end was the presence of a washer and dryer. People may not murder for twenty-five hundred square feet in Manhattan, but they’ll maim for a washer and dryer. I typed the address into Google. I don’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t recall Mac implying anything special about the apartment beyond its dimensions. Perhaps I just wanted some insight into my potential neighbors. Maybe a resume of some earnest MFA candidate or a male model’s plea for the return of lost head shots. I didn’t expect much. And certainly not the five hundred hits that came back to me. This was 2002. Five hundred hits was a lot in 2002. That would be like twenty thousand hits in today’s Web currency.

  But almost none of the hits concerned the building’s current residents. I was scrolling through a virtual graveyard of newspaper archives and real estate websites, each link a headstone from the past. In the early twentieth century, 295 Bowery was a brothel. And not just any IHOP-style whore-house. It was the site of the worst, and by default the most famous, brothel in the history of New York City: McGurk’s Suicide Hall. A macabre tourist attraction a century ago, in one year no less than six prostitutes killed themselves because the conditions were so poor. Apparently the bartenders were on suicide watch, told to keep an eye out for nipple-exposed women standing in close proximity to pocket daggers, bottles of ether, open windows, that sort of thing. This must have been a conflicting assignment. It was in the best interest of the business’s reputation for a percentage of these women to continue killing themselves.

  I, however, experienced no such conflict of conscience. I would be sleeping with the ghosts of dead sluts! How could I resist? Here, finally, was my converted candy warehouse. Except that instead of an “a” in the warehouse there was a “ho.” Several, actually.

  I called immediately, eager for my first whore haunting. Presumably these were the vengeful brand of specter, the kind that refuses to move on. But I figured they’d be kind to me just for believing in them. And believe in them I did. I have seen too many movies about the paranormal. Too much bad dialogue has been exchanged; too much overwrought acknowledgment of the ridiculous has been imbedded in phrases like “Oh my God, you guys! Did you hear that?” and “But Grandma’s been dead for twenty years!” In the movies I’m thinking of, if the viewer’s disbelief isn’t suspended by act three, the director will forcefully bungee it off a bridge. There have been too many well-rendered special effects, too many starlets with flashlights under their faces muttering the mantra “I don’t believe in ghosts,” only to be told that their beliefs, like their thighs and knowledge of global politics, are nothing. Because the ghosts believe in them.

  According to my Internet research, the apartment was one of only a handful of units. Two were occupied by a feminist activist known for her work, ironically, about sex and prostitution. The one I’d be visiting was under the ownership of a Canadian artist who, for reasons unknown, sublet the space for far less than it was worth. Occasionally, it seemed someone would get married or go back to grad school and then the apartment would be unhooked like a rare fish, released back into the Craigslist stream of otherwise untenable listings. A golden ticket with gills.

  For these reasons, I began to think the apartment was calling to me. Even at the time, I knew that this sort of backstory was providing me with a false sense of destiny. Lots of people live in apartments with history in the floorboards. Usually it’s obscure history having to do with famous people. Marilyn Monroe ate a hamburger in your lobby. Edgar Allan Poe once bought a pot of ink in your basement. But McGurk’s Suicide Hall was the reverse—it was the anonymity, the relative uncommemoration of these women, that I found irresistible. No one knew their names, but everyone knew their profession. I also thought of what I’d be leaving. For all their paid promiscuity and suicidal tendencies, at least the ghosts of McGurk’s disappeared the old-fashioned way. Whereas my current roommate was doing it by shedding body mass. The former seemed less gruesome somehow.

  MY NEW ROOMMATE WAS A TALL KOREAN HIPSTER who answered the door in a man’s flannel shirt. She had misjudged the button-to-hole alignment, leaving one swath of cloth farther below her belt than the other. But she couldn’t be bothered to start over. She wore black jeans and no shoes. It was as if she knew the beer-bottle shards and cigarette butts and centuries of grime would bow in deference to the filth of her feet. And filthy they were, striking some shade between the matted nest of her hair and the oxidized toe ring that clung unhappily to her pinkie toe. When she seemed surprised to see me, I knew instantly not to take it personally.

  “Hey, I’m Sang,” she said, looking into some middle distance between my face and hers. I wiped my nose. She cocked her head at me, and I cocked my head in the same direction.

  “I’m Sloane. Mac’s friend.”

  “Yeah. Come up,” she added, as if I were the one holding us back.

  As I followed her up the stairs, I thought of how strange it is to follow anyone up the stairs. Your face is so close to their butt. It’s one of the unsung pleasures of riding in cabs—I have seen very little cabbie ass in my life. Whereas my fellow subway riders’ cheeks are thrust, shifting back and forth, in front of me every day, countless as stars. Sang’s ass was not so much an ass but a continuation of leg and bone, covered by pockets because society demanded it be covered by pockets. They came with the jeans. But much like the rest of Sang, her ass seemed inconvenienced to exist at all. I wondered about the build of the women who first ascended this staircase. People from one hundred years ago looked different. Rounder and smaller at the same time. More forehead, less chin. I am often curious about the texture of their hair. This is why period films are so unconvincing. Because actresses use conditioner and have been plucking their eyebrows for years, and you can’t hire the dead.

  A few beat-up sepia photos of the women from the last century hung, warped, in cracked frames drilled into the brick. They wore boots and feathers and stared with purpose into a bulky wooden box to have their portrait taken. I imagined them lifting their skirts as they marched up these same steps, a red-faced drunk in my position—bob, shift, bob, shift, mustache, mustache, bowler hat. Of course, the kind of women walking up these steps would not likely be wearing skirts long enough to lift.

  “So, how long have you lived here?” I said to the ass.

  “Don’t know,” the ass threw its voice. “A while now, I guess.”

  I wondered what it must be like for the lucky gent who dated Sang. It’s never good to fall in love with someone whom you’d have to stab in the eyeballs to elicit a response. Sang pushed the metal door with a callused heel, and it swung inward with surprising ease.

  There are fulcrum moments in life when you can feel your world pivot in a new direction. Everything that mattered doesn’t. There is no adjustment period between the old and the new. Slice open the plastic bag and pour the goldfish straight into the bowl. Here is how your life will go from now on. My moment came while looking at the dining room table in Sang’s loft. I would make as many toothbrushes out of hair as the situation required if I could do it at that dining room table.

  Crafted in the “picnic” school of tables, complete with benches, it had been rescued from a flea market in Norway, painted white, and then intentionally stripped so that swirling knots of wood overpowered the paint. It was oversized and smooth. Above it hung a chandelier with every other bulb covered by a plastic doll’s head. Brunettes and blondes and a redhead glowed from their eye sockets. There’s no way to convince someone that a doll-head chandelier is tasteful. But this one was. As I strolled around the place, I kept alert for signs of crafts or splatter paint or batiking of any kind. But all I found were beautiful touches that put the creative solutions necessitated by my small space to shame. Like the refrigerator sunk into the wall and then painted to match the wallpaper. Or the slab of jagged marble on the back of the toilet to replace the porcelain cover. It was a beautifully disheveled mess. A warmer, more cared-for version of Andy Warhol’s Factory. There was even a potted tree of some kind, and it was more or le
ss alive. This, despite Sang’s repeated attempts to kill it.

  “I never water that thing,” said Sang, “but it just keeps on living.”

  We sat on one of the artfully mismatched sofas surrounding a freestanding fireplace. I sank into the cushion until it touched the floor.

  “Also, there’s no air-conditioning,” she said, looking down with superhuman vision to remove one of her hairs from her black jeans. “I mean, obviously. It’s a loft.”

  Did I look like the kind of girl who was going to storm in, demanding Freon? I was; I just didn’t want to look like it.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I said, picturing my practically medieval collection of hair-torturing devices. On hot days, I had been known to stick my freshly burned scalp in the freezer. I was willing to eschew it all if I lived here. I would be the kind of girl who doesn’t blow-dry her hair, who has transcended the brush.

  “And,” she continued, “there’s no hot water. There is, but it’s two seconds and then it turns freezing cold.”

  “Good!” I clapped my hands. “Must offset the humidity!”