Heading home, finally, I told myself to try to calm down. I was
determined to help Sarah get over her trauma, though truthfully I was
too tired to really think straight at that moment. So instead I decided
to let everything rest for a few hours and try for some distance. In
fact, I began imagining myself in a hot bath, gazing at my now-wilting
roses. Home Sweet Home.
Mine was a standard one-bedroom in a building that had been turned into
a co-op five years earlier, the owner offering the individual
apartments to the tenants. I'd stayed a renter, however, passing up the
"low" insider price, $138,000, because I didn't really have the money,
and when I did have it someday I would want something bigger. I wished
I had more space--a real dining room and a bigger bathroom would do for
starters, along with some place for more bookcases. And if a baby
should someday miraculously come along . . .
I'd often thought you could tell a lot about somebody from where and
how they lived; it's revealing as a Rorschach test. What, I often
wondered, did my apartment say about me?
A decorator might conclude I'd done up the place with love, then lazily
let it go. They'd decide I cared about nice things, but once those nice
things were there, I neglected them. It would be true.
I'd covered the walls of the living room with pale blue cloth, then
hung a lot of framed pictures and old movie posters. Okay, I like
movies. For me even the posters are art. My couch was an off-white,
more like dirt-colored actually, and covered with pillows for the
"feminine" touch. I'd hoped you'd have to look twice to realize it was
actually a storage cabinet in disguise, with drawers along the bottom
of the front. The floor was polished hardwood, rugs from India here and
there, in sore need of a vacuuming, and even a couple of deceased
insects that'd been there for over a week. That sort of said it, I
thought glumly. I'm a workaholic slob.
The bedroom revealed even more about me. The bed was a brass
four-poster, queen-size, partly covered by an heirloom quilt. It hadn't
been made in a week. (Who has the time?) The room itself was long and
divided into areas for work and sleep. Opposite the bed itself was an
antique English desk, on which sat my old Macintosh, and next to that
was my file cabinet, the indispensable part of the "home office" the
IRS loves to hate. On top of it was a stack of marked-up scripts, notes
scribbled all over them in six different colors. You never realize
movies are so complicated till you see a breakdown sheet. Camera angles
and voice-overs and . . .
Next to the bed was a violin case and three books about Indian ragas.
What was that about? somebody might wonder. Some kind of Indian music
nut? I was, albeit a very minimally talented nut.
The kitchen was the New York efficiency kind painted a glossy tan, the
color of aerosol olive oil. The cabinets contained mostly packages of
pasta, instant soup, and coffee filters. Not even any real food. I live
on deli takeout these days. An inventory of my fridge at this moment
would clock two cartons of "fresh squeezed" orange juice, a half quart
of spoiling milk, a bag of coffee beans, plastic containers of wilting
veggies from the corner salad bar, and three bottles of New York
seltzer. That was it.