Recently, one morning at the crack of dawn, I was awoken by what sounded like a wrecking ball coming through my bedroom wall. It was, in fact, not coming through my bedroom wall, but rather the wall of the building next to me—a complete teardown. Apparently it takes more than one collision to destroy a structure of this size, because the sound carried on for hours, and then days, before transforming into other sounds—bulldozers moving brick, jackhammers splitting pavement, drills puncturing pipes—always rising with the sun. It’s a terrible way to start the day, particularly for a person who finds himself in a bad mood even at the best of times.
Naturally I was incensed. And soon I felt I had no choice but to march over there and see what all the fuss was about—to put a face to my newfound anger. “How long will this be going on?” I asked the foreman. He shrugged. “Months? We’re building a building.” I looked up at all the surrounding apartments—dozens of them—and wondered if they felt as perturbed as me. Could we form a coalition to stop this monstrosity? Throw cherry bombs into the pit, or graffiti their machines with curse words? I couldn’t be the only one whose life had been upended. Could we do something if we came together?
It turns out we couldn’t. New York City allows construction to begin at 7AM, and this crew was intent on punctuality. The situation left me so powerless, so irate, that I felt, again, like New York had won—and that the only way I could fight back would be to air my grievances. I often feel this way: that an expression, in the form of prose, will make it all worthwhile. “That’ll show them!” I always think. “They’ll see that the pen is mightier than the table saw!”
Instead, I found myself returning to Philip Lopate’s humorous and delightful essay, “Never Live Above Your Landlord,” published by the Journal in 1988. Lopate, the undisputed “guardian of the essay” (as regarded by our own Margo Jefferson) has for years gifted us with his homespun, curmudgeonly wisdom, tackling irritability with such verve and nuance that his musings always strike deeper than what originally meets the eye—in this case a perpetual love-hate relationship with one’s downstairs neighbors. And though his reflections don’t do much to combat my noise, they do appease me slightly—at least more so than accosting construction workers—and serve as a reminder that, sometimes, unwanted intrusions can produce fruitful meditations. It’s been over twenty years since Lopate combatted these colorful characters, but it strikes me that—at least in Manhattan—some things don’t change.
Never Live Above Your Landlord
Phillip Lopate
Last week, the writing workshop I give for teachers met at my house. (We rotate houses, and it was my tum.) Just after the class began, there was a banging on the door, and I heard the gruff voice of my landlady, Mrs. Rourke, who unfortunately lives right beneath me: ”What’s going on in there?”
I apologized to the group for the interruption, and went to see what was on her mind. “Did you want to speak to me?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.
“What’s going on? How many people you got visiting you?”
“Just about ten. They’re quiet.”
“Well you can’t have that many. This place isn’t zoned for a school! It’s against the law.”
”There’s no school, these people have never been here before.”
“I don’t care, you can’t be going back and forth like this opening the door.”
“No one else is coming. Don’t worry.”
“My husband wants to talk to you,” she said, with the irritated snarl of W.C. Fields. They both talk that way, like Fields on a tear.
After the class, I go downstairs and knock on their door. They’re watching television, he’s in his yellow terrycloth robe and sandals. I make the mistake of thinking he will be more rational and calm than she. Addressing my comments mostly to him, I explain that I run a workshop of eleven people that meets in each other’s homes, and every three or four months it may fall on me to invite the group. Is that all right? (In fact, I have the legal right to visitors in my apartment but I start by treating it as a favor I am asking them.) She, suddenly well-disposed, says, “Timmy, what do you think? He wants to know if it’s okay.”
Her husband moves his head stiffly like a G-man and looks at her intently, without answering.
“I’m bringing it up now,” I explain, “so that the next time—”
“I understand, you don’t want to be embarrassed,” she sympathizes. If she understands this much, why did she run upstairs snapping at us like a cocker spaniel before?
“Right, I don’t want to be embarrassed, or humiliated, in front of my guests.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to come and talk about it with us,” she says. “What do you think, Timmy?”
He looks congenial, up to a point. Then suddenly his thick eyebrows knit, his voice fills with anger: “When we ask for a few extra dollars in rent you complain.”
“The guy next door to you is paying fifty dollars more!” she jumps in excitedly. “And he doesn’t get no separate bedroom like you. You got the Presidential Suite.”
“We don’t want them coming here. What we’re afraid is, you got a school of some kind up there. You’re running a professional office upstairs!” Rourke yells.
“The government doesn’t think so. I can’t even take it off my income tax.”
“I don’t care what the government thinks. I’m telling you, you are using it as an office. You’re typing day and night. The ceiling’s starting to come down. I may have to put in a whole new ceiling!” he says. (I smile at the idea that my pecking away can be causing such structural damage.) “You fill all our garbage cans with your papers—”
“Now wait a minute, that’s an exaggeration.”
“—And then you slam the door and the whole house shakes. I told you, Mister, to fix that door, but nooooo, you don’t want to. You don’t want to do a lot of things!”
“Would you like to fix the door?” I ask. “It’s your building.”
“No, you fix it. You’re a professional man.”
“But let’s return to the question I asked—”
“Timmy, you’re wasting his time. He wants to know about the visitors.”
“We don’t want ’em. They’re strangers, they can’t come in here.”
“Mr. Rourke! I’ve been living here for four years, and I’ve had one party in all that time, and a few small meetings. The group I had over tonight is very quiet. They just read and write.”
“They’re weird. They’re bohemians, who knows? We don’t want their crazy kind—”
“Have you seen them?”
“I’ve seen ’em all.”
“You must have a periscope.”
“I’ve seen them, and I don’t want ’em around!”
“First of all, they’re not bohemians. You know what they are?” I pause, and answer triumphantly: “They’re schoolteachers.”
“Schoolteachers!” Now he’s really angry. “They’re the stupidest of the lot. I only had two years of college myself, don’t get me wrong, I’m no intellectual. But schoolteachers are the most ignorant goddamn bunch of all. They can’t even speak the King’s English! All a New York City schoolteacher can say is ‘Be that as it may.'”
“Be that as it may! Be that as it may! That’s all they know,” she chimes in.
“Let me tell you something: I used to run an antique shop,” he says. “And the worst people who ever came in were school teachers and doctors. They’re the kinds that give us the most trouble. We used to sell fine art sometimes, if it was included in the estate. Watercolors by John Singer Sargeant…and Bierstadt. You ever heard of Bierstadt?”
“Yes. Albert Bierstadt, 19th Century American landscape painter.”
“Well, these—schoolteachers would ask to see everything in the store.” His left eyelid with the mole started twitching just remembering it. “And then they wouldn’t buy a thing. And they never even heard of John Singer Sargeant!”
“But—” I almost said, be that as it may, and caught myself; “—my understanding is that I have a legal right to invite people into my home any time I want, as long as they’re not rowdy.”
“I’m tellin’ ya, we don’t want ’em! You squawk about a few extra lousy dollars in rent. If you don’t like it, why don’t you move out? That’s all. Buy your own building.”
“I think you’re overestimating my income—”
“You got plenty of money. You’re a professional man. Buy your own building upstate somewhere, one of those old one room schoolhouses. That’ll solve your problem.”
“All right, I won’t have them over again.”
He doesn’t want to hear this now, he’s too incensed. “Go buy your own building!”
“I said I won’t ask them over. I’m agreeing with you.”
“When that door slams, the whole house shakes.”
“And go easy on the toilet, Mr. Lopat,” she inserts. I give her an odd look: did she want me to flush less, or shit less? “Sometimes you let the seat drop and we can hear it down here. It makes an awful racket!”
Meanwhile, their dog, a poodle, comes up and starts licking my shoe. All I can do is watch him and smile, as Mr. Rourke continues to rant. “Aries, get away from there,” Mrs. Rourke cries.
“You understand, I’m not trying to be unfriendly,” concludes my landlord.
“I think you are trying to be unfriendly,” I reply, and start to leave.
“Well, get the hell out of here!” he yells. When I reach my landing, he is still yelling. He’ll cool off by tomorrow.
Although I consider myself a good tenant, clean and quiet and unobtrusive, my landlord and landlady, because of our close proximity, hear every sound I make, and cannot seem to stop resenting that I come in the door, that I take off my shoes, that I open the refrigerator-in short, that I live and breathe. The ideal tenant is to them someone who sends in the monthly rent check punctually but does not occupy the premises. I discovered this when they began fondly reminiscing about the previous tenant, a Hungarian architect who was gone half the year, building pre-fab condos in Barbados. Certainly their property must take much less wear and tear when no one is in it; alas, I can never live up to the standard set by my “invisible” predecessor, my Rebecca, as it were. When I finally complained that the tiny kitchenette in the corner of my studio had no sink, and that I had to go into the bathroom to wash the dishes, they were quick to tell me that the Architect never used the cooking facilities; he took all his meals in restaurants.
On the one hand, although they rent self-contained units to a fairly transient population in the middle of Manhattan, my landlords have got the almost charmingly old-fashioned, busy body mentality of the owners of a “respectable” boarding house, who are entitled to pry into the degree of wholesomeness of their tenants. On the other hand, subconsciously it would seem, they have never quite accepted that the entire house is not their dwelling. A thin four-story brownstone, its scale is such that it could be a one-family home-and indeed, began that way. When my landlady mops the stairs (she’s a tireless housekeeper, I’ll give her that), I hear her muttering to herself her scorn of this tenant or that, as though they were her poor relations who had overstayed their welcome.
Sometimes I watch my landlord tending the garden outside their basement apartment. From my window, I have a good overview of him, usually in his yellow robe, padding around, squat and bow-legged as an old Japanese retiree, perfectly at peace with his roses or tomato plants. At such moments I find him admirable. When I want to get in his good graces, I ask him what he’s planting this year. Rourke gives me a half-hour botanical lecture: he has shrewd eyes, and certainly realizes I don’t understand or care about all this gardening lore. But such are the ways we find to get along, when we are getting along.
Once, during the winter, I came upon him in front of the house; he had just cleared a path in the snow and was admiring his shovel work. We stood around talking, and he told me he had been a semi-pro baseball player, down in Florida before World War II. I assumed, since he is only a few inches taller than five feet, he meant shortstop; but no, he had played first base. Again I admired and liked him.
Sometimes I listen to their fights. (They must listen to mine as well.) Their fights are usually about money: one accuses the other of being too soft-hearted, and letting an electrician or merchant gyp them. I’ve never heard them making love. Maybe they don’t any more, or else they do it very quietly.
The wife is both shriller and easier to get around. It’s a tired literary device to characterize someone with an animal metaphor, but what can I do when I have such a doggy landlady? After scratching on my door, she bolts into the living room just like a mutt, her dirty-blonde-grey hair plastered at odd angles from her head. “Mr. Lopat!” she barks. She has a harsh way of saying my name that stops me in my tracks, like a flashlight pointed at a burglar.
I am resigned to her letting herself in with her keys when ever she wants. One time, however, it made for some embarrassment, because there was a pretty women visitor who was sitting on my lap. Mrs. Rourke took her in immediately-sniffed her out, I should say-and proceeded to ignore her. “Mr. Lopat! Were you watering your plants too much?”
“No.”
“Cause it’s leaking over our heads. Something’s leaking. Did you just water your plants?”
“No!” I say, starting to get annoyed. “I wish I had; they need it.”
“Let me take a look.” She bounds over to the window on her thick little legs with red ankle socks and sticks her snout under the radiator. “The board’s warped! It’s leaking all over. I’ll go get Timmy.”
Moments later, Mr. Rourke enters with his tools. He is grinning from ear to ear, enjoying, it would seem, the comedy of their interrupting a romantic scene. “Will you look at that?” he declares, kneeling by the radiator cap.
“Timmy, it’s leakin’ all over! I thought it was the plants but he says he didn’t water the plants.”
“I know that! What are you telling me that for? Don’t talk nonsense, Kate How do you like that! It’s been turned a full turn since the last time. Maybe you got ghosts here. I hope you’re not afraid of ghosts, Mister.”
“No.”
“Nor am I. Well, but how do you explain who did it?” he asks roguishly, the implication being that I monkeyed with the valve. He tinkers a minute more. “I’ll have to come by tomorrow and look at it.” They exit as suddenly as they had appeared. Back to their kennel, I suppose.
Whenever anything goes wrong with the plumbing (the pipes in the brownstone are very old), they always try to make me feel defensive, as if it were my fault. An anally shaming connotation is given to clogged drains. One day, this note was slipped under my door:
Please do not use the wash Basin to empty the dirt and Cat litter in. Use a Pail and throw it in your toilet.
This Past week the Basin was Packed full of junk. and we used $9.95 worth of Drain Power. Then I had to get my Plumber to dislodge the dirt. Let the water run to clear the drain in that sink. Please throw the stuff in the toilet and flush. Next thing the Pipes will get leaking.
Mrs. Rourke
My answer:
Dear Mrs. Rourke:
What makes you think I am emptying cat litter and dirt in the wash basin!! This is an absurd contention. Please make sure you know whereof you speak before you start making baseless and, frankly, fantastic accusations.
Sincerely,
Phillip Lopate
I held my breath for the next few days, thinking that per haps I had gone too far this time. Yet when I ran into her in the hallway, she was almost respectful. Not that our epistolary relationship ended there. I keep all the notes she slips under my door. One of my favorites is the quaintly-worded:
Please stop that
jungle drum music
or whatever it is.
I'm going out of my mind.
Bang Bang Bang
Mrs. Rourke
Since I don’t often listen to music I was a bit insulted at the time, but I turned off the jazz station.
All these skirmishes are part of the “class struggle” which we must wage as tenant and landlord. The trouble is, underneath everything we like each other, which complicates the purity of the antagonism. That murkiness began the very first day I answered their ad. I had come dressed in suit and tie, to radiate respectability, and instantly fell in love with the apartment, with its high ceilings, garden window, floor-length mirror, and genteel-seedy Edwardian furnishings. I noted the ornate molding with rhythmical slits, which Rourke proudly told me was called “dentile” work. He seemed delighted to have impressed me, a seemingly educated person, with his knowledge. Perhaps it was nothing more than that which softened him. Or perhaps they saw me, for one split second, as a sort of son. Whatever the reason, when I told them it was twenty dollars a month more than I could afford, they let me have it any way, at the lower figure.
Since then they have been playing “catch-up,” trying to undo that first mistake of generosity. They grumble as though I had swindled them, refusing to acknowledge that their real bafflement is at their own initial charity. My rent has been raised many times, but it is still a bargain compared to the other ten ants and considering how expensive the neighborhood has got ten. Nevertheless, I bellow like a gored bull whenever they con front me with a new increase, because I believe that it is my historical role to make them feel guilty for bringing up such demands, just as it is theirs to make me feel reluctant about suggesting repairs.
Once, after giving me a song-and-dance about rising oil fuel costs, she admitted (or I got her to admit) that this was a good time for landlords. “But we got to take in all the money we can. Supposing they put another freeze on us. Like in ’44. So you have to charge now whatever you can get away with, ’cause it could end any minute.”
“It’s going to last for the indefinite future, in Manhattan at least.”
“Come on, forty dollars more ain’t gonna hurt ya. It’s a business—you understand. If you moved out I could raise it thirteen per cent extra. Everyone wants to live on this block. I got these guys living upstairs in single rooms, they pay more than you. They work for the UN and they only make twenty three thousand.”
“But I don’t even make twenty-thousand.”
“But you got the possibility to make a lot more, ’cause you’re on your. These guys that work for the government or a corporation, what do they have to look forward to? They get together and drink beer at-P.J. Clark’s or someplace, and they talk about who’s gonna get a raise. But you’re on your own, you got all kinds of ways to make money. You could make a million. All you got to do is write garbage, trash. That’s what the public wants.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
“Try, Mr. Lopat. You can do it.”
“You could too, probably.”
“What am I going to write about? My ‘misspent youth’? All the things I didn’t do and should’ve?” she said, laughing and, much to my surprise, giving me a wink.
She has her kindly side. Sometimes I come home and find the bathroom floor has been scrubbed, or the dishes washed. She also fed my cat one weekend when I went away; apparently Milena resisted the dry food I had left out and was yowling in a sulk. Mrs. Rourke went out and bought her some canned liver, in spite of the fact she hates my having a pet in the apartment.
Yesterday, Mrs. Rourke came in to investigate something and stayed to chat for over an hour. I was feeling tired and relaxed, and encouraged her to talk. She practically told me her life story. Afterwards I wrote down everything I could remember, as close to her wording as possible. Herein, then, is
The Landlady’s Tale
I don’t like to rent to women. Because they’re always picky, picky, they start finding fault with this and that. They want tiles in the bathroom. Men are more easily satisfied. You can tell a man something and he’ll agree or disagree, that’s that. He says to himself, “She probably had a headache today.” But a woman, she’s vindictive, she remembers.
I had one woman in here, she was a nice-looking girl, blonde and slim, she said to me, “If I get this place I’ll never give you a moment’s trouble.” So, fine, she took the place and the next thing I know she’s complaining, there’s no heat. I says, okay I’ll come up and fix it. “Oh,” she says, “you can’t just come into my house, you have to tell me first. You have to notify me. And you can’t come today, you have to come Friday.” So all right, I figured forget it. The next thing I know she’s all upset. She seen a cockroach. I said why don’t you get an exterminator? She said, “I know my rights, you have to supply me with an exterminator.” Oh, she was screaming like she’d never seen a cockroach before. I said, “What are you scared of a little cock roach for when you got that big gorilla sleeping in your bed?” Ha! She was so surprised when I said that. But I’d seen him coming in and out, a guy like a gorilla with a big beard. He belonged to that Puerto Rican Independence party. He had these tapes going on loud, Viva-this and Down with Anaconda that. One day I knock on the door and I says to him, “Listen, I didn’t rent my rooms for this. If you want to play your anti American speeches why don’t you put down a few bucks and hire a meeting hall?” He said to me, all red in the face, “Don’t you bother me, get out of here!” I was a little scared. He could be a bomber! Could blow the whole building up! He had all these guys with Castro beards coming in and out, sitting on the stoop. Agitators. I says to him, “Listen, I’m not afraid of you. If you keep this up I’ll call the FBI and have you investigated.”
So the next thing I know the girl comes to me and says, “Mrs. Rourke, you got the wrong idea! He doesn’t sleep with me.” So I went in with my Instamatic when she wasn’t there and I took pictures. He had his shoes lying on the floor and his pants and underpants! I wasn’t planning to do anything with the pictures, but just if she started something. So she moves out real fast. Left me a nice note. She was a sweet-looking girl, you know. I went in there to clean up and it turned out she had shut the radiator off! That’s why it was always so cold. But she wouldn’t let me in to check. That’s why I don’t like women tenants. A friend of mine owns a building down the block, number 44. She rented it to a girl and the girl has her gurus coming up and down. Two o’clock in the morning they start meditatin’. Making noise, like O-maa-aa-wuuu. When everybody’s sleeping. My friend says, “Oh, I want to kill that women!” But what can she do? Nothing.
This friend of mine’s daughter went to Vegas. To my way of thinking she was very plain-looking. No hips, no bust, no face, no legs, nothing. She met this insurance man who was a millionaire and she married him! I don’t know what he saw in her, the daughter. Maybe it was one of those things-an attraction. Maybe he liked the way she threw the dice. He died. Had a heart attack, all of a sudden a sharp pain! The artery bursted. Now she’s got a million. See, maybe if I went to Reno and been at the right spot I could’ve been rich by now. But instead I came to New York and I’m still struggling. I didn’t plan to stay in New York. I just came here to make something of myself and get out. I came from Pennsylvania. I wanted to get into show business. But I was too short. Too short for a Roxyette. Nowadays they take ’em small. Then it was a certain look they wanted: tall, baby face, a little plump, you know. Now they like that starved look. I had a friend back then who was a big model, Babe Casey. She was a gorgeous girl. You must have seen that Unguentine ad, you know, with the girl bending over. That’s her. Edna. They called her Babe though. She went into the Ziegfeld Follies. Then she married somebody rich from down south. She’s probably passed on by now. Anyway, she got me a few jobs posing for ski ads. Twenty-five bucks an hour. Good money. In those days, though, you had to bring your own clothes to the job. If it was a ski shot you had to go out and buy a pair of skis.
Meanwhile I was working at the Downtown Athletic Club, waiting on tables for their luncheon meal. They only paid you a dollar an hour, but the tips were what made it. I could come home sometimes with thirty, forty dollars in change. They were always after me. One old guy says to me, “What kind of lipstick you like?” I says “Any kind I can get!” He left me a five dollar tip. Another guy had a big Packard, rode around with the hood down. He says to me, “How’d you like to be living in the Essex House?” “Fine,” I says, “but what do I have to do for it?” Besides, I noticed that this guy had a different girl with him every time I saw him. So if you did what he said, you’d be living at the Essex House, and the next thing you knew he’d be sending up his friends to entertain. Sure! Before you knew it you’d be living the life of a real hustler. I wasn’t interested in sleeping with men. Oh, I’d go on dates. When I was hungry! My girlfriend and I were living in the same residence hotel, and she was a beautiful thing, looked like Jean Harlow. The men would invite her out to dinner and she’d say, “But you have to take my girlfriend too.” We’d go to the Roxy together and then have a big meal on them and never see ’em again. Hello and goodbye, that sort of routine.
I had one fella who was after me, Ripley’s secretary. You know Ripley’s Believe It Or Not? He was the guy who used to research it. A brilliant man, everybody said. He came to the Athletic Club, he would write me poems. All about my hair. A lovely guy. The other girls said, “Gee, you’re lucky. That’s the man for you, Kate, he’ll make a great husband.” But I didn’t love him. He had grey hair. And I was just eighteen.
I would always tell the men what they wanted to hear. To get a tip, you know? One customer would say, “What are you doing tomorrow?” I’d say, “Oh, it’s my mother’s birthday and I’ve got to take her out. If only I could take her somewhere special!” He’d leave me five dollars. You have to make up some thing interesting, that’s what men like. They don’t want to hear the same old story. One man says to me, “Will you be here next week?” I says, “Not only next week, I’ll be here forever.” That kind of thing.
Then I met my husband. I was living in this residence hotel on the same floor as my girlfriend, and there was a man in the middle between our two rooms. Rosenzweig. We used to share the wash basin. He’d say, “Girls, are you going to be in there for long?” And my girlfriend would say, “Yes we’re going to be in there for very long. You don’t like it?” He says, “I can’t stand it any more!” She was always trying to get a rise out of him. So one day he was trying to be friendly, and he invited both of us into his room. I saw he had a caricature on the wall of himself. This Mr. Rosenzweig had an unusually large-nose. And it was all there in the cartoon. I says, “That’s very good, it’s a good likeness.” He says, “Oh that’s by my friend Timmy Rourke, he’s an artist. He’s from Florida. He’s coming into town next week, and if you girls are nice I’ll introduce you to him.” My girlfriend says, “Ah, we don’t want to meet any friend of yours.” She was always trying to get him riled up.
So the next weekend, he left his door open next to the wash basin, as a signal that he was inviting us to join them. They were going to a baseball game. So we all went to the game, and that’s how I met Timmy. I knew right away. I told my friend, “I found somebody I want to marry.” We went together for a year. We were like two puppies. Oh, we had a lot of fun. What I liked about him was that he was so easy. If we were walking along and I saw a Max Factor makeup kit in the window that I liked, he went right inside and bought it for me. Never asked for a thing in return. Not even a kiss. Most men, they would say, “How about a kiss first?” I said to myself, Here’s a man.
When we got married we both had jobs, so we took an eight-room apartment on West 105th Street. The rent was only fifty-four dollars a month then! I fixed up one part and rented it out to an Irish couple as a one-bedroom apartment. They were paying eleven dollars a week, which was a lot of money for the time. Then I heard about this building we’re in now. A friend told me about it. It was owned by a Jewish women with big legs. It was getting too much for her, she was getting too old to run the place. So we bought it. Then we went into antiques. We ran antique stores for thirty years. All the dealers knew me, they used to call me Kiss-Me-Kate.
I had a friend who was an interior decorator named Gladys, she used to bring her clients around. What she would charge ’em! She’d bring in this judge’s wife, Mrs. Gold. And tell her: “You have to have this Biedermeier in your home.” The woman would say: “Vat I gotta haf dat ugly ting in my house?” Gladys would tell her, “But it won’t look like this when I get through with it. I have the finest Italian artist who’s going to transform it into the most beautiful thing you ever saw. Just write out a check for six hundred dollars, that’s what I paid Mrs. Rourke for it.” She’d bought it from me for two hundred! I says to her when we’re alone, “Gladys, don’t you have no shame at all?” She laughs and says, “Why should I? I have to take that dumb woman to lunch and all around town in cabs and I keep picking up the bill. My husband and I play cards with the Judge and her. And we lose. We lose all the time, on purpose. Nah, I got no time for pitying her.” “Well that’s a different story,” I says. So we both had a good laugh.
When Timmy and I sold our business we had some money to invest. But we missed our opportunities. I could have had that office building on 72nd Street for ninety-eight thousand dollars. The one with the beautiful iron doors. But Timmy said it was too expensive. To him everything was always too expensive. You know what it’s worth now? A million! The point of it is: Invest. And there’s nothin’ like real estate. Oh, what we could have picked up after the war. But you’re young and you don’t want responsibilities. Invest while you’re young, that’s the point I’m making. I used to have this friend, Mr. Hermann, he was a stockbroker. And a real gentlemen. Oh, Timmy didn’t like him! Thought he was paying too much attention to me. One time we were at a dancing party and I asked Mr. Hermann if he had any good tips for investments. He took me into his arms and started whirling me around the room, and all the while he was whispering in my ear, “Gold! Gold! Gold!”
The next thing I know, gold is going up through the ceiling. I should’ve listened to him. He gave me another good tip: there was a place just across the street, a penthouse. It used to be where servants hung the wash. I could have picked it up for twenty-five thousand, put in another thirty-five thousand and you’d have had a beautiful roof apartment. The sun would be shining in on us every day. I told my husband, “Timmy, I want to move there.” He says, “Go ahead. I’ll even sign the papers. but I’m staying here. I’m not going to move into no roof apartment. We’d get mugged.” I says, “What do I want to go live there by myself for?” You know what I think? Timmy was jealous! Anything to do with Mr. Hermann, he didn’t trust.
Besides, he doesn’t want to change. I heard about other places to fix up. Now I can’t be bothered. I’m close to seventy, I don’t want to start a whole new enterprise. We talk about who we’re going to leave this house to. There’s my niece, but she’s still like a hippy. She’s over thirty and she’s taking art lessons! That’s not so bad, but she’s been married and divorced and got two kids and now she’s getting the government to pay for her art lessons. I sort of feel she’s missed the boat. Know what I mean? It’s too late for that, you get past a certain point in life . . .
I says, Timmy, let’s leave it to the dog!
There was an old guy who lived in the Dakota, left a fortune that way. The will saw that so much every month would be spent on feeding and care of the animal. So this fella who was taking care of it, he drew a good salary, he was living high, all he had to do was walk the dog and feed it. And the dog died. So the fella was devastated. He went to the lawyer and said, “What am I going to do?” The lawyer thought and thought, and finally he said, “I’ll tell you what to do. Get another dog that’s almost like the one who died and take care of that.”
***
I’ll stop here, because my hand is tired. In any case, you get the idea. Twenty-four hours later, her chatter still flows on and on in my head; she’s so real, Mrs. Rourke, with her innocent courtship and Unguentine ads, her obsession with making money and her inability to go in for the kill. Why aren’t I real the way she is? She’s a character, all right. She has certainty, how ever narrow the intellectual base. Ils sont dans le vrai, they’re in the right, said Flaubert, the visionary artist envying the bourgeoisie out for a Sunday walk in the park. How tiresome. No, I don’t envy them exactly, but I’m fond of that postwar American outlook, I envy that experience, the very word “postwar” in fact gives me a jolt of warmth, with its promise of young married couples starting off. My parents were still hopeful in 1945, I was two years old, barely able to toddle, certainly unable to appreciate the tonal brilliances of film noir or bebop that mean so much to me now. I suppose we often have a nostalgic affinity for the cultural era when we were still in the womb or barely out. A Freudian would say it was the Oedipal desire to crawl in between one’s parents’ lovemaking, or the narcissistic urge to be in on one’s conception. But the Rourkes—to think of them as a young couple, a union of baseball and the Ziegfeld Follies, with all the world ahead of them, and by imperceptible declensions and fateful turns, to end up finally that most morally suspect of creatures, New York landlords. Well, they are honest ones, at least. Still, what happened to Timmy’s artistic ambitions? Or the children—why are there no children? Don’t leave it to the dog, for God’s sake!
