Live Alone and Like It
Rebecca Johnson
Photo by Hannes Richter
Word Count 1124
I was desperate to live alone. As the youngest of four children, I had always shared a bedroom with a sister; in boarding school, we were all assigned doubles, the better, I suppose, to acquire the patience necessitated by shared living. But I had already mastered that art! Stupid, then, to go to college in New York City where living alone is a fever dream only to be achieved by the very rich.
Right before graduation my grandfather, who owned a gas station in Amarillo, Texas, died and left me $10,000. It was more money than I had ever had, but it wasn’t life changing money. One Sunday, while scanning the New York Times real estate listings, I came across a listing for an apartment on Riverside Drive for $30,000. This was an unheard of price for an apartment in that neighborhood of stately limestones and aged intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. If I put 20% of my inheritance down, I could just swing the mortgage. I went to the Open House trembling with hope.
In the ornate lobby, the uniformed doorman (a doorman!) pointed to a door next to the elevator and told me to take the stairs down. Wait, what? Down? I found a blonde woman with pearls sitting in a tiny room bathed in a rosy, apricot light. Across the hall, I could see a room filled with washers and dryers.
“Hello!” she smiled the universal smile of real estate agents around the world. You know, the one completely disconnected from the reality of the shit they are trying to sell you.
I looked around uncertainly. “There’s no window,” I observed. Is that even legal?
“It’s a starter apartment,” she agreed.
Starter and ender.
Virginia Woolf famously noted that a female novelist needs “a room of one’s own.” She was talking about the making of art but, for me, life itself requires solitude. When you live with someone else, there is always a slight psychic dissonance, an unpleasant waiting for the arrival another consciousness to disrupt one’s own internal universe where things are humming along as nicely as a Richard Scarry happy town. Even though it’s been thirty years, I can still recall the bad roommates of my past-- Todd of the smelly feet and oily hair unwrapping his falafel in the kitchen on 116th street or Guillaume, the French architect, who would call me into the kitchen and point to the three breadcrumbs I had left on the kitchen counter, his face distorted by rage.
It didn’t help that I was raised in a vast family of conservative Texans. Should I ever decide to join the Daughters of the American Revolution (not likely), I would qualify. Had the pill and the combine existed, I am certain my great grandmother would not have chosen to give birth to nine children, but with the abolition of slavery, someone had to work the fields. Each of those children had children who had children so family reunions were a massive blur of white faces and familiar last names written with a sharpie on a name tag. Eight hundred people attended my aunt’s funeral and I was related to many of them. My mother was the outlier, a liberal feminist who fought for civil rights but I still grew up hearing her gossip about every errant relative-- the peeping tom, the uncle who got drunk and fell to his death from a tree. The message was clear—people were watching. As soon as she graduated from college, she moved to Alaska, as far from Texas as you could possibly get while remaining on American soil (actually, it became a state while she lived there).
Obviously, I would never be able to live alone in Manhattan on my lowly salary as a Production Assistant on a talk show. A friend had a mother who was a real estate agent in Brooklyn Heights, the first stop out of Manhattan on the IRT. Back then, an outer borough was a come down but worth it, if it meant living alone. Ruth Levine and I climbed three floors to a one bedroom apartment facing leafy, lovely Henry Street. She opened the door to apartment 4F and an orange cat shot between her legs. Inside, it looked like the police had torn it apart. Clothes lay scattered everywhere, magazines and garbage littered the floor, the ceiling had huge gaping holes and the entire place smelled of garbage, but the rent was only $538 a month. Also, it had three large windows that looked out onto a Lutheran church, a working fireplace and a separate bedroom. In addition, Norman Mailer, who lived three blocks away in a townhouse facing the East river, would walk past the house every day at 3:00 on his daily perambulation. Though I did not know that at the time.
“I’ll take it!” I said.
We rushed back to her office to fill out the paper work. Another agent in her office had shown it that morning to a man equally undeterred by the chaos.
I watched nervously as the two agents presented their candidates over the phone to the building’s owner, a dentist on Ocean Avenue, the Orthodox Jewish part of Brooklyn. My friend’s mother was one of those beautiful women who are used to getting their way with men (the opposite of my mother—a stunning woman who never got her way with men.) Ruth called me a “nice young woman who had just graduated from Barnard.”
“Oh,” the dentist answered. “Give it to the Barnard girl.”
And so, trading on my background and connections (a life lesson), I had my first New York apartment that I could truly call home. I had to spend days throwing out the garbage the previous tenant had left behind. I found more than one hypodermic needle among the twisted clothes and assumed that the former tenant, Thomas K., whose name I now knew thanks to the many bills that arrived in my mail box, had been a junkie who died of an overdose.
Two years after moving in, I hailed a cab in front of my building. The driver was a white guy in his fifties with a salt and pepper beard and vivid blue eyes. He looked up at the building and said, “I used to live there.”
I looked at the name on his hack licence. Thomas K. Our eyes met in his rearview mirror and I felt a chill. I could have said, “Yes, I threw out all your belongings and found a home for your cat at the ASPCA”, but instead I murmured something anodyne and gazed out the window as he eased on to the Brooklyn Bridge, joining the ebb and flow of a city fueled by invisible connections.
To this day, I still have dreams about that apartment. In every one of them, I have somehow held on to the lease while continuing to live my parallel life. I can’t explain its hold except to say I became an adult in those battered rooms. I fell in love for the first time. I smoked. I drank. I threw parties. Once, I traveled to Australia for a month and tied my ficus tree to the window so it could get some rain while I was gone. It died. I wasn’t close to my family in those years. My mother and I rarely spoke, my sisters were living their own lives. It wasn’t that I didn’t love them, I simply needed to find my footing on my own. Now that I am older, I find I need them more than ever.
In that apartment, I came to face to face with the realities of adult life. Love will not always be returned. In all but a few of us, ambition will outpace ability and luck. I staggered under the weight of these truths. I remember once sinking into the coat closet and weeping when the man I loved canceled a date at the last minute. I knew there was another woman. As I cried, I was grateful to be alone in my useless grief. As Stephen Sondheim said, “Live alone and like it, don’t come down from that tree.”
Rebecca is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications including (alphabetically) Elle, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The NYT Magazine, Salon, Vogue (contributing editor 1999-2020). Johnson is the author of the novel And Sometimes Why. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.
