She decided a second diner breakfast would not do and
invited me up to her place where she would make something herself.
“I’m a good cook,” she said, then gave me a list of things
she needed me to pick up from the market on the way, giving me an address –
which I mistyped into google maps and didn’t realize my mistake until I stood
before a massive apartment building near the Lincoln Tunnel and knew this
couldn’t be right.
I texted her; she demanded to know where I was; I told her;
she called me silly, then gave me more precise directions.
When I took too long to get there, she again texted me to
know where I was.
“I’m at your front door,” I texted back “What apartment are
you in?”
“Nine,” she texted back. “The top floor. Some of my men
friends called it Cloud 9.”
I rang number nine bell; she buzzed open the glass door to
let me in.
Flash backs hit me from my days on the Lower East Side as I
stepped inside, the narrow passage leading to the lower hall and twisted stairs
going up. I started up, bearing the package I had brought from the grocery
store, passing other apartments along the way, one in which I knew her brother
lived, and on a later visit, she would make me tiptoe passed, hating his
knowing who she brought up to her apartment.
Her door was not the last door at the top. Another door led
to the roof, a detail I would later learn as vastly important, but then seemed
insignificant as I knocked on hers.
She answered on my first knock and let me in.
This door opened into the kitchen, the rear most room of
what was a rail road apartment – very bright with windows looking east towards
Manhattan and another looking south over a playground and a church, a lot of
counter space, a few utensils handing on the wall, a few pieces of cookware as
well.
The rest of the apartment progressed east to west through a
door to the right off the kitchen from the one I had entered leading to the living
room, a bedroom and finally a small bathroom. All of these had windows facing
south and the church, giving the apartment a constant flood of daylight from
sunrise to sunset.
The place was extremely clean and very quiet.
“It’s very quiet here on weekends,” she said. “But if I sleep
late during the week the noise gets outrageous.”
Sleeping late was rare with her on account of the hamster in
her head, the non-stop processing of worries she compared to a hamster running
on its wheel. Late for her was 5 a.m. even if she’d went to sleep late.
In the kitchen, on a table near the door was a piano
keyboard and an MP3 recording system as well as the handwritten lyrics she had
recently recorded and sent to me, as well as posted on a number of musical
websites.
The kitchen window facing the church yawned, full open, day
and night, all seasons of the year, no screen, her two cats not apparently tempted
to step out. She kept a can on the ledge into which she put her cigarette
butts. When she smoked in the house, she did so perched on this ledge like a
bird, exhaling the smoke outside.
The living room had a couch stretched along the left side,
back to the line of windows, a TV stood against the wall across from the couch
and a long coffee table stretched out in-between. A small book case sat against
the common wall with the kitchen containing a number of books by her favorite
food writer, someone she had tried to interview a year earlier for an on-line publication
in New York.
In the next room, her bed was tucked into the left-hand corner,
my book strategically placed near the pillows. In one of the corners, she had a
rack for neatly stacked pants, folded and waiting, as if she wore them in
order, drawing one from each slot for each day of the week.
The tiny blue and white painted bathroom reminded me of one
I’d had when living in Passaic, a little larger than two old-fashioned phone booths,
filled with the usual women’s paraphernalia.
She had dressed down for the occasion, wearing a white
button-down blouse and blue jeans, her hair pinned back into a pony tail,
taking offense apparently when I remarked on her hair style since she did not
wear it that way during my subsequent visits.
She was in an odd mood, distant and aloof, not at all
welcoming. It seemed surreal since this whole breakfast thing had been her idea.
I wondered if she was angry with me for any reason, but she refused to say.
I brought out the eggs and rolls I had purchased at the
market. She carried these to the stove in the far corner of the kitchen where
she had already prepared chopped vegetables to mix with the eggs.
She moved with the grace of a professional chef, stirring
the mixture, and when done, quickly and efficiently distributing the result
into two bowls, handing me folk and bowl, then carrying her own into the living
room where we both settled onto the couch and ate off the coffee table.
As with her mood, her talk remained remote, much more distant
that previous more intimate conversations she’d had in the past, as if she’d
become a totally different person by daylight that she normally was at night, a
persona she maintained at the office until the end of her shift when she tended
to become flirtatious again – except for rare moments such as her flirting with
the company owner, giving him love taps with her pad, he grinning back at her
like a love struck child.
Gone was the role of novice she had played with me during
our early office conversations, although she still retained this when dealing with
our temporary boss, frequently charging into his office with pad and pen to jot
down his words of wisdom.
She wasn’t cold to me in her apartment, yet I felt too nervous
to finish our feast. I just couldn’t make sense of why she had invited me there
or what I was expected to do next.
So, after mumbling my excuses, I made my way back out into
my own life, out of Cloud 9 to somethings less “moment to moment,” thinking
that she had aborted whatever plans she had made for that day.
And truth be told, I was relieved – only to have her start
texting me again as soon as I reached home.
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