As Andrea cleared her throat noisily and led them inside, Susan wondered how long ago that change had occurred; how many other tenants had there been? There was something about Andrea that suggested the sturdy, independent spirit of a longtime widow. Following her bent back down the long front hallway of the apartment, Susan felt a wave of sympathy for this woman, smart and lively as she was, growing old and dying here alone.
The door opened onto a hallway that ran lengthwise down the entire apartment, and featured not one but two coat closets. The expansive hallway ended, on the Cranberry Street side, in a bright and cozy kitchen, with granite countertops and a decent, if not overwhelming, amount of pantry space. "So the kitchen's not eat-in?" asked Alex, and shot a significant look over Andrea's head, which Susan could easily translate: not a lot of space for cooking... .
Susan just smiled. The kitchen in their current apartment was so small, the refrigerator and oven couldn't be used at the same time, because the doors banged into each other. She ran her fingers along the countertops and crouched to open and close the cupboards while Emma played don't-step-on-the-crack on the hardwood floor. Above the stove a pair of windows faced onto Cranberry Street, filling the room with gorgeous midmorning sunlight that cast the floorboards in lustrous browns.
"Floor's maybe a little uneven," Alex noted, crouching to run his palms disapprovingly along the ground.
Andrea shrugged. "Yes, yes. Actually, Howard was meaning to redo the floors in the whole place, but somehow we never had time." Alex nodded as he straightened. Susan glanced down; the floors looked A-OK to her.
"This building was first constructed in 1864, the same year as the Brooklyn Bridge. But it's a solid old thing, and it's got plenty of character. Much like myself." She gave Alex a broad, almost vaudevillian wink, then brayed throaty laughter. Alex smiled politely and gave Susan another meaningful glance: We're sure we want this old loon as a landlord? But Susan ignored him and laughed along with Andrea. Emma, too, squealed and hid her mouth behind her hands-at three and a half years old, she loved jokes, even when she had no idea what they were about.
"Oh, by the way, in case you happen to care, the ceiling?" Andrea gestured upward with a thumb. "That's pressed tin."
If Susan had any doubts about the apartment, the thing that sold her on it, absolutely and irrevocably-what made her certain in the core of her being that she had to live at 56 Cranberry Street #2-was the bonus room.
At the opposite end of the apartment's first floor from the kitchen, back down the long entrance hallway and through an arch framed by two funky old-fashioned sconces, was the living room, spacious and irregularly rectangular, with light flooding in from two big back windows. The center of the far wall bulged into the room like a semicircular column; it was an odd architectural detail, and at first Susan thought there might be a pillar behind it. Closer inspection revealed it to be an air shaft, separating 56 Cranberry Street from the house next door. It even had two decent-size windows, which let in yet more light.
"Very strange, I know," said Andrea of the shaft, tapping on one of its windows with a big costume-jewelry gold ring she wore on her pinky. "It runs from the roof all the way down to the basement. You'll see when we go upstairs, it cuts through the bathroom up there. Lots of light, though, lets in lots of light."
"Cool," said Susan, and Alex peered through one of the windows, craning his neck to look up and down the shaft.
"My best guess is, it was a dumbwaiter when this house was first built," Andrea continued. "Run drinks from the kitchen up to the second floor, that sort of thing. One time a bird got in there somehow and couldn't get out. Flapped around and made the most pitiful noises until it died. Awful. Just awful."
Even Alex couldn't criticize the living room, considering their current apartment didn't even have one. While Andrea stood with hands on hips in the archway and Emma walked the room's periphery, playing some complicated game of counting steps, Susan slipped next to him and squeezed his hand.
"What are you thinking?" she whispered.
Before he could respond, Andrea strode across the room and pulled open a door in the left rear corner-a small door, painted the same color as the wall, so innocuous that Susan hadn't even realized it was there.
"Back here is this funny little room," she said, gesturing them over for a look. "I call it the bonus room, because it's sort of, you know, a bit of something extra. It's what we would have called the 'sewing room,' when I was a child. Of course, when I was a child we were sewing sweaters for our pet dinosaurs."
"Pet dinosaurs!" Emma shrieked, raising her hands to her mouth in exaggerated amazement. "Whaaaat?!"
"This one, I like," said Andrea, patting Emma on the head while Alex smiled.
Susan stepped into the bonus room. It was barely a room at all, really, more of an overgrown closet, with the one door and a single window, letting in a steady and unbroken stream of golden light.
This is it, Susan thought, experiencing such a powerful wave of joy that she had to clamp her hands to her mouth to keep from whooping aloud. This is it!
She'd had second thoughts galore since leaving her job last year. Second thoughts, third thoughts, and more-it seemed so audacious, so unrealistic, so selfish, after all this time to abandon her career and "go back to her painting." But she had done it. She had worked up the nerve to tell Alex what she was considering and found him to be not only understanding, but incredibly supportive: "Of course," he'd said. "If that's what you want, we'll make it work." She'd given her notice and gone to Sam's to supply herself with new brushes, new oils and pastels and turpentine. And then ... somehow, the subsequent months had flown by, and Susan found one reason after another to put off starting. She'd gotten involved in a friend's run for city council, spent a month going door to door with pamphlets, collecting signatures; Emma had been seriously ill for five days, ended up at New York-Presbyterian one harrowing night with an IV line; they'd gone to Alex's parents for a week in July; and then of course she'd decided their apartment was too small, and they had to move.
Things kept interfering-or, as Susan knew very well, she let things keep interfering, so that she wouldn't have to face this enormous life change she'd set up for herself. But now, in this room ...
When she was at Legal Aid, counting the hours until she could go home, feeling like a fraud and a liar, her toes throbbing in her pinchy black work shoes, she would indulge flights of fancy in which she stood painting on a sunny midmorning, bathed in a shaft of sunlight and lost in a cloud of artistic effort. On such occasions it was just this kind of room in which she always imagined herself.
God, Susan thought, tears welling in her eyes. I don't even think it was this kind of room. It was this exact room.
"I didn't even mention it in the ad," said Andrea, as she and Alex ducked into the room and stood next to Susan. "I'd feel like a huckster, because you can hardly count it as a room. Good for storage, though. Or a nursery."
"Or a studio," Susan said softly.
"Oh? Are you an artist?"
"Well, it's kind of a long story. I was-I mean, I am. But-"
"Yes," interrupted Alex, throwing his arm over her shoulder. "She is."
Emma was getting antsy, so Susan set her up in the center of the empty living room, producing from her oversized pocketbook a box of crayons, a stack of construction paper, and a small snack of dried fruit and cheese.
"Stay in this room, please," said Alex, and Emma nodded without looking up, already deeply engaged in her coloring.
"My goodness, she's a happy duck, isn't she?" said Andrea as she led Susan and Alex up the narrow uncarpeted staircase to the second floor. "Howard and I never had any of our own, but I've always loved children. Even the miserable snot-nose types, but especially happy little ducks like yours."
The second floor was really just two large rooms, a master bedroom and a second bedroom, separated by the staircase landing and a decent linen closet. The upstairs bathroom, where the air shaft ended in a small arced skylight, was large, with room for both a shower stall and a full jetted tub. At the sight of it, Alex whispered a mock-lascivious "hey now" into Susan's neck, and she nudged him playfully. The master bedroom, like the kitchen downstairs, faced Cranberry Street and was similarly bathed in warm and generous light.
"All these windows are double paned, by the by," said Andrea, rapping on the sturdy glass. "Noise reducing. Work like the devil. I got 'em downstairs in my apartment, too."
On the way out, Susan asked to see the bonus room one more time. While Alex spoke to Andrea in his low, all-business voice, she walked in a slow, enchanted circle around the tiny room and then stopped to rest her hands on the windowsill and gaze outside. The small back lot was separated from the mirror-image lot, belonging to a house on Orange Street, by a weathered wooden fence. The lot was overgrown with wild grass and dotted with bent and spindly trees; Susan wondered which of these gnarled beauties she would paint first.
From all the way down the hall she heard Andrea's voice saying, "So I'm sorry about that ..." and then something she couldn't hear, to which Alex replied, "... I know how it is ..." Then Andrea laughed a dry rustling titter and said, "Well, the less said about them, the better." Emma could be heard giggling and hooting, having coronated herself princess of the living room, with a host of invisible subjects.
Turning from the window, Susan was suddenly struck by a sour unsavory odor, a nasty staleness in the closed air of the room. She crinkled her nose, and in the next breath it was gone.
She shut the door of the bonus room behind her, gathered up her daughter, and found Andrea and Alex in the kitchen, framed by the slanting sunlight. Andrea was nodding vigorously, eyes narrowed with interest, leaning into the conversation.
"A photographer?" she said. "Is that a fact?
"It is," Alex said.
"Two artists! My humble abode will be quite the atelier."
Susan glanced uneasily at her husband. Alex was not an art photographer-not anymore. Like Susan, he had begun his postcollege life a decade ago with high artistic aspirations. Unlike Susan, who had folded up her easel after eighteen months of desultory effort and gone to law school as her parents had always intended, Alex had bopped along for a while, enjoying just enough success to encourage him but never enough to make a living. What he had found instead was an unusual niche in the world of commercial photography, at which he had been unexpectedly successful-so successful, in fact, that he hadn't taken what he would consider a "real" photograph in years.
"I'm not really an artist," Alex told Andrea. His tone was light, unoffended, and Susan exhaled. "I own a small company called Gem-Flex. We take pictures of diamonds and other precious stones, for jewelry catalogs and advertisements."
"Really? How interesting!"
"Ah. That's where you're wrong," said Alex, giving Andrea an easy lopsided grin. "But it pays the bills."
Back outside on the stoop, they all shook hands. Andrea knelt with some effort to give Emma a hug, which the girl surprisingly accepted.
"Thank you so much for showing the apartment to us," said Susan. "We'll be in touch soon, OK?"
"Take your time, take your time," said Andrea, and coughed. "But I've got a good feeling about you people. I do."
They had Emma all buckled in when Alex turned back and called, "Oh, hey, Andrea? One more thing."
Susan squeezed her eyes shut: here we go. He was fishing for a problem, for a reason to exercise his magical with-you-not-working-right-now veto, to keep them entombed in their one-bedroom on Twelfth Street for all eternity. The place is amazing, Alex, she thought. This is where we're going to live. Just accept it.
"You seem like you'd be a great landlord," he was saying. "But if there are, I don't know, problems, with the heat or the toilet or whatever-"
Andrea interrupted with her high, throaty, barking laugh.
"Oh, good heavens! No. These ancient hands will not be plunging your toilet." She held up thin, knotty fingers. "There's a nice gentleman, an old friend, who is very handy and takes care of all that sort of thing for me. He can handle anything. I promise."
"Oh," said Alex, seeming mollified. "Well, great, then."
That's my girl, thought Susan, and beamed up at Andrea, who waved.
"All right, folks. See you soon."
It was three or four blocks down Cranberry Street to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, where Emma hopped out of the stroller for some much-needed running around. Susan and Alex leaned on the railing and stood side by side, gazing out across the broad expanse of the East River at the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, and the skyline hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. Susan glanced furtively at her husband over the top of her Ray-Bans, trying to assess his state of mind. It was turning into a hot day, and she wore not only her sunglasses but a big floppy hat to protect herself from the sun. She had sensitive blue eyes and the kind of pale Scandinavian skin that burned easily; Alex, rugged and dark, had no such problems. He never bothered to wear sunscreen, which made Susan envious and, occasionally, mildly irritated.
They turned their backs to the railing and saw Emma streak by, shrieking merrily, in fervid pursuit of an adorable little boy in blue Crocs and a windbreaker, his hair in neat cornrows.
"All right, dear, moment of truth," Susan said at last. "What do you think?"
"Well, I think a lot of things." He let out a long breath and stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Did you hear? Her last tenants ran out on her, so she's asking for three months' security deposit."
"Three months? Jesus." Susan did some quick math in her head. "So that's-"
"It's ridiculous, is what it is."
"Can we afford it?"
"We can, because the rent is crazy low. I mean, really insanely low. In fact-" Alex gave Susan his most serious pretend-serious face. "It's probably haunted, right? Gotta be haunted."
Susan cracked up and rested her head on his shoulder. She had a good feeling about where this conversation was going. "Totally," she said. "Built on the only Indian burial ground in Brooklyn Heights."
"Shame," he said. "Because otherwise it's fabulous."
"It is, right? And a great neighborhood. And an easy commute for you."
"Yup."
"And, it's got that ... what did she call it?" Susan pretended to try and remember. "The bonus room. It'll make a great studio, I think."
"Right. Now, did you notice? No washer/dryer."
"Eh. I'll live."
Susan looked around for Emma and found her right away, on a nearby bench with the little boy, chatting merrily with a woman Susan guessed was the boy's mother. Susan pointed to herself and then to Emma, mouthing "she's mine," and the other woman smiled back and waved cheerily.
God, Susan thought. I love it here.
"So, OK," Susan said, turning back to Alex. "Why don't we sleep on it tonight, and ..." She trailed off and broke into a surprised smile. Alex had his phone out.
"Screw it," he said, grinning. "Let's call her right now."
Susan's heart leaped in her chest.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. We both know we're going to take it. So let's just take it."
As Alex dialed Andrea Scharfstein, Susan felt a sharp sting on her calf and bent to smack at the mosquito. She nailed it, and her palm came up bearing a thick bloody smear.
Andrea sent the lease three hours later to Susan via e-mail, exactly as she had promised. After Emma was asleep and after Alex left for a long-scheduled and eagerly anticipated game of Texas Hold 'Em with some college cronies, Susan sat down to review it.
"I'll take a look when I get home," Alex promised.
"Sure you will," said Susan, and gave him a kiss as he headed out the door.
He would, naturally, be drunk later, or at least buzzed, and the truth was she didn't really need his help. She was, after all, the lawyer. Well, Susan thought with a smile, as the document emerged from their sleek miniature laser printer, former lawyer.
The lease was obviously cut and pasted from a sample document floating around on the Internet. Across the top margin it said: SAMPLE OF A NEW YORK STATE RENTAL AGREEMENT, MODIFY AS NEEDED. But Andrea had not, so far as Susan could tell, modified it in the slightest. Still, it took her more than an hour to read through everything, not counting ten minutes of comforting Emma, who woke crying from an upsetting dream: in it, she said, while Susan kissed the tears from her cheeks, "Big Grandpa was chasing me"-Alex's grandfather had died seven months ago-"and his face was all melty, like it was big chunks coming off of him." Susan had no idea what could have inspired such an unsettling vision of decomposing, sliding flesh. She got Emma a glass of water and sang "Little Eliza Jane," stroking her soft brown hair until she fell asleep.
Alex got home after midnight, mildly but pleasantly drunk, rambling giddily about the monster pot he'd won by making trip sevens on the river.
"I have no idea what you're talking about. But nice work," said Susan. "You ready to sign a lease?"
He grinned. "Totally." Alex fell into the seat next to her and grabbed the pen. His sleeves were rolled up unevenly, and he smelled like cigars. "Oh! Wait! Shit. There was this guy at Anton's, a lawyer, named Kodaly-Kodiak? Something. Starts with a K."
"Uh-huh?"
"He said the person has to, like, promise the place doesn't have bedbugs."
"Well, no. Not exactly." Susan turned the pages of the document and found the clause the mysterious Kodiak was referring to. "Here. 'The landlord or lessor warrants that the premises so leased or rented and all areas used in connection therewith in common with other tenants or residents are fit for human habitation.' Blah, blah, blah, et cetera. It's called a warrant of habitability, and ..." Susan stopped. "Um, excuse me?"
"What?" Alex asked with sing-song innocence. He had leaned over in his chair toward hers and was busily working his hands into her shirt, fumbling for her breasts. Susan leaned back into his arms.
"I thought you wanted to hear about the bedbugs."
"Not so much, as it turns out."
As always, Alex fell asleep almost instantly after sex, sprawled out naked on top of the sheets; Susan lay awake, reading and listening to him breathe softly. After knowing him eight years, and being married for five, she still could not say whether or not she found her husband handsome. Attractive, yes: Alex was tall and solidly constructed, with dark hair and coloring, and he radiated a kind of easy magnetism- especially when he was smiling, which was most of the time. But there was also a kind of roughness about him, a coarseness in his features when you caught them in the wrong light. And the largeness of his body and features, the same largeness that made Susan feel safe and protected when he laughed and threw his arms around her, was a little scary when he was being sullen and aggressive.
Susan pulled on her robe, poked her head into the curtained nook to check on Emma-sleeping soundly now, looking startlingly like her father in her open-mouthed dead-to-the-world repose-and padded back to the kitchen table and her MacBook. She e-mailed Andrea and said the lease would be on the way back tomorrow with the appropriate checks; she e-mailed their management company to let them know this would be their last month on their month-to-month lease; she went to the website of Moishe's, a moving company she had used in the past, filled out their detailed move-request form, and pressed "submit."
It was now 2:47 a.m. on August 16, 2010. They were traveling to visit Alex's parents on Labor Day weekend, so on the move-request form Susan had indicated they'd like to move to Brooklyn on September 12, a Sunday.