The rental agreement only vaguely described the rules of the sublet, but I signed it because I was splitting up with my husband and I could move in that night. It didn’t say when I had to leave, if ever. I thought this apartment would be a safe haven for my sudden, blank inability to think, or feel, or plan.
The studio was small with barren white walls, except for a tiny figurine of a fawn dangling from a nail, like me, over empty space.
“It’s nice,” I lied. “And that was a six-flight walkup.”
“Sorry,” said the tenant, his wide, white grin full. “But think of it like this. Everyone around you is separated or divorced. A lot of this building is new singles.”
Did he mean that as a consolation? My very tan lessee told me he was moving to Fire Island while back in the city his brutal divorce attorney would burn his wife down. And as he told me about the other tenants, the words “heartbreak hotel” gathered around the edges of my thoughts. Before he left, my new landlord handed me his own divorce lawyer’s card. I was grateful, because who did I know, and I needed to know someone.
With that, I resided in what was essentially a foreign neighborhood. The world through the window was an imposing stranger. That night, the streetlights put out yellow, alien beams that swayed through the window and rippled onto the wall over my landlord’s bed—my bed. There were odd shadows, and the rhythms of the street sounds at night were different. I was heartsick, but the possibilities felt open. Sometimes, they can just abound.
Day after day, I went to work and returned to the stained, linoleum stairwells. I ordered artichoke pizza every night and ate in front of the window like it was the TV and as if being monogamous to a food could get me through my heartache.
One night, I saw through the window a woman in a building across the street looking out her own window, toward an apartment adjacent to mine. In the windows around hers, curtains and blinds opened, and people behind them stared, too. I placed my cheek against the window and looked across the pane. Was there someone doing something dirty next door, in an apartment window I couldn’t see? This is how distant you can become. Everyone can see things that you can’t.
Such as the classic condition of always being the first to hear you should marry him, and the last to hear he was bad for you.
I was trapped in a routine. I flinched at the slightest threat of an additional withdrawal on my heart. I lived in a deep valley and my windows on the world showed only the isolation I had fallen into. I was closed off and mute. The chairs I sat in were so swathed in my own claustrophobic body heat that I couldn’t identify what my body felt like anymore. It needed to touch something new. Something new, my body cried, give me something new and then we’ll feel something.
On the Saturday after I moved out, my husband went to his office so I could be alone in our apartment as I picked up some of my things. It would be his last helpful act. But I knew in my heart that he only wanted my stuff out of there. So, I hired a man with a van.
“Everyone needs a man with a van,” I had told my girlfriend over lunch earlier. I wasn’t sad. I was trying out my breezy, new divorcee style.
“Tinder!” she shouted abruptly.
In the moment, I took this for a new way to call for the check. I hadn’t been with a man other than my husband in six years.
After the man with the van laid down the last of my boxes in the sublet, I took him in. Skinny, late twenties maybe, head shaved to a soft fuzz. There was a slightly pleading look about him, as if he were someone who had never been listened to, so I did, a little. Then we stopped talking. When he left later, I thought, now I don’t need a man with a van.
A few months before we separated, my husband and I rented a silver car and drove to Montauk, and he was funny and I was funny and secretly, I recorded us talking with my phone. I named the clip strange and forgot about it, partially, in the way you force yourself to.
I turned on the light in the sublet. The city disappeared from the window and my translucent face was there, looking back at me. I swallowed all my worry about my neighbors seeing more than me, because everyone was seeing more than me. If you’re as alone as I had become, then everyone else, even alone as they might be too, can still see better than you, with your blocked view of people next door, and this will warp everything for a time. I didn’t know where to look, so I looked at my phone, with the hours of our drive to listen to and my memory of gazing out the car window to accompany it. But I’d just climbed six flights and I was tired. I wanted to sit and stare. I wanted to be my own window for a change. Because through it, the possibilities can sometimes just abound.