Ninety Days Read Online Free PDF Page A

has left the studio. There is no one on the sidewalks, no cars on the streets. The maze of the West Village is empty. Thunderclaps and wild sheets of rain slap against the asphalt. Had I ever heard thunder in New York? Was it like everything else that I took for granted—these streets, the cost of things, love—and can only now recognize?
    Up ahead an awning sticks out over a dry patch of sidewalk and I quickly walk toward it and duck under. It’s a small real estate agency and in the window there are photographs of apartments. I remember when Noah and I would stand in front of windows like this one and gawk at the high-ceilinged, new-kitchened beauties. Looking at these shiny, meticulous spaces now only reminds me that I don’t have my own and the one I’ll end up in—should I end up in one at all—will not be like these.
    The wind starts blowing the rain horizontally and the awning no longer provides protection. A sudden squall of rain explodes against the window, the awning, the drenched length of me, and in a panic I jump inside the real estate agency. Dripping wet, I close the door, and as I do four people sitting at desks look up and say hello in unison. I tell them I’m looking for an apartment to rent, which is true, though I have no plan to go through an agency and pay the outrageous broker’s fee that is usually at least two months’ rent. Still, the little place is warm and dry and I have time to kill. I tell them that I’m taking a sabbatical from work and looking for a cheaper place to rent. Computers flutter to life, images of apartments with rental statistics shine from screens, and one of the agents, a middle-aged bald man, says he knows of a great studio with a terrace that’s about to come on the market. Turns out it’s just a few blocks from here and he could get me in tomorrow at noon before anyone else sees it. Sure, I say, with no intention at all of showing up. We exchange numbers, he gives me the address where I am to meet him the next day, and after a round of good-byes I’m back on the street.
    I keep the little slip of paper in my pocket through the meeting that night and miraculously it finds its way into my pants the next day. I pull it from my front pocket around 11:30 that morning and think of the bald guy showing up at the building and me nowhere to be found. It seems like something I might have done before and felt guilty about. Something I would have cringed over later as I downed vodka after vodka until I forgot it altogether. So I go meet the guy in front of the building at 15th Street and Seventh Avenue. When I get there I realize this is the block where I lived when I first met Noah. The block where the apartment I owned when I was twenty-five is and where my girlfriend Nell and I lived for almost three years. I always felt more comfortable on this street than I did at One Fifth, and as I look down the block I see that it hasn’t changed much. It’s still a mix of rent- ​controlled mid-century apartment buildings, older tenements, hair salons, and renovated brownstones. I can’t remember the last time I was here. I sold the apartment—the second floor of a carriage house at the back of a courtyard—years ago so I’d have money once we started the literary agency, but after that I don’t think I ever came back.
    I meet the bald guy in the small lobby and we go up to the seventeenth floor. As he unlocks the door to the apartment, I have a strong feeling of déjà vu, not unlike the feeling I had that first day at the Library meeting. We walk into the short hallway and before we’ve reached the one and only room, before I’ve seen the small terrace that looks out over the city, to the Empire State Building and beyond, before I see the little kitchen with space enough for a desk, and the simple black-and-white-tiled bathroom, and before I worry where I’ll find the money for the first and last months’ rent, the deposit, and the broker’s fee, before any of this,