Free I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron Page B

parents, even if it’s only a dimple. But I don’t mean to digress. The point I want to make is that love may or may not be homesickness, but homesickness is most definitely love. My apartment in the Apthorp was really the only space my children and I had ever lived in together. Since the day we moved in we’d never even locked the door. It was the place where Max got his head stuck in a cake pan and Jacob learned to tie his shoelaces. Nick and I were married there, in front of the nonworking living room fireplace. It was a symbol of family. It was an emblem of the moment in my life when my luck changed. It was part of my identity, or at least part of my wishful thinking about my identity. Because it was on the unfashionable West Side, just living there made me feel virtuous and brainy. Because it was a rental, it made me feel unpretentious. Because it was shabby, it made me feel chic. In short, it was home in a profound, probably narcissistic, and I suspect all-too-typical way, and it seemed to me no place on earth would ever feel the same.
             
    The whammies began to mount up. A mysterious dead body was found on the roof of the building. One of the apartments caught fire. An apartment on the eleventh floor was robbed and the housekeeper in it was assaulted.
    And then the truly shocking things began to happen. The landlords cleaned the building! The landlords, who had basically done nothing to the building since we’d moved in, sandblasted the soot from the exterior, replaced pipes, redid the elevators, and painted the elevator and lobby ceilings gold. They dressed the building employees in braided uniforms with epaulets; the staff began to look like a Hispanic version of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The senior landlord, a man in his nineties named Nason Gordon, removed the mailbox from the building entrance and replaced it with a large marble statue of a naked woman, which the tenants instantly christened Our Lady of the Apthorp. He dotted the courtyard with horrible white stucco urns and statues of lions. The tenants experienced all of this—every last bit—as acts of hostility. The improvements were clearly being made for one reason and one reason alone—to raise our rents. Which was true; every time the landlords spent money on the building, they trotted off to the Rent Stabilization Board and asked for rent increases based on their expenditures. As a result, more and more tenants lurched toward luxury decontrol and a state of absolute panic. The fear was exacerbated by the fact that the new law made it possible for landlords to be utterly capricious about the rent rises. After all, what was fair market value for an eight-room apartment in a city where there were almost no eight-room apartments for rent?
    The 1990s were cresting, and there was a huge amount of money out there in the streets of New York. Empty apartments in the Apthorp were renovated, Miss Ross picked out garish chandeliers for them, and rich tenants moved in. One of the new tenants was actually paying twenty-four thousand dollars a month in rent. Twenty-four thousand dollars a month—and you still couldn’t get the doorman to open the gate or the Chinese food delivered to you. Rich men getting divorces moved in. Movie stars came and went.
    The courtyard, once an idyllic spot full of happy laughing children, was suddenly crowded with idling limousines waiting for the new tenants to be spirited away to their fabulous midtown careers. Angry tenants waved petitions and legal papers and spread rumors of further impending rent rises.
    My lease expired again, and Miss Ross called to tell me that my rent was being raised. The landlords were willing to give me a three-year lease—ten thousand dollars a month the first year, eleven thousand the second, twelve thousand the third. My rent had effectively been raised 400 percent in three years.
    And just like that, I fell out of love. Twelve thousand dollars a month is a lot of