Free The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney Page B

heavy red-and-black-plaid mackinaw jackets hung out and tossed down their morning beer. Robbie would order a coffee and I would be perched on a tall stool, next to him, my rubber boots just skimming the shining brass floor rod. Robbie and the truck would scoot me home in time to take my son to school, then I’d circle back to the fish market for the day’s work.
    It was easy to slip into class at the Art Students League in my Rosedale outfit, as it looked rather outré and artistic, and the other students could never smell a thing—or at least they never said anything to me about it.
    I had, as planned, applied to graduate school for furtherstudy in painting. Yale was my first choice, but Hunter was in my neighborhood and I could attend afternoon seminars with Robbie’s blessing and still have free nights to be with my family.
    When a cosmetics company I knew from my days at Glamour called and asked me to work on a project as a consultant, I knew I had to quit Rosedale—I couldn’t walk into the tony offices in the General Motors building where they were headquartered in my fishy clothes. I reluctantly left Rosedale after almost a full year. But I was thrilled about the money I was being paid for the cosmetics project and by the prospect of an untethered life as a freelance writer and fledgling artist.
    Without a day job, I wanted to move downtown to a loft where I could have a studio to paint in. Pragmatically I knew it would never work because my son was in school on West Seventy-seventh Street, and living downtown would be an enormous hassle for all of us. I came up with the idea of renting a cheap loft for weekends instead of renting a house in the country and convinced my husband it would be fun.
    I had met an artist at a cocktail party who lived in an area of town I didn’t know anything about. He told me about his loft south of Houston Street in lower Manhattan. I didn’t know exactly what a loft consisted of but I was curious, so I pulled on my well-washed Rosedale OshKosh coveralls and biked downtown one afternoon for a cup of tea.
    He had an enormous white-painted space in a redbrick five-story walk-up with high ceilings and several skylights. In other words, a loft. The glossy floors were painted a neutral gray, and a black wood-burning cast-iron stove, the only source of heat, commanded the living space. Water for shaving and bathing was warmed up in a huge pot on a two-burner stove. The area where he worked was splattered with a brightly colored bouquet of oil paints and the walls were covered with tacked-up preliminary charcoal sketches. Here was the genuine la vie Bohème . It was three miles and universes away from my Upper East Side apartment, and I was instantly seduced.
    I used any spare time I could find to hunt for a space, preferably in a cast-iron building on one of the neighborhood’s cobblestone streets. I pestered supers and tracked down landlords to see what was available. I finally found a great open loft with wooden ceilings and tall windows on LaGuardia Place, which later became part of now-famous SoHo. My husband pitched in to whitewash the floor and all the walls, and we moved some mattresses, tables, and bikes in.
    Our little family sometimes stayed at the loft on weekends and I painted as much as I could. I even threw a birthday party for my son there and all the uptown kids were wildly excited that they could roller-skate indoors. After a year the lease was up and my husband wanted to try something else. He had found some property in Vermont and designed a lovely shingled Cape Cod house for us to live in. We began heading north on weekends.
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    My husband and I very slowly drifted apart. I had loved my time downtown and wanted more of it. He preferred the NewEngland house. I preferred the city. I hated the five hours spent driving to Vermont and the five-hour return on Sunday nights. For me, it was a huge waste of valuable time that I could use to do