Free Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum

of twelve flights of stairs. My parents droveup and watched me collect my diploma. They told me they were proud. This made me incredibly guilty and, by extension, incredibly sad.
    But guess what was coming my way? A slightly shabby prewar apartment on 100th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. I had a friend named Lara, whom I’d met at the Lincoln Center office, and together we’d decided to look for a place somewhere on the West Side, between Ninety-sixth Street and the Columbia University campus. Though she’d been living downtown, she was set to enroll in film school at Columbia, and though I’d be working in midtown—I’d reluctantly accepted a job as an editorial assistant at a beauty magazine—I still wanted to live among the Gothic spires and bearded socialists of the upper stretches of West End Avenue. So during the first month or so of that job, while I commuted in from Ridgewood on the dreaded Short Line bus, Lara scoured the apartment listings until she happened upon the place on West 100th Street. And when we looked at it and were told we didn’t have enough income to qualify, Lara visited the management office, security deposit and first month’s rent in hand, every day for three weeks until the landlord finally broke down and rented it to us. Preposterously, we both had to get our parents to sign guarantors’ letters stating (falsely) that their yearly incomes were a hundred times the monthly rent. I have known very few young people who’ve managed to get leases in New York City without producing this kind of document, which all landlords know is bogus but seems to comfort them nonetheless. The rent (this figure is permanently etched in my mind) was $1,776.76. Since we still couldn’t afford the place without a third roommate, I called aVassar friend, Ben, and offered him in on the deal. He immediately agreed.
    As far as I was concerned, this apartment was paradise. Not to mention huge. A long hallway ran the length of the place, off of which lay a decent-sized living room, a dining room, and a large bedroom. At the end of the hall was a tiny bedroom, and adjacent to that was the bathroom and kitchen, both of which I also considered ample and therefore evidence of my ascending station in life. My room was the dining room, which had been converted into a separate bedroom. Lara, being enviably assertive (she is now a movie director), had the large bedroom, and Ben, being gracious and patient to a fault (he was then a third-grade teacher), took the small room. The whole apartment was probably about eleven hundred square feet. My share was $550.
    Oh, and the bathroom, whose sole window afforded privacy by way of a faded and paint-splattered stained-glass panel in a Victorian fleur-de-lis pattern, had the original porcelain hexagonal tiles. Clearly I was where I was meant to be.
    With the exception of my job, which reverberated with so much displaced female anger that I often broke out in hives, I adored my life here. I adored Ben and Lara and I adored the apartment and I adored just about everything we did in it: the meals we ate, the episodes of
Northern Exposure
that Ben and I watched, the parties we threw in which strangers crowded in the kitchen and lit their cigarettes off the stove. I had a boyfriend—a twenty-nine-year-old journalist who seemed extremely grown up—and even though he had his own apartment downtown with a doorman and air-conditioning, I often wanted nothing more than to be sprawled out on the couch in the apartment on 100th Street with my age-appropriate peersdoing age-appropriate things like eating lentils from the 99-cent store.
    The building, which wasn’t in any way fancy but had a handsome marble lobby and ornate ironwork on the front door, was, as far as I was concerned, one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. It smelled like a combination of that musty, uriney smell that imbues all New York City buildings and the chicken and plantains that were