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

frequently cooking in the ground-floor apartment of the Puerto Rican superintendent, Carlos, and his enormous extended family. One member of this family, a woman of indeterminate age named Carmen, had a habit of using the super’s keys to enter apartments when tenants weren’t home. She wouldn’t steal anything but, rather, identify certain items that appeared to be broken or not in use and later ask if she could have them. I remember her approaching me while I was retrieving the mail and informing me that my Walkman, which I kept in a desk drawer, didn’t rewind properly but that she’d take it off my hands for five bucks.
    The neighborhood was hardly unsafe. But back in 1992, if you worked at a magazine for which the question of how best to apply lip liner required regular summit meetings, it was considered a bit unusual to live north of Ninety-sixth Street. Many of my co-workers were comely trust funders with co-op studios on lower Fifth Avenue and time-shares in the Hamptons, and I remember taking a smug delight in their bewildered, slightly appalled reactions to my address. “One Hundredth Street?” they’d ask. “Isn’t that Harlem?”
    Eventually, Ben and Lara moved out and got their own places. I stayed for five years (mind-blowing considering my college record) and rotated through five more roommates, a few of whom became friends for life and a few of whom I canbarely remember. One roommate incident that I do remember but wish I could erase from my mind involved a certain Columbia grad student I’ll call Brad.
    I cannot overemphasize the degree to which this apartment was a highly desirable “share” situation. Given that the building was rent stabilized, the unit was at least 20 percent cheaper than most Manhattan apartments—and significantly larger and nicer to boot. Whenever a roommate moved out, the only action necessary to replace him or her was to post a Room Available sign on a handful of telephone poles on Broadway. Within an hour, at least a dozen people would have called and begged to come over “right away” before someone else snapped it up.
    Partly because we were busy and partly because having a coveted apartment tends to strip its occupants of all traces of empathy, it became a tradition that roommate candidates would be interviewed on a single day, one after the other. We’d show them the place, make them explain themselves, and then tell them we’d call them if we were interested. Brad was among a group of candidates being considered to replace Pat, a particularly beloved roommate who’d been attempting to write her doctoral dissertation in the tiny room once occupied by Ben. The remaining roommate was Stephanie, a struggling actress I also adored and with whom I’d be deciding who should be crowned Our Next Roommate. On the day we interviewed Brad, we’d also interviewed several other nice people. One was a woman who was a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia but spent most of her time in Russia. Pat, who’d overheard some of the interviews as she was packing up her room (and who was also more than a decade older and much, much wiser), suggested to us that the Russian scholar was the way to go, since it would be like hardly having a third roommate at all.Brad, she’d pointed out to us, seemed immature and puppy dog–like and, did we happen to notice, mentioned his mother no fewer than twelve times.
    Being twenty-five and all, we chose Brad anyway. The reason we did this is that we wanted boyfriends (I was long done with the twenty-nine-year-old journalist; Stephanie was doing too much musical theater for her own good). Not that we wanted
him
as a boyfriend. But Brad had the distinct advantage of being a boy. And since he’d be attending graduate school at Columbia in the fall, it was likely he’d be bringing friends to the apartment. Possibly those friends would be cute and smart and the kinds of people we might date. Never mind Pat’s point that Brad was in the English department,