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

where there were considerably more women than men. Never mind that by then I, too, was in a graduate program at Columbia and should have known that if you wanted a boyfriend, the chances of finding one in a humanities department were only slightly better than the chances of finding one in a handbag store. At that point in my life, hard evidence was less compelling than sweet, soft fantasy. I took Brad’s deposit check and handed him a set of keys.
    Brad’s first offense was to bring in a large piece of baby blue carpeting and unroll it in his room so that it covered every inch of floor. He then moved in a shiny brown Formica desk of the sort you see in bank branches. Then an enormous bright orange recliner.
    I need to say a few things about the decor and overall architectural style of this apartment. By no means was it luxuriously or even interestingly furnished. Just about everything was a hand-me-down from someone’s parents’ house or some kind of “gem” (when you’re in your early twenties “gem” is a broad category) dragged in from off the street. We had a large, comfortablesofa whose appearance I no longer recall but that I have no doubt was reasonably attractive or at least minimalist and nonoffensive. The walls were lined with bookshelves, over which Calder prints and collector’s edition posters from events sponsored by the Lincoln Center office hung in stark black frames. In the kitchen we had a sea green 1950s-era breakfast table and two matching adorable if somewhat rickety chairs (there had been three until Ben sat down in one and it splintered into pieces right out from under him). Our bedrooms were generally spare and book filled. Worn, faded Oriental rugs seemed to slide in and out as roommates moved in and departed. Houseplants would thrive for a few weeks, then singe to their deaths in the sunlight from the south-facing windows, the desiccated leaves falling behind the couch never to be swept up. We occasionally vacuumed and dusted, but we never waxed the floors. Dried flowers in random-sized clay pots popped up in unlikely corners. When we played music, it was often jazz or the work of esoteric South American folk musicians. When people came over for the first time, they said,
“Amazing
place.” You get the picture.
    Brad, for his part, did not get the picture. In the first weeks, he holed up in his carpeted room, listening to U2 and reading his Melville and his Hawthorne and occasionally wondering aloud to Stephanie and me why he wasn’t quite “clicking” with anyone in the English Department. In the weeks after that, he became so aggrieved at the conditions of the cupboards in which he’d been forced to store his mother’s expensive cook-ware that he embarked on a cleaning frenzy whose results defied everything he thought he knew about the physical laws of hygiene.
    Unlike the disinfected Westchester County house in which Brad had grown up, the apartment on 100th Street was one ofthose unrenovated prewar New York City dwellings for which total cleanliness was simply impossible. No matter how hard you scrubbed and how many cleaning products you used, there would always be a layer of grime on the counters, on the windowsills, and in crevices of the woodwork. No matter how many roach traps you set down, there would always be that momentary flurry of activity when you turned the lights on in the middle of the night. No matter how pristine the contact paper on the bottoms of the drawers or the shelves of the cabinets, there was never any guarantee that at some moment in the recent or distant past, a mouse hadn’t padded across someone’s mom’s Le Creuset frying pan like a mischievous cartoon character. For Brad, there must have been something almost primitive about the place. Appalled by our sanitation standards, confused by our decor tastes, and, as time went on, so tongue-tied around us that he resorted to making embarrassing puns or recounting his college days in excruciating—and