Monthly Story (December '24): Apartment Number Three

NOTE TO READER: This is a story I wrote the original draft of after reading a series of comic stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem. I was trying to capture his vibe, but the effort bombed and I put the story away for a couple of months. After I finally came back to it for a dozen or so new drafts in my own voice, I think I finally discovered what it wanted to be. With that in mind, I dedicate this one to all the people out there who discover that it really is okay to live a life that nobody else understand. Live, laugh, and love, folks.

APARTMENT NUMBER THREE

To start with, I have to tell you about how it stood with me. Sixty-four years of age. Almost ready to be put out to pasture, as they say. I think they still say that. You know, a gold watch. Retired. Replaced. Redundant. And bald. Crome-domed, thank you very much. Could lose a few pounds, too. Maybe more than a few.  

Anyway. Me.

Single. Never been married. When it comes up, I say, “I was too focused on my career, and, to tell you the truth,” I add, though maybe I’m stretching a smidge (my dignity, you know), “I didn’t exactly disgrace myself.”

So the truth is something else?

That’s for me to know.

I’ve always had trouble with everyday people. They can’t figure out how I fit. And me, understanding how they can be so… How to say? So obtuse. I’ll give you an example.

I’m out walking one night, which I do now and again. Exercise. Digestion. I don’t own a television or a car. It’s summer, had been hot all day but had cooled off, and I’m taking a stroll at eleven at night on the bridge, high up over the river. I’ve just gone a little past the guard house they have there. It’s not clear why they have a guard house, but they do. I see the guy behind the glass, doing…what?

Anyway, he’s there, and I’m walking along and I get an idea into my head. I take my shoes and socks off so I can feel the cool nighttime pavement on my bare feet. It’s the best sensation I’ve had all day. I leave my shoes and socks neatly lined up out of the way along the railing and walk on a little further. I’ll come back for them when I’m ready. Who’s going to bother a pair of shoes? Aside from the guard, there’s no one else around. Everything is still and quiet. We have a fingernail moon and the air suggests possible rain. Nice.

Then I hear a voice.

“Sir? Sir? Are these your shoes here?” It’s the guard.

Polite. I’ll give him that.

I make a show of looking down at my bare feet and then over at the shoes and socks. “By George,” I say, “I believe they are!”

I’d like him to see his question the way I do. As absurd. But he only frowns as if he’s disappointed. I’m being difficult. Tsk, tsk.

“Well, then,” he says, all full of himself, “I invite you to put them back on.”

Hmm, ‘invite you”? Really?

“Oh, thank you,” I say, “but I’m fine.” I wiggle my toes on the cool pavement, still hoping he sees the absurdity, but no. He’s serious. He doesn’t understand that words have meaning. An invitation is something you don’t have to accept.

“Sir,” he says, “please. I’ve asked you nicely.”

But he hasn’t asked me. He invited me, and I can see I’m not going to get a smile of simple, human bemusement out of him. In fact, he’s writing me a citation as we stand there.

“You can put your shoes and socks back on,” he says, “and I can rip this up and forget I ever wrote it, or you can go down to the city and pay the fine.” He adjusts his belt and stands taller. “Your choice.”

And he gives me this tapping-his-foot look. The choice that isn’t a choice.  

And what is power, even petty power, if it’s not exercised? Somebody famous said that. Or something like it.

As a matter of fact, I happen to know exactly where in the city government building one would go to pay such a fine. Two chairs down from my very own desk. You’d step right up to the desk of Margaret Hill, who has sat at that spot through children, divorce, alcohol rehab, remarriage, and another divorce for thirty years.

And I’ve sat two chairs down from her for about as long. In my “focused on my career” hours, that is. Excellent drafting skills and one semester at a community college while thinking about becoming an architect qualified me to accept my fate in a room full of other city workers—clerks for parking regulations, sanitation, public transportation passes, etc. My “career” was examining proposed residential remodeling plans.

I’d smile my neutral smile as they spread their plans out on my desk, and I’d adjust my glasses and point a finger here or there on their plans as I made thoughtful little noises meant to buy time as I figured out what the plan did and didn’t do right. Then I’d quietly consult the relevant city codes. I could stamp an “Approved” on the papers or send the petitioner away with instructions about how to bring the plan up to code. One more foot away from the curb on this one, a two-foot lower roofline on another. There were two of us doing this job, though I was senior, which maybe accounts for my sometimes letting slip that I was the supervisor. Not technically true, I’ll freely acknowledge nowadays.

So my role for the moment was to pretend that this probably bored, generally dispirited guard was offering me a merciful off ramp, being positively magnanimous.

I put my shoes and socks back on. No need to be the office laughing stock any more than I already was.

The rest of the office might have had small talk—coffee pot, copy machine conversations—but I was never much a part of that. They were an informal lot, coming into the office dressed as if they had walked out their back doors to let the dog go do its business. That’s not me. I dressed for the job. A nice suit and tie. A pocket square. A good crease in my pants and shined shoes. They didn’t think I saw their looks, but I did. I knew what they thought. Curtis is a dandy, maybe even gay.

One of them even shook his head at me once. “I just don’t get you, man,” he said. “Don’t you have a life?”

What was to understand about me? I guarantee there never was much to know.  

No doubt, I had my illusions. We do, don’t we? Some would say delusions. I arrived to work early and made a point of staying late to tie up loose ends, though I can’t think now what loose ends there might have been. Then I caught the bus home and nobody smiled. Nobody talked. Nobody nothing. I played the quiet business man in the expensive suit I knew other passengers noticed every day, and that gave me a quiet pleasure.

At home, the condo, I don’t know why, I never had a cat to feed, never had a plant to water. It never occurred to me. So what? In my spare time, I visited my mother and my brother on the other side of town. It was my ne’er-do-well brother who kind of took on what other people were thinking.

“What are you going to do with yourself when you retire?” he started. “When are you going to get it together?”

He’d cornered me in my mother’s basement, of all places. I’d gone down there to do laundry for her, which he had pledged to do. He was addicted to convenient forgetfulness, though. We’ll put that aside. He is what he is, my big brother, twelve years my senior, and don’t even think about my mother’s age. She can’t be going up and down those stairs.

Anyway, he followed me down the stairs. I turned my back to sort the colors from the whites and he pulled a couple of chairs up behind me. When I turned around, he plopped me down in one, sat himself in the other, and pulled it up so close we were knee-to-knee, nose-to-nose. “What the devil are you going to do with yourself after you retire?”

“What are you talking about?” I shot back, but I knew what he was talking about. The city was already making maybe-you-should-retire gestures and the question had flitted through my mind more than once.

I could always do without such thoughts.

“Don’t you at least have a girlfriend?” he asked.

Oh, for goodness sake, he knew the answer to that.

Of course, for him not having a “girlfriend” completely escaped his understanding. He always had one, even at his advanced age, twelve years my senior, as I think I mentioned. He could never hold a job, he couldn’t afford to buy a home, he always drove used cars, some of them real stinkers, but he always had himself a girlfriend, some woman who thought he was the smartest, funniest, handsomist creature God or Mother Nature ever managed to conjure out of infinite nonsense. 

“Don’t you at least have a girlfriend?” he asked me, to which I tried to stand up. He pushed me back into my seat, just like when we were boys. Pushing me down. Pushing me out of the way. Big brother/Little brother.

But we’re old guys now. I’m not going to wrestle with him, so I sat down.

“No and you know it’s no,” I said.

He shakes his head. “Get a freakin’ life,” he says, like some pimple-faced, smart-mouthed  teenager.

But it got me thinking.

Back home and on the job, I’m reading one of those free weekly newspapers on the bus one morning—the last of its kind, I might add. Like me, it was on the brink of extinction. But I saw an ad. “Delusion Removal Conversations.” It caught my eye. Was I living a delusion? In my own little world. You know, not living the kind of life that other people more or less just fall into and think is in the natural, healthy course of things. I felt somewhere deep inside that I should be more like that, that I was somehow wrong.

I really wondered.

Then, by chance I suppose, HR called me in to have a “conversation” about my retirement package. Hint, hint. I didn’t work late that day. What was the point? I microwaved a Stauffer’s from my collection in the freezer that evening and looked at that ad again. There’s no point in drawing out the story. I called the number and set up an appointment.

The next morning, I called in sick—never did that before—and went off to find this Herbert T. Y. Sun character I’d talked to on the phone.

He gave me an address near the back of the Greyhound station. A noisy place. Buses backing up with their beep beep beeping and their revving engines. A racket. I covered my ears walking past it. The address said second floor, over a sandwich shop. No elevator. The floors creaked and the one dim hallway light flickered as I tried to read the numbers on the doors, but I found Number Three and knocked.

My goodness. A short fellow as bald as myself in white cotton pajamas and bare feet answered. The light from tall windows behind him exploded in sharp rays to outline his body, catching tufts of hair sprouting along the edges of his ears in a golden glow. And forget the name. Sun. He didn’t look Chinese to me. His turned up nose was a big red spot in the middle of his face.

“And you must be Curtis,” he whispered.

I considered turning around and leaving. But he ushered me into his bare apartment. No rugs. No couch. I’d expected a couch. No tables. No chairs. No floor lamps. Bare blinds only. No curtains. Pillows in Indian prints on the floor, though. But nothing tacked into or taped onto the walls. Bare. I looked around myself to be sure. Nothing but those pillows.

His chin followed his gaze as he looked me over, even walked around me as if he were checking for rust on a used car he considered buying.

“I called about the ad,” I said just to say something.

He nodded, but kept up the examination. “Would you like to have a seat?” he finally asked.

I assumed he meant to lead me into an adjoining room where he had a proper office, maybe even a couch. “Why, yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I would.”

His chin pointed to the floor and with a wave of his hand he motioned me to sit on whichever pillow I liked. He himself took a seat on one even before I could manage to lower myself down. The last time I had sat in such a way must have been close to when I’d come out of diapers, but I bent my stiff, sixty-plus knees enough to get there and try getting comfortable.

“And what, may I ask,” he began, “is your delusion?”

The thought of telling him what I’d been thinking, what I’d been worrying about, stopped me because I knew it would sound stupid once I heard myself say it out loud. And before how things actually turned out, I would keep it to myself even now, but in that moment I wondered how I could finally understand the mysterious secret everybody else seemed to know so easily and what was wrong with me that I seemed so clueless.

But I didn’t want to say that.

Lost for anything else, I said, “I need a girlfriend.” Understand, I said it with a squint because he sat with his back to the bright sunlight coming through those tall windows straight into my eyes. There never was much to my story, but I told him this and that anyway. It didn’t take long.

“Is that all?” he laughed. “That’s easily fixed. I hardly think I should charge you money for such a problem.” He flicked his fingers dismissively. “Go dancing.”

And he stands up. His standing up says to me, “You, too. Stand up.”

But it’s not so easy for me to stand up. I find myself on all fours, like a dog or a little baby, and I’m not sure how exactly I’m going to get to my feet. My knees are not what they once were. I look up at him as if to say, “Lend me a hand, will ya?” but he only smiles at me and says, “That will be fifty dollars. I prefer cash.”

Somehow, I find myself standing and I’m thinking what for fifty dollars?

“Go dancing,” he tells me, “and you’ll find a girlfriend.”

So I count out fifty dollars and I’m heading for the door, but he stops me. He’s got his hand on the door knob.  “Not any old dancing,” he says. “Tango dancing. Come back and see me in two weeks. Oh, and you may need lessons.”

I’m rubbing my chin. “Are you sure?” I start. “This seems…”

He interrupts. “Works every time. Like a charm. You’ll thank me or my name isn’t Herbert T. Y. Sun.”

As I’m walking down those creaky stairs to the street, I’m thinking what sort of advice is this? Did we even have a “conversation”? Wasn’t that what the ad said?  What did I just pay fifty dollars for? But I saw through the window of the sandwich shop that they had a pile of those free weekly newspapers stacked by the door, and so I grabbed one to read on the bus going home. Turns out somebody had placed an ad for tango dancing lessons.

The next evening I’m standing in a circle in a third-floor warehouse space with eleven other people. The teacher says he’s an actor as well as a dancer. When we form lines facing him, I make sure to be in the back row.

“Now, do as I do,” he orders as he turns his back to us. “Weight on left leg, step back with right.”

For some reason I almost trip doing this.

It only gets worse when we take partners. The first woman is too tall for me. My eyes are level with her breasts, which are large and pointy. She looks anywhere but at me.

Our teacher goes on a little spiel about how we will all experience “tango moments,” times when we feel totally connected to our partners. He’s beside himself with the beauty, the magic, we will soon discover dancing tango. At this, my partner looks over at me like she’s smelled something bad. She’s definitely not going to be my girlfriend.

In two weeks I walk past the bus station and climb the creaky stairs, pad down the dim hallway to knock on Door Number Three. I have fifty dollars cash in my pocket. Two twenties and a ten.

“So! How’s my dancing friend doing?” he starts as soon as I’m in the room. “Having lots of fun, I’ll bet, meeting all sorts of interesting, available women, I’ll bet.”

“Not so well, I have to tell you,” I tell him. “As a matter of fact, not so well at all.”

I’ve managed to sit with my back to those windows so the light won’t be hitting my eyes. I don’t have to squint at him this time.

“You must not be doing it right,” he tells me. He’s shaking his head.

“Oh! You have no idea how badly I’m not doing it right,” I tell him. “I can’t even walk right. You have no idea!”

“Yes yes yesyesyesyes,” he’s thinking, telling me yes, of course he knows, ofcourse ofcourse he knows.

“Let me see now,” he wondered, standing up. “Let me see…let me see! Show me one of your new tango moves! I’ll bet you have more than you think! Go ahead and stand up. Show me.”

I managed to get to my feet—but I didn’t know what to show him. Most of it was walking. “Most of it is just walking,” I told him.

“Walking! Isn’t that something! Show me. Show me.”

So I started walking around the room, and he walked with me in his tiny bare feet. “Is this the way?” he’d ask every few steps. “Is this the way they walk?”

Then, just as fast as we’d stood up and started walking, he sits down and motions me to do the same—back in my old position with the light in my eyes. I kept standing. He smiled up at me and picked absentmindedly at something between his toes. For the first time I noticed that he reminded me of a little pink animal. Something in a cage with an exercise wheel and cut up newspapers for bedding.

It was too much. “Now, listen,” I told him. I’ve got my hand over my eyes so I don’t have to squint. “None of this is working. It’s nonsense.” I’m getting pretty well worked up, ready to walk out. Keep my two twenties and the ten. In the wake of my outburst, I hear the beep beep beeping of a backing up bus.

Then he pulls himself up straight and tells me, “I can see you aren’t doing it right, but I can fix that.” He scratches his head, digs a finger into his ear, turns it this way and that, pulls it out for examination, then flicks the wax away.

“You advertised ‘conversations,’” I say. I’m feeling bold, remembering the fifty bucks I’ve already wasted. “So when does that start? I’m sure the secret to a happy life is not hidden in dancing tango!”

He looks at me and tilts his head. “Who says so? It might be.”

“Right! Or maybe it’s in hiking the Appalachians Trail!”

“That’s possible, too,” he says, and then smiles. “Or in making model airplanes!” He loses himself in this idea for an instant. “What, may I ask,” he says as if I should see how foolish I’m being, “do you want? What is your fifty dollars shopping for? Don’t tell me you want to be president of the United States!”

Well, of course not.

But it’s a decent question.

“And here’s an even better question. What exactly is wrong with you? Come back when you can answer that question, and we’ll have something to work with.”

And I’m out the door, standing in that dim hallway minus another fifty dollars—and insulted by the very question I’d already been asking myself. What was so wrong with me?  He’d put my fears into his mouth.

I could stamp my foot even now just thinking about it.

What’s the expression? “It stuck in my craw”?

For days, I boiled, talking to myself, and getting tangled in my bedcovers, imagining “I shoulda this” and “I shoulda that,” the way we do.

But no matter.

Nobody is more passionate to receive justice than someone who knows he's allowed himself to be made a fool of. I was ready to make that little guinea pig cough up my hundred dollars.

Hurrying up the stairs to his apartment practically gave me a heart attack, so the drama I had planned in all my boiling had to be postponed while I hung onto the banister catching my breath. The dim light bulb had gone out, but I knew which door it was and finally had enough oxygen in my lungs to find my way in the dark.

I pounded on Number Three for effect—knocking is for suckers—but there was no answer. I repeated the pounding, only harder this time, then stood there in the dark listening. A television game show played in an apartment down the hallway.

Not a ticking clock or a dripping faucet sound came from inside Number Three.

That’s when a door opened at the top of the stairs and a woman with short gunmetal grey hair comes out of her apartment. She’s straight as a pencil and holds a book in one hand and her door open with the other. Not young. About as ready for tango as I am.

“You’re the third one today,” she says. “He took his belongings and left yesterday.”

Belongings? I was already walking toward her, headed for the stairs. “What belongings?” I say.  “I never saw any belongings.”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “It took two strapping young men to load the truck. Up and down the stairs half the day.  I never saw so much stuff.”

“The man in Number Three?” I say.

“Why, yes, yes. Herbert.” She held her door open wider. “Come on in. I’ll make you a cup of tea and tell you all about it.” She’s shaking her head, amused. “I’ve certainly seen them come and go,” she says.

I followed her into a neat living room with bookcases along the inside walls, where she motioned me to have a seat on an armchair upholstered in deep cushions. I sank into it as she prepared the tea. “Everybody gave him money,” she called from her tiny kitchen. “A strange one, he was, though I don’t know why I should speak of him in the past tense. He’s still somewhere now, isn’t he? Pretending.”

Two tabby cats sat staring at me from the couch. They nodded their heads as if listening. Another, a grey tiger, perched on the windowsill, darting his head this way and that at birds in a tree outside.

“Do you have any idea where he went?” I wondered as she carried the tea tray out of the kitchen.

“Why should you care?” she laughed. “Are you going to go looking for him? That would do you a lot of good.”

No. I supposed she was right.

She sat down, and we drank tea and talked until the room grew dark and she turned a lamp on. One of the tabbies curled up in my lap. Lillian—that was her name—sat knitting a hat for her grandniece. She told me a funny story about a clerk carding her when she bought a bottle of wine. “Can you imagine,” she laughed. “At my age! Goodness. As if he had no brains in his head. No independent judgement.”

I told about the guard on the bridge. “Yes,” she said. “Words do have meaning.”

I told her about the tango lessons. “Well, if it’s your thing, you know,” she said, “but if it isn’t, why bother?”

Indeed.

So a day or two later I found myself climbing the creaky stairs and knocking on her door. I wore my best suit and a silk tie with matching pocket square and brought her a coffee cake from the bakery in my neighborhood. It’s true that I could lose a few pounds, but I don’t guess I ever will now. I stayed so long I almost missed the last bus of the night.

I won’t say we moved in together, but it wasn’t long before I rented Number Three. Lillian and I are back and forth day and night. She has her cats and I have a forest of house plants just loving the light flooding in from those tall windows, and that grey tiger cat? He keeps finding his way into my apartment. Not that it matters, but he gets me.

My brother visited recently and I had to shoo him off Lillian.

“Behave yourself,” I told him. “I saw her first.”