The Apartment A Novel(3)

I put on my coat. She puts on a grey coat and a grey hat. She grabs her bag and has the folded newspaper under her arm. It was supposed to be clear today, she says. I open the door for her, and before she exits she walks to the painting, lifts it, turns it upside down – which is to say right side up, I realize – and replaces it on the chest. Oh, I say. It’s hard to tell, she says. We walk into the corridor and see a Japanese man – one of my neighbours – walking to the shower. He is in a white dressing gown and big blue plastic shower slippers, and holds his clothes in a folded stack with both hands, and on top of the stack is a thin brown belt as well as some toiletries. Saskia goes by him without lifting her head, and he does not look at her. I find that people here are always reassuring each other that they exist and life exists and the city itself exists by refusing to communicate. I have lived beside the Japanese man for a few weeks, and we have started to give each other restrained greetings.

Saskia and I get into the elevator. It’s just about big enough for the two of us. It smells like potpourri, and after you leave you smell like potpourri for a while, and if you live here long enough, and take the elevator often enough, you begin to smell potpourri in your dreams. I go in first, because Saskia has opened the door for me. We are facing each other, and the metal door with a little window in it swings shut. She presses the button and we begin to descend. This is an old elevator, one that doesn’t have an inner door, so you can see the rough cement walls inside the building between floors as you descend. Saskia finally turns so that we are not face-to-face so close together. I am a whole foot taller than her, maybe more. On the night that we walked around the city in the cold, she linked her arm in mine and pressed very close – it was bitterly cold – and I had to take small steps to match her stride. The elevator is creaking. It always creaks, but for some reason it is creaking louder than usual. I ought to say something, but before I can, she says, There are three places in good locations. We’ll call them first. There are a dozen others farther out, but you want to start in the centre. Thanks for helping out, I say; I’m sure I’d pick the first one I came across, then I’d see something later and regret it. She smiles. We stop with a crunch. The elevator bounces, and rises slowly up. The little green light illuminates, which means we’re free to go, and Saskia opens the door.

The reception area is empty. It’s just a booth with a buzzer. When you buzz it, you often have to wait five minutes before Mr Pyz or Mrs Pyz comes out smiling. Mr Pyz is a bald man with a large belly and Mrs Pyz is a tall woman with a large, elegant nose. Opposite the reception booth is the door to the restaurant and café, but the main entrance to that is on the street. The walls have wooden skirting and old wallpaper. The burgundy carpet is covered in stains, not because the place is dirty, but because the carpet is – or seems to be – so old. There’s never a crowd of Americans or Canadians or Australians or Irish twenty-somethings wearing backpacks and looking at maps in the reception hall or vomiting in the elevator. And nobody complains about slow service or about noise. This is a hotel for people on their own. In the evenings, the restaurant is busy with locals who come here for traditional food. Mrs Pyz wears a traditional outfit that pushes her breasts out. It gets really loud from about eight to eleven, and then all at once it goes quiet, except on Friday nights, when a blues band comes in. I went to see the band once, and it was hard to stay. I left after three or four songs. It’s hard to watch European men sing the blues. They take it seriously, but the more seriously they take it, the more absurd they become. These guys knew a lot about the blues, they mentioned some good people, but their knowledge was dry. It wasn’t ever going to be anything else. In their sound, there was an emptiness where inheritance ought to be. They manufactured black accents and spoke in broken English, and I felt a little embarrassed for them, so I left. I don’t begrudge them. It was how they chilled out, and how they paid tribute to music they liked. The place was packed. All the tables were full, and some people stood. Mr Pyz asked me what I thought about it the next morning. There was a time in my life when I would have wanted to say it was terrible, but that time has passed. I told him it was a lot of fun. Mr Pyz is a nice man, and he’s proud of his hotel. And Mrs Pyz seems proud of Mr Pyz.

Saskia is ahead of me, and gets to the door first. She turns around and makes a face. The face says, This is going to be painful. She pulls her shoulders together. Saskia can move quickly from being very cool to being very funny. It makes me think she’s not trying to be one or the other. I wish we could preserve our relationship as it is now for a long time. I wish we could remain strangers. She opens the door. The street is white and the sky is a dark grey. We are met by an iciness that is even more intense than I expect, even though it is probably no different from yesterday’s. Saskia digs in her bag for gloves, and I put a winter hat on and pull it down over my ears, as far down as I can get it. I zip my coat and turn the collar up, and stick my hands in my pockets. The underground station, where I buy my newspapers and cigarettes, is to the left. The bus is closer – it’s to the right – but stops often on the way into the centre. Which way, I say, the underground or the bus? It doesn’t matter, she says. Cars go by with lights on, and the lights make the snow shine, and the way the light crawls up the street makes the snow appear to rise rather than fall. Saskia says, Maybe the bus is better. Her teeth are chattering. The shelter is closer, she says. We hurry down the sidewalk, through two trenches of stomped-down slush, created by foot traffic, in a thick layer of snow. Because it’s a bit slippery and I’m trying to keep up with Saskia, I have to take my hands out of my pockets. My fingers start to go numb. My eyes have started to water and the water has started to freeze. I think in my entire life I’ve experienced this kind of cold once before, in Chicago, when I was visiting an old friend. I hated the cold there but I don’t mind it here. It feels like I am walking through my own imagination now, or a dream.