Danielle Steel: The Apartment

The following week she met a girl at a party, who was a creative writing major at NYU. At twenty, she was a year older than Claire, and had grown up in L.A. Abby Williams was as small as Claire was tall. She had dark, curly hair and almost black eyes, in contrast to Claire’s long straight blond hair and blue eyes. She seemed like a nice person and was passionate about her writing. She said she wrote short stories and wanted to write a novel when she graduated, and she mentioned casually that her parents worked in TV. Claire later learned that Abby’s father was the well-known head of a major network, and her mother had had a string of hit TV shows as a writer/producer. Both Abby and Claire were only children, and were dedicated to their studies and ambitions, determined to justify their parents’ faith in them. They went to see the apartment together, and Abby fell in love with it too. They had no idea how they would furnish it other than at garage sales over time, but they figured out that it was within their budgets, and two months later, with their parents’ cautious blessing and signatures on the lease, they moved in, and had been there ever since, for the past nine years.

The two women had shared the apartment for four years, and after they graduated, in an effort to rely less on their parents, be more independent, and cut costs, they decided to take in two more roommates, to reduce their expenses even further.

Claire had met Morgan Shelby at a party she went to on the Upper East Side, given by a group of young stockbrokers someone had introduced her to. The party was boring, the men full of themselves, and she and Morgan had started to talk. Morgan was working on Wall Street, and had a roommate she hated in an apartment she couldn’t afford and said she was looking for an apartment farther downtown that would be closer to where she worked. They exchanged phone numbers, and two days later, after talking to Abby, Claire called her and invited her to come and take a look at the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Claire’s only hesitation was that she wondered if Morgan might be too old. She was twenty-eight at the time, five years older than Claire, and had a serious job in finance. Morgan was pretty with well-cut dark hair and long legs. Claire had been in her first job at the shoe company that later folded and was living on a tight budget, and Abby was waiting on tables at a restaurant and trying to write a novel, and they both wondered if Morgan was too “grown up,” but she loved the loft the minute she saw it, and almost begged them to let her move in. The location was much more convenient for her job on Wall Street. They had dinner with her twice and liked her. She was intelligent and employed, she had a great sense of humor, her credit references were solid, and six weeks later she moved in. The rest was history, she had been there for five years, and now they were best friends.

Abby met Sasha Hartman through a friend of a friend from NYU, two months after Morgan moved in, and they were still looking for a fourth roommate. Sasha was in medical school at NYU, hoping to specialize in OB/GYN, and the location worked for her too. She liked all three women living in the loft and assured them that she’d never be around. She was either in class, at the hospital, or at the library studying for exams. She was a soft-spoken young woman from Atlanta and mentioned that she had a sister in New York too, living in Tribeca. She failed to mention that they were identical twins, which caused considerable consternation the day she moved in, when her sister suddenly appeared, with the same mane of blond hair, in the same T-shirt and jeans, and the three residents of the apartment thought they were seeing double. Valentina, Sasha’s twin, enjoyed confusing them, and had done so regularly in the five years since. The two sisters were close, Valentina had a key to the apartment, and they were as different as night and day. Valentina was a successful model, involved in a high-powered world, and Sasha was a dedicated doctor, whose wardrobe consisted mainly of hospital scrubs, and was in her residency at NYU Langone Medical Center five years after she’d moved in.

They were like unusual and unexpected ingredients and component parts of a fabulous meal. For five years the four roommates had lived together, helped each other, loved one another, and become fast friends. Whatever the recipe was, as different as they were, and their lives were, it worked. They had become a family by choice, and the loft in Hell’s Kitchen had become home to them. Their living arrangement suited all four women perfectly. They were busy, had full lives and demanding jobs, and they enjoyed the time they spent together. And all four still agreed, the apartment Claire had discovered nine years before was a rare find, and a gem. They loved living in Hell’s Kitchen, for its history and still slightly seedy quality, and it was safe. People said it looked a lot the way Greenwich Village had fifty years before, and they could never have found three thousand square feet at that price anywhere else in the city. The area had none of the polish and pretension and astronomically high rents of SoHo, the Meatpacking District, the West Village, Tribeca, or even Chelsea. Hell’s Kitchen had a reality to it that had been dulled or lost in other places. All four women loved their home, and had no desire to live anywhere else.

There were inconveniences to living in a walkup, but it didn’t really bother them. They were a block away from one of the more illustrious firehouses in the city, Engine 34/Ladder 21, and on busy nights, they could hear the fire engines scream out of the station, but they’d gotten used to it. And they had all chipped in to purchase air-conditioning units that took a while to work in the vast space they used as a living room, but the place cooled down eventually, and the heat worked fairly decently in winter, and their bedrooms were small, cozy, and warm. They had all the comforts they wanted and needed.

When they moved in together, they brought their dreams, hopes, careers, and histories with them, and little by little, they discovered each other’s fears and secrets.

Claire’s career path was clear. She wanted to design fabulous shoes, and be famous in the fashion world for it someday. She knew that was never going to happen designing for Arthur Adams, but she couldn’t take the risk of giving up a job she needed. Her work was sacred to her. She had learned a lesson from her mother, who had left a promising job at an important New York interior design firm to follow Claire’s father to San Francisco when they got married, where he started a business that floundered for five years and then folded. He had never wanted Claire’s mother to work again, and she had spent years taking small decorating jobs in secret, so as not to bruise his ego, but they needed the money, and her carefully hidden savings had made it possible for Claire to attend first private school and then Parsons.

Her father’s second business had met the same fate as his first one, and it depressed Claire to hear her mother encourage him to try some new endeavor again after both failures, until he finally wound up selling real estate, which he hated, and he had become sullen, withdrawn, and resentful. She had watched her mother abandon her dreams for him, shelve her own career, pass up bigger opportunities, and hide her talents, in order to shore him up and protect him.

It had given Claire an iron determination never to compromise her career for a man, and she had said for years that she never wanted to get married. Claire had asked her mother if she regretted walking away from the career she could have had in New York, and Sarah Kelly said she didn’t. She loved her husband and made the best of the hand she’d been dealt, which Claire found particularly sad. Their whole life had been spent making do, depriving themselves of luxuries and sometimes even vacations, so Claire could go to a good school, which her mother had always paid for from her secret fund. To Claire, marriage meant a life of sacrifice, self-denial, and deprivation, and she swore she would never let it happen to her. No man was ever going to interfere with her career, or steal her dreams from her.