Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“Who’s this?”

“The guy who hasn’t called you back in a week.”

“Hey! I was wondering about you. I almost didn’t pick up because I didn’t recognize the number. It’s been a very upside-down world I’ve been living in. Usually, I’m the one who doesn’t call you back. Interesting feeling, being blown off. And by interesting, I mean it sucks. Apartment hunting, why not? Where should we meet?”

I put my head into the editing suite again to announce I would be leaving early. Suriyaarachchi, engrossed in the game — it was apparently a nineteen-inning nail-biter — said, “Why don’t you just take the rest of the day off?” I was about to tell him that he was paraphrasing what I had just told him, then thought better of it.

I thanked him and left.

I met Viktoria on the corner of Third Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. I was struck anew by her beauty. She was stunning. Tall and thin, with long blond hair that today she had divided into twin pigtails. She wore a skirt, high-heeled Mary Janes, and a cardigan over a button-down oxford. I felt both sheepish and overjoyed to be walking down the street with this sexy jailbait. Every man we passed without exception was dumbstruck, even the two holding hands. She was, to say the least, out of my league. She seemed at ease with the attention, absorbing it and deflecting it in equal measure, returning a smile or lowering her gaze or staring straight ahead. There was something electrifying about being the guy she was with, like riding a motorcycle for the first time — power, danger, lack of control.

We met the broker outside a tenement on Fifth Street and Avenue A. He had to correct himself when telling us his own name. “Hector, I mean. Viktor is my brother. Hector Villanova.” He handed us his business card with trembling fingers.

“Villanova,” Viktoria said. “That can’t be your real last name?”

“What do you mean?”

“ Villanova means ‘new house.’ ”

“Yes, it does,” Hector said, not catching her drift.

Viktoria looked at me poker faced.

Hector fumbled with the keys before letting us into the lobby. It was a five-floor walk-up, past dimly lit hallways and the smells of cat pee and frying onions. Hector described the apartment as “newly restored,” but all that seemed to mean was the stove had been cleaned. A sponge and a can of Ajax stood on the counter. One of the walls had been given a recent touch-up; the smell was intense.

One couldn’t really be given “the tour” because there wasn’t anything, properly speaking, to tour. The place was a kitchen. Nevertheless, Hector tried his best. “These are the original linoleum floors,” he said, and tapped a buckling tile by the refrigerator with his tassled dress shoe. I went to the windows and looked down at the street corner. Hector came over to narrate the view for me, as if to revise what I was seeing. “What we have here are two exposures, unusual for the building, but this is a corner apartment. North facing and east facing. You will get very nice light here in the morning, and it should maintain an even brightness throughout the day. You can see the features of the neighborhood from here. Restaurants, nightlife, shopping. It’s very safe at night. There are people around all hours. Eyes on the street, we call it in the business. Keeps the criminal elements at bay.”

Viktoria said, looking out, “Oh my God, that place!” She pointed to the bar directly across the street. “We used to cab it down there once the clubs closed. Nice thing about it — only thing about it, really — is that there’s no last call. They’d just let us hang out until we had to go to school in the morning. I don’t know how many times I barfed in that garbage can on the corner.” She took me by the hand. “Come look,” she said, and brought me to the bathroom.

She sat down on the toilet. “Try closing the door.” I tried, but her knees protruded past the threshold and the door bumped into them.

I turned to Hector. “Small bathroom.”

Hector came over, and we both considered Viktoria as she sat on the toilet. “But you have very long legs,” he said.

“Taking a shit in this apartment would be a public act,” Viktoria said. “It’s okay, I don’t mind.” She got up, keeping her bare knees together.

“I will ask the landlord what he can do about that,” Hector said, making a note.

Apartment hunting in New York City, I came to learn after Hector had shown us the others, is a special kind of hell. Each was more depressing than the next. If Viktoria hadn’t been with me, I would have quit after the first two. She was sweet and game and helped me see that, yes, I could build shelves over here or have a loft made over there and put a desk right under it. She showed me the cool thing about this place: a safe, built right into the wall! Or that one: roof access! Or: Couldn’t I just picture a cross-legged, candle-lit cocktail party in here?

By the end, six turns deep into the realtor’s labyrinth, I began to see these apartments not for each one’s objective awfulness but for the way each stacked up against the others. It was a trick of the eye that fooled me into believing that maybe number 4 wasn’t so bad after all.

Only to be told that if I was interested, I would need to act fast.

“What does ‘act fast’ mean, in this situation? Me saying, ‘I’ll take it’?”

“And filling this out completely.” He handed me a form that required my divulging all of the relevant information that the initial application hadn’t, including bank account numbers, landlord references, and a signatory waiver for a credit check. “Get it back to me as soon as you can,” Hector said. “And confidentially,” here he handed me the faxed copy of the form I had filled out earlier, “I would suggest putting something steadier sounding on your final application than ‘filmmaker’ and”—he pointed to the number I had listed for income ($300,000/year)—“make sure you have a figure here that can be verified.”

After parting ways with Hector, we strolled back west, toward Viktoria’s apartment. Now that the sun had gone down, it was much cooler, and she hugged herself against my arm as we walked. We stopped at the front window of the St. Mark’s Bookshop, a storefront I’d passed dozens of times on my way to the movie theater, never once having the urge to slow down, to take in what was on display.

We went inside. I took pleasure in losing Viktoria for a short while as I wandered the store — to discover her again, at the far end of an aisle. She’s with me , I thought, just to make myself flush. I showed her Arthur’s book, which was on display. “I know him,” I said. This didn’t seem to impress her, though.

She said, “Is it any good?”

“Very good.”

“Reading isn’t really my thing. I’ve got nothing against people who read, there’s just so much else to do in life. Do you think they have any books on BPD? I need to figure this thing out better.”

She went to the counter and asked. Even the hipsters who worked here in their tight flannel shirts and horn-rimmed glasses were not immune to Viktoria. She shook them from the heights of their affected boredom to the very core of their once brace-faced, high school selves — stammering, tripping over their own feet to show her what she was looking for. It was a joy to watch.

She brought a book to the register. Girl, Interrupted . “I hope it doesn’t suck,” she said.

I offered to pay for it. In my head while she was picking something out, I practiced a line about how paying for her book would be my contribution to the fund for her enjoyment of reading, but all that came out was “No, seriously. I insist.”