My first apartment in San Francisco was on Franklin Street on the border between Pacific Heights and Russian Hill. A small but stately building with musty old hallways but beautiful art-deco apartments, painted white and full of windows. Technically speaking, I had a roommate, a college friend, but she mostly lived with her boyfriend; in the 10 months we “cohabitated” I think she spent two nights there…and that was sort of awkward, because obviously, it was my home at that point. But I will not complain about any of this because I got a very good deal in the bargain.
It was the height of the dot-com boom in San Francisco, and so what was technically a one-bedroom apartment with a double parlor was marketed as a two-bedroom at an enormous rent. My “roommate” paid her half of the rent every month, took the real bedroom, furnished it with a complete Pottery Barn floor sample set, stocked the walk-in closet with clothes that were never worn, and then closed the door. I took the enormous dining room, which was separated from the livingroom by French doors with frosted glass panes. My mother and I furnished the rest of the apartment ourselves, not wanting to spend the year worrying about someone else’s stuff.
My dining room-cum-bedroom had a bay window mostly obstructed by a verdant tree growing in the shared courtyard below. This was where I put my bed, flanked by a long, three-paneled armoire instead of a closet. My handbags hung on the wall in place of art. Mostly I kept the French doors closed, choosing to create two separate living and sleeping spaces, but once in a while I would open them and roll the TV on its Ikea stand into the bedroom so I could watch TV in bed.
I never really paid much attention to my roommate’s room, treating her closed door like part of the hallway wall, unless I needed to use the full-length mirror in her closet. But the fire escape was out her window, and sometimes on Fridays, when I was waiting for my then-investment-banker boyfriend (now husband) to finally extricate himself from his Excel spreadsheets and come over, I would pour a glass of wine and climb out my roommate’s window and furtively smoke — of all things — a clove cigarette and look around at the other buildings that framed our never-used yard.
I love apartment living. I love the idea that in this one building, in such close quarters, there are so many vastly different stories being played out and aesthetics realized. There is something so fascinating, if you are ever invited into a neighbor’s home, about seeing your own floorplan conceived of in a completely new way. I wonder if she knows the person who painted that. I never would have dreamed of putting a couch there. I didn’t think you could fit a dining table for six in here. I wonder if the landlord knows she painted the hallway blue.
I suppose it sounds vaguely intrusive, and maybe it’s the writer lurking inside me, but I relished those quiet Friday evenings, the intimate sounds of other people’s weekends: the muted clang of pots as the woman across the courtyard washed her dinner dishes in the window, the thud-thud of the music downstairs while the two party boys got ready to go out, the silence — literal and figurative — surrounding the elderly couple watching TV in a dimly-lit livingroom with all the windows closed tight.
I no longer live alone, and our apartment now is vastly different. A high-rise, “modern” in the worst sense of the word — which is to say denuded of all personality, just white walls and inoffensive wall-to-wall carpet. On the other hand, it is a blank canvas for us to inject with as much personality as we have energy and courage for (we have never been able to convince ourselves to paint the walls, for example). Plus we have little kids, who fall and spill things, so this might be the one time in my life when inoffensive wall-to-wall is an okay compromise. On the plus side, we have huge windows and (from certain angles) amazing views to satisfy my inner people-watcher.
Our building is, in many ways, the best neighborhood I’ve lived in…certainly in my adult life, possibly ever (unless you count a college dorm…which is a whole other beast). I was reminded of this on a recent Sunday night, when the Giants swept Detroit to win the World Series, and suddenly we were all bursting out onto our decks, the young and the old, in PJs and party clothes, clutching beers and backlit by 22 floors’ worth of TVs, cheering into the streets. High Fives With Strangers, my husband calls it.
But are they?
One of the original Marlboro Men lives on the 15th floor with us. He is slowly dying — of lung or heart disease, no one can say — but he moans when he walks, then composes himself to zing off one-liners to my son: “Your secretary told me you were at the cleaners!” he’ll deadpan, “When clearly you were out with this beautiful blonde!” LittleMan is mystified.
“It’s his male pride,” says the diminutive septegenarian South African who lives next door, of the Marlboro Man’s refusal to go to the hospital. “You know how men are,” she says conspiratorially. “And while we’re talking, since I know you’d like to be informed, and this isn’t information I’m sharing with everyone in the building…” and she launches into some whispered gossip I barely understand.
Around holidays, the retired taxi driver with joie de vivre to spare shepherds his visiting granddaughter down the hall in a child-sized replica of a Yellow Cab with pedals and a wheel that steers. They stop and knock at our door across from the elevators, hoping that LittleMan will be there. He hasn’t yet mastered pedals — shuns the bike, in fact, on account of the helmet, which he abhors — but he is taken with the cab and gamely tries to pedal to the emergency exit with gentle coaxing from the taxi driver and the grandchild.
If it is commute hour the dapper gentleman who raised two kids in San Francisco yet has no apparent wife will undoubtedly be waiting for the elevator. Interestingly, we never see him waiting to ascend to the 15th floor in the lobby; he is in a constant state of descent, whether at 9am or 5pm, always leaving in his blazer and French cuffs, never arriving.
The lovely South African calls me by name — “Oh, Jaime!” she gushes whenever she sees Babygirl, and comes running over for a closer look — but others simply call me “LittleMan’s Mom”.
“How’s LittleMan’s Mom today?” they’ll ask.
“Busy as ever,” I reply.
Then they address LittleMan and I start drilling him on his manners: “Look up and say hello, LittleMan. ‘Good Morning. I’m fine, thank you!'”
Sometimes he obliges.
Our friends are leaving, a slow trickle departing the city for detached houses with grill-friendly backyards, but we stay on in our vertical village, where the neighbors watch out for our kids and the elevator hums up and down all day. It’s a small world after all.
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