When we moved to New York we had to get rid of the children. Landlords didn’t like them and, in any case, rents were so high. Who could afford an apartment big enough to contain children?
Naturally, we all wept. What made it doubly hard was that we had to get rid of the dining-room furniture too. It made you feel sad. It was like being whittled away.
When the apartment rent went up, we had to settle for something with one room less, which meant getting rid of the trunk with Grandmother’s old snapshots and 1899 letters to her grandfather, as well as our favorite easy chair, locks of the children’s baby hair and the urn containing Uncle Mark’s ashes.
“All that junk,” said the real estate agent, “belongs in an attic, and New Yorkers can’t afford attics.” Attics were the past and New York was now. “To hell with the past, and three cheers for now!” we cried, as we got rid of it all.
And yet it made you feel sad. It was like being whittled away.
The rent went up again, and we had to get rid of the guest bedroom. Everybody said we were crazy for keeping a guest bedroom anyhow. It was an invitation for impoverished relatives, deadbeat acquaintances and children to bilk you of a free night’s sleep. So we got rid of the guest bed and the sampler that said, “Welcome to our happy home,” and we settled into a one-bedroom place with a doormat outside in the hallway that said, “Scram.”
The doormat came from one of the chic new doormat boutiques in SoHo and looked so up-to-date that it made us feel almost as trendy as Jackie O. Still, when you got inside, you couldn’t help feeling sad. You felt you were being whittled away.
The next rent increase presented hard choices by driving us into a one-room place with a windowless kitchen. The old sofa on which we had sat to watch the Super Bowl of 1964 had to go. So did the old lamps by which we had struggled to read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The old bed went, too, and the old rugs, the old mirror and the spare toothbrush.
When we first approached this new, lean shelter, scarcely larger than a procurer’s automobile, we felt inexplicably sad until I cried, “Come now, it was just such a cubbyhole as this in which we first set out on the great American adventure of marriage and success.”
With that, I scooped my companion into my arms and bore her over the threshold. How thrilling it was to recapture the euphoria of better days and to be young again. And, this time, in New York! And yet, it made you feel sad. It was like being whittled away.
The next rent increase was brutal. We refused to pay, refused to be whittled again.
“You don’t want to pay, suit yourself,” said the landlord. “This town’s crawling with saps who’d give an eye and their front teeth for a place like this.” He was apparently right. Entering and leaving the building, we saw half-blind, toothless saps staring at us with slavering apartment lust.
Out we went. Moving down again.
“Why are we always moving down?” I asked friends. “In the old days everybody used to move up. I remember the year I moved up to Kents. That same year I moved up to a three-bedroom house for only $22,000.”
Friends assured me that moving down was what you did in New York. Why didn’t any of us ever consider moving out? I asked. “You crazy?” they explained. “New York is where it’s at.”
I moved down. To fit into the smaller space I had to get rid of my companion. “It’s just a closet,” I said. “You wouldn’t really like it.” Anyhow, I pointed out, landlords didn’t like women in their closets.
Naturally we both wept. It really did make you feel sad. It was like being whittled away.
One night the landlord opened the closet door and showed the hooks to a German with a favorable rate of exchange, a millionaire Italian playboy, an oil-rich Arab and two highly skilled American tax evaders.
There was no doubt what that meant. I called real estate agents. They took me all over Manhattan, looking at warehouse shelves. Not one of them could accommodate anybody more than four feet tall.
The surgeon was reassuring. “I have done hundreds of such operations,” he said, “since the real estate boom began. My patients inhabit some of the most expensive shelves in Manhattan.”
“Will I regret it afterward?” I asked.
“A touch of sadness is only to be expected,” he said, “after you’ve been whittled away.”