NEW YORK STORIES

"The Big Move" by Sarah Norris

By the time my boyfriend, Robert, and I discovered that our New York real estate agent was also Sweden’s most famous gay porn star, we weren’t surprised. It was strange that our married, father-of-two friend Dave was the one who recognized Fredrik as “Tag,” but the whole apartment-buying process was so convoluted and absurd, even that seemed kind of fitting.

First there was the one-bedroom co-op on 16th Street, where our offer was accepted, contracts were signed and a ten-percent deposit put into escrow. A month after that, we were rejected by the board, for reasons that were never made clear to us. Having already given up my rental studio on Avenue B, I moved temporarily to live with Robert in London. But three months later, we still hadn’t received our deposit back and whenever we called, our lawyer always seemed to be “in the middle of a deposition.”

Finally, an email from a paralegal showed up in my inbox stating: “the seller is refusing to return your deposit because they think that you purposefully bombed the board interview.” Or, as Robert said, “This really doesn’t say much for our social skills.”

Our lawyer suggested that we settle—cut our losses and write off the deposit—so I started lying awake at night plotting revenge against him. After I woke Robert up at three in the morning to suggest flying to New York to stuff a banana in the tailpipe of our lawyer’s BMW, Robert took to sleeping on the living room couch. Then we retained a new lawyer, who said he’d never heard of anything like this: “It’s nothing but an old-fashioned stick-up!” At the end of the summer, when we threatened to file a lawsuit against the seller, our entire deposit was returned to us—without interest, but still. Time to start looking again.

We called Fredrik. “Ändhållplats!” he said. “I won’t even waste our time on co-ops.”

I had erroneously assumed that the twelve-year age gap between Robert and me only showed up when comparing each other’s CD collections and friends (the difference in the former being the obvious disparity between Bruce Springsteen and Death Cab for Cutie and the latter being that New Yorkers in their mid-twenties are still a decade away from an all-consuming obsession with the city’s elementary schools). But the gap showed in our apartment search, too. Robert said he had “been working like a dog for twenty years” and now wanted something nice and clean to come home to and I, a part-time yoga instructor and grad student, felt absolutely confident in saying that I did not want to entertain friends with “Red, white or cognac?” We agreed on the East Side, but he wanted Upper and I insisted on Lower.

It was like a game of chicken, both of us refusing to swerve to the opposite side of 14th Street.

“Excuse me for asking,” my friend Phoebe said. “But are you a trustafarian?”

I shook my head.

“Well,” she pointed out, “if Robert’s buying the place, shouldn’t it be up to him?”

I pointed to the cover of a sales brochure for a building on Fifth Avenue. It showed a woman carrying a latte in one hand and a teacup poodle in the other, while a uniformed man in the background chased after her with eight Chanel shopping bags. “Phoebe …” I said.

“I get it,” she replied.

In the end, I won regarding the location, though this was probably due less to my debate skills than the prevalence of downtown condos. With our apartment on the Bowery, Robert got what he wanted, the top of a building and a washing machine, and I was happy to settle into a legendary slum. After our first night there, I stood up in the morning and looked out over the East River while Robert slept. Then, wrapped up in a comforter on the floor, I made a mental list of things to buy: coffee maker, coffee grinder, coffee cups, bed. The whole search had taken more than a year, but as I snuggled back under the blanket, I happily thought, “We’re home.”

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