“Do you know this guy?”
“He is my brother.”
“I see,” I say with a my-wife-is-dead level of energy. “That’s not good.”
“No.” Pedro laughs. “It’s not.”
He offers me the mango, which I take in exchange for the second half of the joint.
When Edgardo comes back to the car, I stare out the window, refusing to feel bad for him. I will not care who broke Edgardo’s heart or why or how badly. I am not sorry he is lonely. A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are lonely even when they’re surrounded by other people. I am determined to deny him my empathy. But everything is thawing, inside the car and out. So when Edgardo enthusiastically shouts the names of the mountains, releasing the steering wheel to point each time the road provides a new angle, as if I have not just spent the night on one of them, as if he has not told me a million times already, I can’t help but crane my neck and nod, sufficiently awed.
The Grape Man
My roommate came running out of the closet and did not stop until he reached Los Angeles. I knew this day would come. Sometimes it’s easier to be your actual self where nothing of your alleged self exists. Sometimes that’s how you find out who you are in the first place. But after three years of cohabitation, I knew I would never find a better roommate than him, decoratively, hygienically, or morally. The day my previous roommate moved out, he caught her and a friend escorting her queen-size mattress up to the tar roof of our building, where they intended to discard it. The apartment was on the fifth floor of a fifth-floor walk-up, so it was easier to battle gravity for one flight than pivot down a narrow stairwell for four. He stopped her, saying something like, “Hey, that’s not where that goes.” I wouldn’t have. I would have tattled or seethed or judged or indulged in all three at once, like dipping sauces.
Instead of rolling the dice with another roommate, I decided it was finally time to live on my own. So I moved to a studio apartment on the first floor of an old brownstone, right above the garden unit. What used to be an Edith Wharton character’s yarn storage room was now my entire world. The cliché about New York starter apartments is that the shower is in the kitchen. The good news is this joke didn’t apply to me. The bad news is this is because there was no shower, only a bathtub.
Still, the place had whimsical touches. Like an outlet on the upper right-hand corner of one of the walls that suggested the building had once been upside down. Or the radiator that someone had taken the liberty of spray-painting gold. Or the defunct buzzer on the door frame that had once been used to ring for a maid. Now it was frozen beneath layers of white paint, its cords clipped. I didn’t need to ring for a maid, anyway. I was my own maid. I used to scrub down the whole place in ten minutes, using paper towels and Windex, cleaning the windows to get a better view of the greenery below.
Most people I knew who were lucky enough to have outdoor space used it for damp parties strung from above with Chinese lanterns or as a necropolis for broken patio furniture. The garden apartment was a thing to be trampled on or, when the situation called for it, puked near. Whatever weeds pushed themselves between seams in the concrete constituted “the garden.” But not this garden. Here I was, living above Don, a sixty-something man with a NO NUKES sticker on his door and a deeply green thumb. Don meticulously kept a wall-to-wall garden of flowers and topiaries, of vegetable trellises and canopies of vines. It was extraordinary. To this day, it is the only one of its kind I’ve seen.
I never knew Don’s last name. Or rather, I did on the day I moved in and he shook my hand with a calloused paw, but I have long since forgotten it. What I do know is that he was the thing rarer than a baby-pigeon sighting in New York—a neighbor with whom you enjoy interacting. After his name, the second piece of information Don offered pertained to his grapevines, which were at their peak. If the vines got too unruly, I should let him know. They were Champagne grapes, he explained, small, dark, and seedless. I didn’t think much of this warning at the time. My previous bedroom window had faced a brick wall—how unsightly could a bunch of grapevines be? And who was I to spit in Mother Nature’s bucolic face? I also figured he was overplaying his gardening skills. I lived a full floor above him. Those would have to be some pretty determined vines to climb so far and so fast.
Within a few weeks, they had completely obstructed the bathroom and living room windows. Which was all the windows. It was like living in an organic jail cell. The vines moved at a grape-specific speed, somewhere between stop-motion animation and full-blown horror movie. At first their tendrils cast playful shadows on my walls, but now they were like Michael Pollan’s wet dream run amok. When I lifted the windowpane to get some fresh air, branches flopped inward and onto my radiator, unbending as if they had eaten too much and had just now been permitted to unbutton their pants. And my apartment was but a pit stop for them as they made their way to the window above mine.
On the plus side? What an olden-timey way to discourage burglars! Cheaper than an alligator moat. On the minus side? Off-Seasonal Affective Disorder.
If I had been my old roommate, I
