Look Alive Out There

would have said something. He lived and died by Occam’s razor, whereas I seemed to be in the midst of a multidecade phase of making everything more complicated than it needed to be. Here I was, unambiguously invited to say something if I saw something. Instead, I decided to resolve the situation myself. Not wanting to make Don get out his industrial ladder and climb up to my window in threadbare boxer shorts, I would reach out every few days with a pair of kitchen scissors. But no matter how deep into the V of the scissors I crammed the vines, they only slid back out. I barely nicked them. Come July, I had to use a cleaver. Which also meant I had to buy a cleaver. But every woman should own a cleaver.

And it worked. The mosses and flowers and a softly bubbling fountain came into view. There was a roughly cut stone path of the Zen persuasion. It was lovely. For a whole seventy-two hours. Until it wasn’t again.

One day Don stopped me as I was coming out of our local Laundromat. He was wearing a striped caftan and green rain boots with plastic amphibian eyes molded to the toes. He had taken notice of the attempted trimming. He told me that he would have done the pruning himself and seemed borderline offended that I had taken this task off his hands. I hadn’t realized it was a betrayal of our neighborly relations and, in fact, assumed that Don of all people would appreciate communal gardening. He blew a lock of white hair from his forehead and added that he hoped I at least ate the grapes because he didn’t know what else to do with them. He had only one family member in New York, a ninety-seven-year-old mother in a nursing home with “no appetite and no charisma,” and the rest of his friends were back in Portland, Oregon, having swapped opiates and Airstreams for lattes and refurbished Airstreams. He made me promise to eat some of the grapes. Then he insisted on carrying my laundry as we walked home.

At first, I was resistant. Eat the grapes? Eat them? Grapes that had come from city soil and rested on the same brick wall from which my air conditioner protruded? Oh, no, thank you. But both the grapes and the promise I had made dangled themselves before me. So one day I reached out the window and tore off a couple of ripe helixes. I soaked them in my sink. Then I put them in the refrigerator. If I couldn’t kill the germs, I could at least make them wish they were dead.

The highest compliment bestowed upon fruit is that it tastes “like candy.” Pineapple gets this a lot. Raspberries. Star fruit’s certainly sick of hearing it. What’s meant to be a compliment to fruit is actually an insult to candy. I don’t know what kind of Eastern-bloc chalk pellets people have been eating, but most grapes do not taste as awesome as candy. Except for these. These were like little clown cars of sugar and flavor. And they were accessible from my bathtub, where I could reach my arm out, snap off a cluster, and knock my head back like a Greek goddess.

To thank Don, I hung a bottle of red wine in a paper bag around his doorknob, along with a note that I’m sorry to report included the phrase “grapes of bath.” Before long, we became engaged in a game of Obvious Santa. Don really amped things up. In return for the wine, he left me a bag of freshly picked tomatoes tied with red ribbons. In return for the tomatoes, I left him a beer koozie with dancing rainbow bears printed on the side. He left me a flower vase. I left him flower food. He left me a bottle of organic laundry detergent. I left him hand balm. He left me a yoga mat. I left him the same yoga mat with a package of Hostess cupcakes tied to it.

After about a month of this, I returned home from work one day to find an actual present wrapped in paper and ribbon, waiting for me outside my door.

I’m guessing you could use this, read the attached note.

Inside was a glossy photo book called Designing with Books. I was still working in book publishing and Don had registered the rectangular packages I received. It was the first gift that didn’t seem spontaneous, that hadn’t impulsively occurred to either of us. He had tracked it down especially for me. So at the office the next day, I did some digging of my own. Turns out I worked for the same people who produced such sleeper hits as Gardening in Small Spaces. Presumably this series also includes Reading on Stools and Napping Under Partial Enclosures. I ordered a copy of Gardening in Small Spaces and left it outside Don’s door, along with a trowel. He was the only person I knew who could use it without hitting concrete.

*   *   *

The other thing that made Don so great is that he was considerate without being intrusive—unlike our super, who was a professional lunatic. This man terrorized our building, inventing minor crimes for which anyone could be tried. Offenses included: being too rough with the front door, tracking dirt into the basement, standing outside while talking on the phone, allowing vagrants (food delivery people) to enter the building, and hosting scumbags (friends) and degenerates (members of the opposite sex). All of whom demonstrated reckless behavior. Like opening the front door.

If your toilet clogged, he gave you the side-eye. If your ceiling caved in, he yelled at you for having a ceiling. Once, he banged on my door at 7 a.m., and when I opened it, bathrobed and bleary-eyed, he accused me of letting my packages languish on the lobby radiator. I explained to him that not only was this false, but it could never be true. I was living on