Here I sit, with a bottle of Riesling and an iPad, writing this piece on my tiny terrace—the only sliver of outdoors I dare enjoy these days. Now that they’ve opened a Covid19 hospital right here on Roosevelt Island, NYC, I don’t set foot outside my apartment.
The current sheltering in place brings to mind literature like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera”,where two aging lovers, reunited at long last, hoist the cholera contagion banner on
their cruise ship so authorities won’t let them dock and they can float around forever.
That’s beautiful, but then there are stories like Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, which could also apply.In it, three people die and go to hell (a room with no exit) where they proceed to bicker and make each other miserable for all eternity. The play’s most famous line is “hell is other people”.
As in No Exit, I share my space with two others: my son and a male roommate. My apartment does have an exit, but the virus took it away. My son, afraid I’ll die on him, tries to keep me from going anywhere. Needless to say, we have some spectacular clashes, but he’s my kid and we’re Cuban, so we forget about the fight before echoes from the last scream fade.
The roommate is a different matter.
Roommates happen to be a way of life in NYC, where real estate is expensive, and unrelated adults must often share space to defray costs. If you’re the head of household, you try to find a quiet, responsible person. I, for example, don’t rent to students.
The best roommates are people visiting the city on some kind of training program. They tend to be mature, intelligent, educated professionals, polite to a fault, but their stays are always temporary. The next best deals are folks who work in Manhattan but live hours away, and need a pied
à terre in the city during the week. On weekends and holidays, they go back to wherever they came from, and you’ve got the place to yourself. Problem is, they’re hard to find.
The rest—the majority— consists of adults who are more or less adrift in life. To me, anyone over 29 who hasn’t settled into some kind of a stable living arrangement and needs to rent a room somewhere is probably damaged goods, or in transition from some personal tragedy. Which makes them
damaged goods. But those are the people who come to your door when you’re renting out a room.
With our current roommate, everything seemed fine initially.
He was a man in his 50’s, never married and living in Long Island with his sister and her husband. He came to us because he worked in Manhattan and needed to reside closer to his job. At first, the guy worked at night and slept during the day, so we rarely saw him. Then came the virus and his schedule
changed. He now works two days a week and shelters in place with us the rest of the time.
He’s pleasant enough and pays on time, loves our cats, gets on famously with my son and is very quiet—easily one of the best tenants we’ve ever had. But now that he had become more visible, he was getting a touch too friendly. He followed me around, trying to start little chats. If I went to the kitchen at 3 a.m. for a glass of water, he’d pop out of his room and attempt to socialize. I felt stalked in my own home. I wasn’t flattered at all. He looks like the Expedia Gnome with a yarmulke and no beard. He sounds like Little Caesar’s “Pizza, pizza” character. He has this lecherous glitter in his beady little eyes.
And I couldn’t get away from him, given the present situation. It was like No Exit, live.
For women, few things are more hideous than insistent, unwanted attention from a man they find unattractive. I know it sounds like high school, but men retain the capacity to creep you out no matter how old they (or you) are. My son says I’m imagining things, however,
I tried to be curt and evasive with the roommate, but he didn’t take hints.I once tried to step around him and he moved to block me, until he realized what he was doing and backed off. He kept bringing me little presents of wine and cookies. Then last week, when he showed up with flowers, I exploded and asked him not to give me anything else. He was visibly shocked, but subtlety hadn’t worked, so I had to resort to rudeness. That seems to have worked.
Now he comes in without greeting us, a sullen shadow on the way to his room. Once there, he barely emerges. Well, that’s fine with me, and it also serves the purpose of social distancing from someone who’s still in touch with the outside.
I just hope he keeps it up until this Coronavirus thing is over and I can find my way to the exit and a normal life.
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