IF HE COULD HAVE KNOWN all the lives that would be wrecked, David still would have agreed to all that was to come, starting that bright, windless day he stood outside 6 Observatory Hill Road, waiting to see the top floor of the three-story Victorian-style house.
The realtor had slowed down as she climbed the front steps. “So tell me what you’re looking for.”
David and Bonnie trailed behind her.
David tilted his head back to look at the highest windows of the house, defeated by the rays of sun. Tell me what you’re looking for. The realtor’s words snaked into his mind as, roughly, What are you looking for in life, when at twenty-eight years old you call yourself a writer but you’re always trying to finish the same first novel?
He had been sinking into panic about his prospects lately, which led his mind to wander this way. He knew seven people in his personal orbit who had already published books, though one was with an academic press, and nobody was sure if that counted. Three of the other writers were younger than him, if only by months, and one tiptoed, briefly, onto a best-seller list. David had an MFA—master of fine arts in fiction writing, he’d clarify, most people having no idea what that was—but ultimately his degree dragged him down, merely rendering him self-conscious about his work. He had been grinding out the same manuscript for the last five years. The realtor’s question prodded him to mentally grasp for an answer: I’m looking for my turn.
That was all. So simple. Just his turn!
Deep down, though, he feared he could never be good enough. Or that everyone else deserved to reach their goals more than he deserved his.
Bonnie took David’s hand, snapping him back to the present. David, who was just above average height when he made an effort to stand up straight, used his free hand to toss his overgrown brown hair from his eyes.
“Two bedrooms would be ideal, in case of family visits, with a bonus room or extra space for David to do his work,” Bonnie said. “Wish-list items: at least one and a half baths and a renovated kitchen.” Bonnie was not a writer, so she effortlessly sounded like a normal person. Sharon, the realtor, wasn’t really listening; she had just been making conversation while sifting through her thicket of keys.
Sharon finally unlocked the door, and they followed her up a narrow, angular stairway that had been added half a century earlier to the side of the house to keep it hidden from the street. Long ago, owners of a Cambridge, Massachusetts, home wouldn’t have wanted people to see their servants go in and out, or to know that financially strapped owners rented out the top floor, where David and Bonnie were headed. The stairway was enclosed in flimsy plasterboard. It was dimly lit, and each tread emitted a creak that petered out into a hollow echo.
“Tight squeeze,” David commented as the stairwell narrowed even further after another sharp turn, where Bonnie had to take care not to slip in her ballet flats.
They were coming to the third floor, topping the lower floors of the ornate old house, where someone else was living in what must have been a grander fashion.
“Those stairs are a doozy,” said Sharon, who had a frizzy red ponytail and a drunken laugh. “You know Cambridge. Everyone is content just to live here.”
Her observations could have been sarcastic or sad, hard to tell. After rounding one more odd angle in the stairway, they trailed her into the top floor.
“Ta-da,” said Sharon.
Light flooded into the four windows of the vestibule where the stairs let them out. Bonnie’s manner and questions to the realtor let on that she liked the place, exactly what a potential tenant wasn’t supposed to do, but nothing could convince Bonnie to deceive. The $3,200-a-month price tag was steep, and would be absurd almost anywhere else on earth, but, as the realtor kept making clear, this was Cambridge, Boston’s best-educated and haughtiest neighbor. Universities gobbled up real estate, which shrank the supply for desperate renters, which led people with seemingly infinite money from around the world to buy up the remaining properties and further inflate prices. On top of that, there was nowhere new to build housing, because there was nowhere new in Cambridge.
“So few places on the rental market right now,” said Sharon. “I helped an assistant professor rent a treehouse earlier this year, and a colleague found a shed for a Tufts graduate student.”
Bonnie laughed.
“I’m not kidding,” Sharon snapped. “Sorry,” said Bonnie.
“The shed is actually charming, and the lease gives her permission to use the bathroom in the main house, and their kitchen twice a day, as long as she remains in the shed the rest of the time. There’s two of you, at least. Two incomes?” Without waiting for an answer, which would have revealed her error, she added, “That’s always helpful.”
“I have a question, Sharon,” David said from the living room, gesturing back at the pitiful staircase that had brought them there. “Is that the only way in and out?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Isn’t that a fire hazard?”
The realtor laughed, the same laugh she’d emitted on the stairs, but never denied that a fire here would incinerate anyone inside.
“How would you even move furniture in and out of here?” David persisted. “The three of us barely fit up those stairs. I can’t imagine squeezing a couch or a mattress, or—”
“Ah, yes,” Sharon said. “That’s the catch. Cards on the table, that”—she paused to search her real-estate-friendly vocabulary— “idiosyncratic staircase is the only reason why it’s still on the market. Otherwise, poof.” She made a hand gesture like a magician making something disappear.
She led them to the hall between the living room and the bedrooms. On the hardwood floor, she pointed out a large rectangular outline: a cutout.
David asked what it was.
“It’s the answer to your question. It’s a trapdoor over a crawl space, and below that is another trapdoor that opens onto the much larger, wider central stairs running through the two floors of the main house. Your lease gives you the right to use it to move furniture in and out, through the front door of the main house and up their staircase.”
The rooms were relatively big and airy, the hardwood floors shiny and clean. Even that convoluted clause in the lease couldn’t dampen Bonnie’s enthusiasm. “That’s handy, to have the landlords downstairs, in case there’s any problems,” she said. “I’m sure they’re very nice.” Bonnie always assumed the best in people, without evidence, which left her irritated when it was proven otherwise. Her upbeat vibes would have served her in countless lucrative career paths; maybe she could even have been a realtor herself, though a vague guilt-driven suspicion about the morality of most fields had led her to her job with a nonprofit, where she helped match underserved families with needed services.
“Oh, those won’t be your landlords if you rent here,” Sharon corrected her. “Many years ago, this all used to be a single-family house. Then the first two floors sold to one owner, and this top floor sold to a different owner, who added the stairs on the side of the house where we came up, and created the crawl space between them.” She pointed again to the cutout in the floor.
“Then if the downstairs neighbors aren’t the landlords—” David began.
“The current owners of this top floor are a young couple, like you.
They moved to the suburbs—I believe they wanted space to start a family. The couple initially placed this unit on the market to sell, but when potential buyers were put off by those stairs, they recently decided to try to rent it out. They’d be your landlords, not the people downstairs. Technically this is a condo association made up of two units.”
“Hopefully the neighbors downstairs appreciate strangers dragging their furniture up through their house,” David muttered.
Every writer he encountered seemed to have some distinctive attribute, while David felt forgettable even to himself. Not just in writing, but in life.As the realtor flipped through her notes, Bonnie beckoned David over to show him a few possible spots to set up his desk. Even though it only generated debt, Bonnie took David’s writing as seriously as he did. David loved that about her, but it had the unintended effect of making him more nervous than ever that he’d fall short. Now that sinking feeling overtook him again, the feeling that he would never meet expectations, his or hers, a pessimism that in turn always upset Bonnie. His greatest fear was not about the writing itself. He had decent talent; he’d worked hard for years to become a polished, consistent writer. His fears were about intangibles. Was he special enough? Every writer he encountered seemed to have some distinctive attribute, while David felt forgettable even to himself. Not just in writing, but in life. Was he destined to just be missing that elusive X factor?
This condo, with its ghastly stairs, was just another reminder that he was unable to contribute to their finances the way Bonnie deserved, though she was too hopeful and superstitious to ever acknowledge that.
“A two-year lease is required . . .” the realtor was saying. David was planning their sprint out the door. Trapped here for two years! That would take them into the summer of 2010, which seemed like an eternity. They should hang around a few more minutes to be polite, he decided. Then they could tell Sharon they had to discuss it, or that it didn’t quite seem to fit their needs, and get the hell out. Maybe grab lunch and laugh about how they’d dodged a bullet.
David took in the view from a window overlooking the yard. “Think of it like this, David,” Bonnie said, resting a hand on his lower back. “If it wasn’t for the stairs, they would have sold this a long time ago, and it would never be available for rent. Remember some of the dismal places we’ve looked at? This one could be meant to be, even though the rent is a stretch. Otherwise we’ll end up in a treehouse.”
“Bonnie,” he started to reply, but he was tongue-tied. Maybe he was a writer in part because when he was writing, he could revise until he sounded sure of himself. He should just cut Bonnie loose, he thought. Let her be free to be with someone on his way to being somebody, someone fulfilling his potential.
They’d met at a birthday party they’d each been dragged to, in an apartment where they felt out of place. Talking about their mutual discomfort had made them feel comfortable and confident, and they’d struck an easy rapport. Now he just felt selfish. Selfish for wanting Bonnie, and immature for wanting to prove his worth to her instead of proving it to himself. “I just wish . . . I want to be able to do more to contribute—”
“Writer,” the realtor broke in, looking down at her notes. “What?” David asked, pulled out of his fugue.
“The neighbor downstairs. He’s a writer, and his wife is a guidance counselor at a high school.”
“Writer?” David asked.
“Silas Hale,” the realtor said, reading from the printout. “You know Cambridge. You throw a rock and hit a writer of one kind or another. In fact, my own neighbor across the hall…”
David stopped listening. Silas Hale!
Silas Hale!
With a dozen complex novels written for sophisticated readers, with an arsenal of national and international awards, Hale was the writer David sought to be one day. Silas Hale, as his downstairs neighbor, sharing the same roof? Silas Hale, “a writer.” That was an oblivious understatement. Silas Hale the writer, and New Yorker fiction editor at large, one of the few in the magazine’s history. Pulitzer for fiction. David’s heart stuttered. He knew, at that moment, that this was all meant to be, as Bonnie would say. Hale was meant to become David’s neighbor, to introduce him to elite culturati, to put him on the fast track to literary achievement and to becoming the respected partner Bonnie wanted. To unlatch and swing open the gates to his future. David could never have dreamed this. This would be his X factor. This was the best day of David Trent’s life.
He tried to keep his poise, and to appear detached in the eyes of Bonnie and the realtor, even though, if he were completely honest with himself, he might have burned the world to the ground for this chance.
“We’ll take it,” he said.
“Really?” Bonnie threw her hands around him. “With a two-year lease?”
“The longer the better, as long as you’re happy.”
As the young couple celebrated, each with different reasons in mind, the realtor sighed. It was a sigh of surprise and relief. Sharon did not like those stairs any more than David did, and she was glad she would not have to climb up and down them in heels. But neither she nor her clients noticed the scribbled note on the packet of documents prepared by the last realtor in her office to have handled the property. In the margin, where the downstairs residents were listed, it advised realtors to “warn” potential tenants that the resident was Silas Hale. Not inform; warn. Still not spotting the unusual gloss, Sharon slid the documents into her bag. There was no need to look at them again.
She began to toggle light switches off. “Let’s go get you to write out some checks!”
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