Page 12 of The New Couple in 5B

He tugs on the lapels of his maroon uniform blazer, looking more soldier than doorman, straight-backed and clean-cut, at the ready. He takes his cap from the doorman station and puts it over his thick black hair. He’s ageless, his accent unrecognizable. I asked him once where his family was from and he waved a hand, saying, “I’ve lived all over the world. But now I’m just a New Yorker.”

I didn’t press. I don’t like to answer that question, either. My family is of Scots-Irish descent, not that I feel any connection to those places, and I was raised in the Ozarks of North Arkansas, my childhood a time and place so distant from where I am now that it might as well be in another galaxy. I might be from those places, but I am notofthem. Like Abi, I consider myself a New Yorker now. This is the place I chose.

Abi strides gracefully toward the elevator. “Shall I give you the tour?”

“The tour?” I ask with a smile. “I think I know the place pretty well.”

Should I share the news with him? But I hold it back because, honestly, it still seems too good to be true. What if Danadoessue us? What if she gets the place back? Sometimes it’s better not to attach in the first place than suffer the pain of loss.

“All new homeowners get a tour, Ms. Lowan.” He offers a slight bow, which seems silly and antiquated and sweet all at the same time.

“Oh,” I say. “You heard.”

“I think you’ll find that news travels fast here. In any case, Mr. Lowan told me when he came by this morning. Congratulations and welcome.”

“Thank you,” I say. “Chad was here?”

“He came very early. To take some measurements, I think.”

That’s news to me. “Oh, right,” I say. “Slipped my mind.”

Abi is so tall that his cap nearly grazes the top of the elevator door as he steps inside. The manually operated elevator—a piece of New York charm that sets the Windermere apart from other buildings. Also, a huge expense and part of why the maintenance is so high on a building with few amenities. According to Ivan, there was talk at one point of modernizing. But it was decided that the elevator man was part of the Windermere’s elegance. Also, the shaft is too small for modern elevators, and the mammoth cost of undertaking that project was prohibitive. Windermere residents, many of them older, do not like change and they do not like assessments.

And there is something lovely about the mahogany interior, the pleasant clicking of the closing gate, the quiet, well-oiled hum of the machinery, Abi’s steady hand on the bronze-handled mechanism that controls ascent and descent. Stepping into the lobby of the Windermere, and into this elevator, is like stepping into the old New York of my dreams, reminding me that this building has been here since the late 1920s. All the people I’ll be writing about have stepped over these floors, ridden in this very elevator. It connects my present to the building’s storied past. It’s a time machine.

“The tour, then?” he says.

It seems rude to decline. And I need to know everything there is to know about the Windermere. So why not start here? “Yes, please.”

Instead of going up, we go down to the basement. I follow dutifully as he takes me to the laundry room, which is clean, well-lit and a modern finished area within the large concrete and exposed pipes basement labyrinth.

“Most of the apartments have washers and dryers now, but the machines down here are new and state-of-the-art,” Abi explains. It’s true that everything gleams, white and clean, the look of having been barely used.

As we’re leaving the laundry area, I notice something I haven’t before. In the far corner of the room, mounted on the ceiling, there’s a half dome with a blinking red light.

“What’s that?” I ask Abi.

“Oh, that’s the security camera,” he answers. “The doorman on duty monitors the basement, the roof, the hallways, the elevator, the alley out back, the back staircase. For safety, of course.”

How had I never noticed that before? Just a few months ago, Chad and I tiptoed up the stairs to the roof to make love beneath the stars and the city lights. Was Abi on duty? Did he see us? The thought makes me flush. I glance up at him, but his expression is unreadable.

As we move through the rest of the basement, I start to notice the half domes everywhere. That must be a new feature, since the cameras, too, look modern and state-of-the-art.

Abi shows me the furnace room, the hot water heater, the electrical boxes—all the innards of the building.

The Windermere, like many old New York buildings, doesn’t have central air; rooms are cooled inefficiently by window units, heating by clanky radiators. Ivan said that the board priced out the prospect of installing central air, but the residents again voted against the huge assessment that would have been required to convert the old building. In summer sometimes the apartment is sweltering, but we’ll live with it.

Abi and I snake through the labyrinthian hallways of the basement until we get to a row of metal cages, maybe ten by ten.

“These are the storage units for each apartment,” says Abi. “Maybe you’ve been down here?”

I shake my head. I don’t remember Ivan mentioning a storage unit and I’ve never ventured past the laundry room into the dark of the basement.

Most of the cages are packed to the rafters with all manner of items—bicycles and filing cabinets, old furniture and stacked boxes, skis, easels, a drum kit, shelves of books. I recognize some of the names—Donofrio, a heart surgeon and his wife; Stuart, a painter of some note, his work displayed in galleries around the world; Adamo, the lawyer; Abeling; O’Malley, the medium who I have yet to meet—she’s high on my list of people to connect with; Campbell, the professor. It’s a diverse group, all nationalities, mostly creatives and professionals. I think we fit in here—the writer and the actor. Surely, we’ll be the youngest by a decade, the least established. Maybe it will be good to be surrounded by people who are successful in their chosen profession. It will rub off on us.

“Did Ivan have one?”

“Of course,” Abi answers, motioning for me to follow. “Your husband has been down here a number of times.”

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