Millenials

We had a fight about art, which was really about meaning and existence, which was really about money and the rent, which was really about Annie being pregnant again and seeing her future narrow into a lightless tunnel.

That place made her lash out in desperation. Nobody wanted to represent me, she said, and therefore we were going to be homeless, because nobody wanted to buy my art because I had no talent, and therefore all time prior to this moment was a tortured, extended giant fucking mistake.

(In fairness, she didn’t say “no talent.” She said something like my vision was incomprehensible and my choices were derivative and that my hostility and nihilism had flattened my work to the point where nobody wanted to be near it, especially a customer or an art dealer or her, which, incidentally, I didn’t think was true.) 

While Annie and I possessed near limitless talent in raising each other’s blood pressures, this night felt singularly raw, and I stayed uncharacteristically silent. My tongue was drying up inside my mouth.

Since it was Tuesday night, my friends were supposed to be stopping by for our regular jam. Annie usually played her cello, which made our music sound far more sophisticated than it was. But now she left me by the dish-piled stainless steel counter (foraged on a late night rendezvous with a restaurant out-gentrified across the street) in our kitchen area and slammed the door to our room. I could hear her throwing things around our spartan bedroom (by design for better dreams and vastly freer sex). But since the walls of our bedroom only rose halfway to the heat-stealing sixteen foot ceiling and also because the only light source in the bedroom were floor lamps next to our bed, I could see the long piercing shadows of her flailing arms flinging books and shoes. The shadows themselves spilled over the rim of the unfinished drywall. I heard my son start to cry but didn’t head towards his room. Responding could set off an hour long struggle; since she woke him up, she could put him back to sleep.

He of course was part of the problem, although neither of us would ever admit that. His room was Annie’s old studio, long and narrow along the south wall of the loft. We had attached a work table to the wall and purloined a deep cabinet for Annie’s metal at the end where now the crib sat. The unbolted work table was now in my studio and still strewn with welded elbow joints and round tubes of green glass from a piece Annie had barely worked on in a year. The cabinet was filled with clothes and toys.

I decided to clean the kitchen and eat something. Behind me, I heard Annie go to Basq. He was almost two and already trying to climb out of his crib. We had a futon on the floor, so when he eventually took the plunge, he wouldn’t bust his head on the cement floor. We hadn’t noticed the lack of soft corners or easy surfaces until we had a kid. The pipes running along the ceiling dripped and clanked and were surely asbestos insulated. The outer walls were brick, the inner walls gypsum board and every twenty four feet there were crumbling cement columns.

Outside our loft was a service elevator with original lift gates and a manual control which was big enough to load most of our furniture at once when we moved in. There was one other occupant to our floor, which took up almost half of a Williamsburg block, and he painted enormous canvases on custom made steel frames hanging on rolling tracks at intervals from the ceiling. He loved what we loved about living here. The cavernous space echoed and was easily filled with sound. One could build a half-pipe or hold a dance rehearsal or a site-specific exclusive dinner party with scaffolding affixed over the table to suspend movie prop house borrowed chandeliers. Privacy was buttressed by the three foot thick concrete floors and the sparse residency of the building. Then there was the light.

Our loft was on the tenth floor, and nothing except the river stood between us and Manhattan. The Williamsburg bridge glittered and shone in our eyes, but the sun floating high above had direct access to our four by twelve foot windows for which we could barely improvise curtains enough to shade them, and why would we want to? Light you could hang from flooded in every morning from the uncrowded air space east over Brooklyn, and then all afternoon from the west. 

But the BQE, four blocks away, could be a loud roar all day, and the rising exhaust and other river industry emissions were low hanging fruit when the conversation turned to child safety and health. With our view, though (which I knew we might not be able to afford for much longer if I didn’t manage to make some big sales), our kid (plus) would never want to live anywhere else.

Annie came out of Basq’s room and sat on the couch, her hands in her hair, her face sunken. I was pulling a pot of leftover lentil soup from the fridge. “Do you want some?” I asked.

She shook her head without looking at me. “I’m afraid I’ll puke.”

My cell phone buzzed. It was Jims, wanting to come up. Another feature of our amazing industrial space was that you had to ride the elevator downstairs to let someone in. It was too high to throw keys down – although we had tried more than once – and it wasn’t as if the landlord, who inherited the building with his three brothers from their father, and who ran some new media company on the first two floors was going to invest in an intercom system for a twelve story.

As I unlocked the door to go out, Annie said, “You should wait for Sam. She’ll be here soon. She’s bringing her trombone.”

Basq loved Sam’s trombone. But the horn would keep him up all night.