I only once in my life experienced a real cold-water flat. This was in New York on Avenue A, in what is now called Alphabet City. I was staying with a certain woman for two days, I believe, uninvited on this occasion, sleeping across the end of her bed. I was 18 or 19 years old.
Except for the lack of hot water, there was nothing especially unsavoury about the apartment. She hadn't been living there very long and the second night I was there was the first time she decided to take a bath. Heating water on the stove for the bathtub apparently worked fairly well. I didn't get to sample it.
Here in Sydney, Steve/Sylviane does have hot water. But somehow the phrase "cold-water flat" does keep coming to mind.
"I'm sure that you'll get along with my flat-mate Peter," Steve had written me. (I've been fairly successful in using the masculine name, but less so at using the corresponding pronoun.) "Everybody always likes you."
"Peter is willing to baby-sit Cassiope, so we can go out at night together sometime."
Well, this was a considerable misrepresentation of the situation. True, there was no major difficulty between me and Peter. All I knew at first was that he was very seldom present, and when present was locked in his room most of the time.
The main problem, I eventually learned was between Peter and Steve.
Anyway, when I arrived I didn't yet know what the plan was. Steve had talked about finding a hotel room for me, and then told me how to find his flat when I arrived, and I had thought that I might be staying there only a day or two.
This apartment (not reallly a flat by the San Francisco definition) was actually fairly large, but somehow the space was mostly not very usable. As previously described, Steve and I were sharing a somewhat small bedroom, sleeping not in the same bed but almost side by side except for a difference in height of about half a meter. Steve's 7-year-old Cassiopée had her own bedroom next door.
As far as I was concerned, this arrangement seemed reasonably okay, despite the fact that there was really no room for me to unpack my suitcases.
But Steve kept talking about how unsatisfactory the apartment was for her. She couldn't dercorate it and arrange it and make it her own, she said. She couldn't even walk naked to the bathroom, "because it would completely freak Peter out."
With three months left on the lease, I didn't see this as sufficient justification for moving. It seemed obvious that there was something else going on that I wasn't being told about. (And I still don't really understand it.)
Steve told me only that he had let Peter sleep on the floor in the room he and Cassiopée had been formerly living in at a backpackers hostel after Peter had got into an argument with the manager and got kicked out of his own room. And then they decided that it would make sense to find an apartment to share, which they did. According to Steve, they got along fine for several months but then got into a big argument and after that Steve started avoiding Peter, frequently coming home late, leaving Peter to pick up Cassiopee from school in the evening and baby-sit her. I was never told what this argument was about and, following my usual custom, I didn't ask.
Peter was/is heterosexual but had no interest in being sexual with Steve. Which makes sense, after all, if one accepts Steve's own evaluation of himself/herself as a male. Maybe if I hadn't known Steve so well when she was Sylviane, I might have had major difficulty in that respect myself.
It would take quite a bit of space to fill in all the details about
The point is that Steve now has a new apartment for himself and Cassiopée and, until I leave to return to San Francisco, me.
This apartment, like the previous one, does have hot water, but it must date back to the 1930's. Certainly no later than the 1940's. There are separate hot and cold water faucets on opposite sides of the bathroom sink, half a meter apart, so washing one's hands takes a bit of practice, since the hot water is very hot. The kitchen sink also has separate faucets, instead of a nozzle that swivels. There are two electrical outlets in the living room and two in the kitchen, one in one of the bedrooms and none in the other. But so far, the wiring has proved quite capable of dealing with several extension cords.
Despite the inconveniences, though, Steve really likes the apartment and I have to admit that it has its appeal for me as well.
The big deal is that it has a real (although very basic) kitchen, with a door. And a real kitchen table, big enough to seat three adults and one kid. Much as I like bars, the sort of bar one finds in a contemporary kitchen is, in my opinion, no substitute for a good honest kitchen table that one can sit around and smoke at and drink wine at and talk late into the night. For my part, I don't smoke and never have, but I've always found something nice about sitting around a kitchen table with a few smokers.
The living room is for watching the movies one has rented, of course.
Being here in this funky apartment has been in some ways a reversion to an earlier period in my life, when I was in my late teens and early twenties. There was something wonderful, almost magical, at the time about being in an apartment with furniture from the Salvation Army and Goodwill, so different from my parent's home, and dealing with dinner by calling out for food to be delivered when we got hungry.
I have never felt that I really knew a woman if her apartment looked like it was ready for a photo shoot for the magazine in the Sunday paper. It would be totally unfair to use the word "hippie" in describing Steve's apartment, but "bohemian" quickly comes to mind. And not bohemian chic, but rather we-don't-have-much-but-we-have-the-basics bohemian. Or perhaps "improvisational" would be a better word.
But I have to admit that in some ways, the improvisational approach to life as a whole has become very old for me. I get tired of always being the designated adult, as well as on a few occasions the designated sober person, listening to drunken conversations where the same sentences keep repeating over and over again. ("But he changed the lock," Steve kept saying, speaking of her former roommate after Steve had moved out, but at a time when Steve's name was still on the lease and he was continuing to pay rent on the old apartment. "But he changed the lock." So he had, and was quite wrong to do so, as the real estate agent informed Steve. But certainly there were other things we could have talked about.)
But I shouldn't exaggerate. The drunkenness is rather rare, and, I think, more psychological than due to the actual alcohol intake, which amounts to only a couple quarts of beer or a couple of bottles of wine between the two or us. A lot of the evenings we weren't drinking at all.
It's nothing like some of the women I've previously lived with, who needed a breakfast beer and sat around drinking tequila all evening or even all afternoon.
On the whole, in any case, it's been a good experience being here.
November 27, 2006