So is free, considering I don’t really have the money to buy my neighbor dinner while fishing for information about the Bartholomew.
Inside 12B, Nick hands me a bottle of beer before returning to the kitchen to heat up the pizza. In his absence, I sip my beer and roam the sitting room, checking out the photographs that fill the walls. Some of them are of Nick looking dapper in a variety of far-off locales. Versailles. Venice. A savannah in Africa lit by the rising sun. Seeing them makes me wonder about the person on the other side of the camera. Was it a woman? Have they traveled the world together? Did she break his heart?
On the coffee table is a leather-bound photo album similar to one my parents owned. It’s long gone now, like most of their belongings. I think of the framed photo currently on the nightstand in the bedroom of 12A. It’s the only picture that remains of my family, and I’m not even in it. I envy Nick and his entire album of family photos.
The first photograph in the album is also presumably the oldest—a sepia-tinted image of a young couple standing in front of the Bartholomew. The woman has an opaque look about her, thanks to features washed out by too much sun and too little makeup. The man with her is a handsome devil, though. Familiar, too.
I carry the album into the kitchen, where Nick is pulling slices of reheated pizza from the oven. Just behind him, the painting of the ouroboros stares at me with its single, flame-like eye.
“Is this your family?” I ask.
Nick leans in to get a better look at the photograph. “My great-grandparents.”
I examine the picture, noticing the ways in which Nick resembles his great-grandfather—same smile, same granite jaw—and the ways he does not, such as in the eyes. Nick’s are softer, less hawkish.
“They also lived in the Bartholomew?”
“This very apartment,” Nick says. “Like I said, it’s been in my family for years.”
I continue flipping through the album, the pictures passing in no discernible order. It’s a hodgepodge of images in various shapes, sizes, and tints. A color photo of a little boy blowing bubbles—young Nick, I assume—sits beside a black-and-white one of two people huddled together in a snowbound Central Park.
“Those are my grandparents,” Nick tells me. “Nicholas and Tillie.”
On the next page is a striking photograph of an even more striking woman. Her gown is satin. Silk gloves reach her elbows. Her hair is midnight black and her skin an alabaster white. Her face is made up of sharp angles that, when joined together, merge into something arresting, even beautiful.
She stares at the camera with eyes that are at once foreign and familiar. They seem to pierce the lens, looking beyond it, directly at me. I’ve seen that look before. Not just in another photograph but in person.
“This woman looks a bit like Greta Manville,” I say.
“That’s because it’s her grandmother,” Nick says. “Her family and mine were friends for decades. She lived in the Bartholomew for many years. Greta’s whole family has. She’s what we call a legacy tenant.”
“Just like you.”
“I suppose I am. The last in a long line of Bartholomew residents.”
“No siblings?”
“Only child. You?”
I glance again at the picture of Greta’s grandmother. She reminds me of Jane. Not so much in looks but in aura. I detect restlessness in her eyes. An urge to roam.
“Same,” I say.
“And your parents?”
“They died,” I say quietly. “Six years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Nick says. “It’s tough. I know that from my own experience. We grow up expecting our parents to live forever until, one day, they’re suddenly gone.”
He transfers the pizza onto two plates and carries them to the round table in the dining room. We sit side by side, positioned so that both of us can look out the window at twilight settling over Central Park. The arrangement gives it the feel of a date, which makes me nervous. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything resembling a date. I had forgotten what it feels like to be a normal single person.
Only nothing about this is normal. Normal people don’t dine in rooms overlooking Central Park. Nor is their dinner companion a handsome doctor who lives in one of the most famous buildings in the city.