Of course with lovers and boyfriends, uncertainty could keep craving alive (and with the more reliable and kinder men, that metamorphosed into that other kind of attachment we call love).
More than anything I wanted transformation not of my nature but of my condition. I didn’t have much of a vision of where I wanted to go, but I knew I wanted to distance myself from where I had come from. Perhaps that was not so much a matter of craving as its opposite, aversion and escape, and perhaps it was why walking was so important to me: it felt like I was getting somewhere.
I did have one early vision of what a life worth living could look like. When I read her diaries in my mid-teens, Ana?s Nin’s evocations of her Parisian life between the wars gave me images of spaces that could harbor conversational depths and exploration, of lives that intertwined and cross-pollinated, of the warmth of being wrapped up in passionate friendships. Many years later, after a dinner party of friends gathered around the chrome-legged linoleum table in my kitchen, the radical historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, one of the guests, and I agreed that this was what we had hungered for in our lonely youths. (And many years later I was dismayed to find out that Nin had left her banker husband out of the published diaries, so she presented herself as more hand-to-mouth bohemian than she really was.)
Next to the stove were two wide sinks, one an ordinary kitchen sink, the other, to the right, a deep laundry sink I covered over with the old enameled metal dish-drainer tray that had come with the place, and the dank dark deep sink under the tray would grow fetid, so that I had to lift the lid off and scour it out from time to time. Women had washed clothes by hand in it, and in the first years I was there, the building’s flat roof still had a wooden cage for hanging out laundry to dry, up the last flight of stairs whose upper steps crunched with gravel from the tarry roof.
The kitchen’s original yellow-and-green linoleum flooring was worn into something grainy and cracked that was impossible to keep clean, so I painted it black, and then painted it again and again as it wore out again and again. But the light streamed into the kitchen every sunny morning, and into the other room’s east-facing bay window and trickled through the south bay window all day in winter. That last window faced Fulton Street and a streetlight, and sometimes I would sit there transfixed watching the fog cascade over itself like gargantuan, phantasmagorical tumbleweeds under the streetlight, as the wind pushed it in from the cold ocean where it had arisen.
Or I’d lie in bed and hear in the hush of night the foghorns blaring far away. Awakening in the middle of the night, in the center of a city and a place thought of as the inner city, I often heard the foghorns, and they carried me to the edges and beyond, to the sea, the sky, and the fog. I heard them often, and in recollection the sound seems almost like a correlative of that middle-of-the-night state of being not quite awake, not quite asleep, with a wandering mind but a body pinned down by sleep’s Jupiterian gravity. They called to me as though I was a lost ship, not to bring me home but to remind me of the ocean and the air beyond and that there in the closet I was still connected to them.
I lived there so long the little apartment and I grew into each other. In the beginning I had hardly anything in it, and it felt vast, and at the end it was overstuffed with books and with many boxes of papers under the bed, and it felt cramped. In memory it seems as lustrous as a chambered nautilus’s mother-of-pearl shell, as though I was a hermit crab who had crawled into a particularly glamorous shelter, until, as hermit crabs do, I outgrew it.
A dozen years since I’ve left it I can still see every detail, still imagine sometimes that I’m reaching for the medicine cabinet there rather than the one I actually live with, still gave the Lyon Street address to a taxi driver automatically when I went back