I’d bend over the body, captivated by the foulness of it. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds of reverie, and then the spell would be broken, sometimes by the traffic, but more often by my neighbor Helen, who’d shout at me from her window.
Like the rats that spilled from the gangway, she was exactly the type of creature I’d expected to find living in New York. Arrogant, pushy, proudly, almost fascistically opinionated, she was the person you found yourself quoting at dinner parties, especially if your hosts were on the delicate side and you didn’t much care about being invited back. Helen on politics, Helen on sex, Helen on race relations: the response at the table was almost always the same. “Oh, that’s horrible. And where did you know this person from?”
It was Hugh who first met her. This was in New York, on Thompson Street, in the fall of 1991. There was a combination butcher shop and café there, and he mentioned to the owner that he was looking to rent an apartment. While talking, he noticed a woman standing near the door, seventy at least, and no taller than a ten-year-old girl. She wore a sweat suit, tight through the stomach and hips. It wasn’t the pastel-colored, ladylike kind, but just plain gray, like a boxer’s. Her glasses were wing-shaped, and at their center, just over her nose, was a thick padding of duct tape. Helen, she said her name was. Hugh nodded hello, and as he turned to leave, she pointed to some bags lying at her feet. “Carry my groceries upstairs.” She sounded like a man, or, rather, a hit man, her voice coarse and low, like heavy footsteps on gravel.
“Now?” Hugh asked.
She said, “What? You got something better to do?”
They walked into the building next door, a tenement, and were on the second floor, slowly climbing to the fifth, when she told him of a vacant apartment. The former tenant had died a month earlier, and his place would be available in a week or so. Helen was not the super or the manager. She had no official title but was friendly with the landlord, and thus had a key. “I can let you have a look, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.”
As one-bedrooms went, this was on the small side, narrow too, and as low-ceilinged as a trailer. The walls were covered with cheap dark paneling, but that could be gotten rid of easily enough. What sold Hugh was the ferocity of the sunlight, that and the location. He got the address of the landlord, and before leaving to fill out an application he gave this Helen woman seventy-five dollars. “Just for showing me the place,” he told her. She stuffed the money down the front of her sweatshirt, and then she made sure we got the apartment.
I first saw it a few days later. Hugh was in the living room taking down the paneling while I sat on a paint bucket and tried to come to terms with my disappointment. For starters, there was the kitchen floor. The tiles there were brown and tan and ocher, the colors seemingly crocheted as they would be on an afghan. Then there was the size. I was wondering how two people could possibly live in such a tight space, when there was a knock at the unlocked door, and this woman I didn’t know stepped uninvited onto the horrible tiles. Her hair was dyed the color of a new penny, and she wore it pulled back into a thumb-sized ponytail. This put the focus on her taped-up glasses, and on her lower jaw, which stuck out slightly, like a drawer that hadn’t quite been closed. “Can I help you?” I asked, and her hand went to a whistle that hung from a string around her neck.
“Mess with me, and I’ll stick my foot so far up your ass I’ll lose my shoe.”
Someone says this, and you naturally look down, or at least I do. The woman’s feet were tiny, no longer than hot dog buns. She had on puffy sneakers, cheap ones made of air and some sort of plastic, and, considering them, I frowned.
“They might be small, but they’ll still do the job, don’t you worry,” she said.
Right about then, Hugh stepped out of the living room with a scrap of paneling in his hand. “Have you met Helen?” he asked.
The woman unfurled a few thick fingers, the way you might when working an