Aaron and I found a new apartment one subway stop farther away from Manhattan, in Prospect Heights. It was a one-bedroom above a deli on Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare, but the immediate neighborhood surrounding the building felt desolate and uneasy. The streets were occupied by scrappers pushing shopping carts full of cans and metal to the recycling center one block over. Outside the front door stood a thick cottonwood tree with a curious wet spot in the crevice of its first branch. Eventually we figured out why this spot was perpetually moist and named it “the piss tree”—for it provided all the neighborhood men on walkabout a shady place to relieve themselves. But the apartment came with a double-car garage at street level, big enough for Aaron’s studio, and a large private roof deck. The rent hovered just above our upper limit. I wasn’t sure. As we walked away from the building in the pounding rain, weighing our options, I saw something skittering to the side of my vision: a huge rat squeezing under the garage door.
We’d been in New York for more than three years, so I wasn’t shocked by the rat. It just compounded the dimness of the moment, the blows of the giant raindrops on my boots. Where Aaron saw hope and a nice studio space, I saw a future shackled to high-rent digs on a dreary corner. My perspective could just as easily have been positive. We weren’t destitute. Aaron was working a steady carpentry job that paid well, even though making art was still his main gig; every night he whacked away at a new group of sculptures. He’d just begun to paint the surfaces of his carved bas-reliefs black and to rub the points with metallic graphite so that the wood looked like poured iron. They were growing into a serious collection, starting to look like deranged frescoes made by a mad hermit in a hideout. He’d been showing in gallery group shows, but still, art wasn’t paying the rent. My cooking job at db bistro sure didn’t pay much. In this neighborhood, I wouldn’t be able to ride the subway home after work and walk the three dark empty blocks from the subway alone; I’d have to blow money on nightly cabs.
“The apartment is pretty nice,” I said. “But that garage is a shithole.”
“I’ll clean up the garage,” Aaron said. “It would be a great studio.”
“What if we can’t afford it?”
“What does that mean? I’m making good money. You’re working.”
“I mean, what if you don’t. What if you get a show and don’t work,” I said, not really questioning but dropping statements like bombs.
“You mean what if I become a working artist with a gallery and don’t make any money? That doesn’t make any sense.” He looked at me with bewilderment. “That’s what a working artist is: working.”
As we walked he let this sink in and then spun his head and groaned. I couldn’t believe I’d said it out loud, either. It was exactly as he had suspected, the buried tension that hummed between us. I wasn’t buying the dream. I would have argued that I was questioning the sustainability of the dream, but I knew that all he could hear was the sound of my heavy boots stomping on plan A.
“No, no.” I backpedaled. “It’s not that I don’t believe in you, it’s that I don’t believe in the art world. I don’t know if I believe in…” I keeled through the puddles and the water flew up in protest. I shook my head quickly, to dislodge the thoughts that were rising up in my head: Maybe I just want a normal life. Boring and predictable. Salaries. Vacation time. Savings.
“Listen, Amy,” he said. “This is what I am. I’m an artist. I don’t do anything else. I’m not really equipped to do anything else. This is what I went to school for, what I trained to be.”
I stood there silently. I knew his work was really good, better than what was in a lot of the shows we saw. Aaron had spent all of these years deriding the notion of a backup plan—equating it to a dilution of one’s purpose—and I had always agreed in the abstract, but now we were living it, without any kind of meaningful or realistic plan B. He was a sculptor; I was a cook. We had no financial cushion.
“I can’t believe you actually said you don’t believe in it,” he said, meaning our dreams, the reasons we had moved to New York in the first place.
I was skeptical, but when he put it that way, I didn’t want to be the one who, twenty years from now, could be blamed for derailing our lives onto the secondary track. I wanted our first choices to work. “I do believe in it. I do. We should take the place.”
He nodded, didn’t look at me, and briskly entered the subway stairs. He didn’t believe me.
—
We rented the apartment and, soon after, Aaron’s sister, Sarah, and her husband, Paul, moved into the apartment next door. Eventually Aaron would cut a swinging door into the fence between our adjoining roof decks, but first he cleaned up the garage. It was a serious project that involved screwing cement boards around its perimeter to block the rat superhighway leading into the deli next door. The rats, effectively priced out of their old neighborhood, quickly found new homes. Aaron whitewashed the floors and the walls, and one night we set up a table on which I laid a tablecloth and a landscape of fancy appetizers. He opened the garage door to the street. Just a month after that day in the rain, we were having a housewarming party and I was serving raw-milk cheeses in the rodents’ former abode. What a taunt.
Upstairs on the vast garage-roof deck we erected a verdant ode to our rural life back home: We planted rows of peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers in empty Sheetrock buckets and constructed a raised bed for herbs, and in the center we dragged over an adolescent maple tree in a whiskey barrel in the hope that its canopy would someday shade our picnic table. Aaron installed a tightly wound screen door on the entrance from the kitchen and its quick slam behind us was like the punctuation to the rural language I knew.
A horde of friends came to our housewarming party. Even with people divided among the apartment, the deck, and the studio, the place felt hopping. A West Indian timpani band started going through its jubilant set in the lot directly behind ours, having rented the space in preparation for the Flatbush West Indian parade. They practiced nightly at 10 P.M., but this night it seemed as if they were playing just for us.
After midnight we heard this series of soft explosions, maybe fireworks, and through the open garage door we saw a group of teenagers running swiftly past. Ten soft pops, then more, almost too many to be a shooting—but it was. Aaron immediately slammed down the garage door, and instantaneously everyone began asking me for the number of our local car service. We were so new to the neighborhood, I didn’t even know it yet.
When we opened the door a few minutes later to let people out to meet their cars, we saw that Matt, our friend from Minnesota, had been stuck outside when the garage door closed. He was still crouching behind the piss tree, all 6 feet and 4 inches of him not exactly hidden.
“I’m okay!” he shouted with an upraised palm, and bounced into the garage. “Could use another beer, though.”
—