An exercise in imagination: let’s picture an Italo-American man, sixty-ish (though he might have been older, some people wither on the vine at a certain point in their lives and age no further), smoker’s rasp and cough. Skinny, and not in a healthy way; Coke-bottle thick glasses that slide down his perpetually oily nose. A little hunched, always a wrinkled shirt, white stained to a sickly yellow, extra dark at the collar. Probably from Brillcreme, which he definitely used, to slick his defiantly thick and unruly hair back from an oddly feminine widow’s peak. Let’s give Mr. A. a car. A big silver boat of an El Dorado, at least twenty years old, kept up infinitely better than its owner (who always brought with him a faint tang of garlic, which the mint gum—likely also intended to camouflage the smoke smell; it failed—did little to combat). The El Dorado was about three times the size of the cars most people drove around Manhattan, unless they were driving a truck, which were necessary to the people driving them, because they had to haul things.

This guy, though, didn’t need to haul anything besides himself and his short, rotund, gone-to-seed wife, which we’ll give him now. Into the passenger’s seat she goes. Mrs. A. must have possessed an entire closet of mumus, because that’s what she always wore, even in winter, when she topped them off with an incongruously luxurious fur coat that looked real, though I never touched it. Her face was like a beautiful beachfront property ravaged by a hurricane, whose owners, instead of reconstruction, had opted for a slap-dash paint job.

Extras in a movie? Minor mafia figures? Our new landlords?

Two of those three options were true; I’m going to assume enough intelligence among you, my friends, you privileged and exclusive members of the Bad, Bad Love club, that you don’t need the odd one out underlined for you.

Yep, and they drove, early on the morning of the first day of every month, to our ratty little ex-tenement dive on Bleecker Street (the driving was clearly part of the performance: they lived not a ten minute walk further west into the Village, on Charles Street). Mr. A. would park the silver boat squarely in front of the building. If there were no spaces, he’d make his own, a second layer of parking spots just for him, right in the middle of the very busy street.

A wee aside here: no driver ever rammed into his fender or rear-ended him or side-swiped the very shiny rear-view mirror, which maybe lends credence to the second of the true things among the options presented above. The most consistent rumor I heard was that one of his brothers was decomposing somewhere along the murky bottom of the Hudson, sporting concrete shoes. Mr. A., for some reason, or debt owed, or perhaps action or attitude of his own—whether unctuous cooperation or badass threat-ery, I couldn’t say, and I heard both—had been spared the same fate, but nonetheless permanently ostracized from la famiglia. This, depending on who was telling (the whole street—and Bleecker, for those of you who don’t know this, is a long street—knew the story, or thought they did), had made him the object of scorn or fear or maybe both. Mr. A. made it his business to always look the part, regardless. Hence the boat.

Once he’d parked it, Mr. A. would get out, cross the sidewalk with his jerky gait, made more-so by a very slight limp (people also speculated about what might account for the limp but Mr. A. wasn’t talking), and open the front door of his building with a big, heavy set of keys. We could hear the rattling all the way up on the third floor (again, I think that was the idea). He then proceeded to knock on the door of each and every one of the twelve dwellings into which the decrepit old building had been divided, in order to collect the rent. In cash. White envelope please, nothing smaller than a fifty. I always got strange looks at the Citibank—as though maybe I were the victim of a home invasion (ha!), or maybe someone was standing behind me with the muzzle of a gun rammed against my lower back—when I went, on the final day of each month, to make my half of the withdrawal (we always had separate bank accounts, Husband #1 and I, which later would prove to be fortuitous, but was likely not a great sign. Like a lot of things weren’t. But who reads signs?).

When I say Mr. A. came early, I’m talking, like, six A.M. Why? Couldn’t say, probably some Mafia thing, real or imagined, it mattered little. I was woken up hideously early on the first day of each and every month, so that I could part with a hefty chunk of cash for which I was not going to be given a receipt. Not that it had ever occurred to me to visit a tax accountant at that stage of my life; the chiding over failure to document such expenditures would only come years later, once Husband #1 was out of the picture.

Husband #1 insisted on being the one to answer the (unnecessarily loud—the place was miniscule) knock, the one to open the door. Which we kept chained, because Mr. A. liked to stick his scuffed up loafer, which had clearly been fine and expensive once upon a time, into the crack (I can come in if I want to). And he could have: one good shove to the door–even from him, who wheezed his way up the stairs, another thing we could hear coming; the walls were thin–and that useless chain would have ripped right out of the door frame.

The weird thing: I think Mr. A. and Husband #1 actually liked each other. Maybe recognized a kindred spirit. Both of Italian extraction, their last names ending in exactly the same series of vowels-and-a-consonant (said Italian extraction, in fact, explained Husband #1’s legal status in Europe). Both graduates of the school of hard knocks (Husband #1’s parents were Italian immigrants to his native Argentina, where his father ran a grocer business; and his mother had not progressed beyond secondary school in her studies).

Husband #1 would answer the door in his boxers, shirtless, even if it was cold. Which was strange—not being snarky here, just telling truth: no matter the visits to the gym (or, more accurately, the Y–we definitely could not afford a gym), no matter the sit-ups, his slightly flabby abdomen was never his best feature. Kind of Putin-y, maybe, though he did not have Putin’s (undoubtedly photoshopped) chest. Universal male-to-male statement: “The woman’s up in bed”—which she was, literally: it was a bunk one, college dorm style, just barely categorizable as a double.

Mr. A. clearly understood “the woman’s up in the bed”—a meeting of the minds, though my money would be on him answering the door in a wife-beater, a pistol shoved into his waistband. There was often morning sex after Mr. A. had departed.

Beneath our bed, as in a cave, my desk, lit by a lamp even during the daylight hours, because the one grimy window let in little light, slammed as it was up against the red brick wall of the neighboring building. And some ersatz, milk-crate bookshelves, for my Arabic texts and dictionaries (remember, throughout all this, both this week’s installment and those of weeks to come, I am translating eleventh-century love poetry of such heartrending loveliness I find myself at a loss to convey even its most basic qualities here…).

Behind our tiny bedroom, a tiny bathroom (at least the tile on the floor was real, if chipped), which I never managed to scrub completely clean.

In the opposite direction, the kitchen—not state of the art by any means, but the stove and fridge worked. There was a dishwasher: her name was Cynthia. Lol, old joke, barely funny. In fact, there were two, for I must give Husband #1 his due—he did do half of the dish washing.

Beyond the kitchen, the studio, with its two windows, one cut across by the fire-escape, that looked out over Bleecker Street, in all its touristy, noisy, weekend Bridge-and-Tunnel-y, old-timers-disappearing-but-not-going-quietly, early 90s punky, loud, lively, there-but-yet-elusive, all-someone-else’s, life.

No door separated the studio from the rest of the apartment, but none was needed: there was a barrier as palpable as the unseen shields protecting superheroes in comics, if that is in fact a thing (unfashionably, I don’t read comics). The studio was man-space, genius space. The windows were Husband #1’s, as was the room. As a rule, I never went in there unless invited. I worked, at my dark little cubby hole of a desk, occasionally (but only occasionally) spilling over onto the kitchen table when I needed some extra space.

Why did I accept this gross inequity (we did, btw, split the rent, in case you’re wondering, and he was definitely occupying significantly more than 50% of our common liveable space) so easily? Good question. One I’m still turning over, hoping to find some answers as I write these next installments, which I so appreciate you, my dear Bad, Bad Love readers, for reading.

And I don’t mean to imply that nothing here was fun, or light, or sweet. Because it was. Por ejemplo, Husband #1 made breakfast. Every morning. I’ve mentioned before that he was a bit manic about what he consumed, particularly in the morning. So he made breakfast (with ulterior motives, yes, clearly—he wanted to control breakfast, but there was also an upside to it: I had breakfast put in front of me every day and I am not a morning person, and I very much appreciated this. Missed it when it stopped).

Husband #1 made breakfast after his half hour of meditation in the studio (we’ll get, in another post, to what he meditated on, my friends, and that is a promise). He made muesli, from scratch (none of that store-bought mix, it might have preservatives) and fresh-squeezed orange juice. He made café con leche, using one of those old stove-top espresso pots that you could still buy right there in the ‘hood, at a super-cheap household products store on Broadway that is no longer there (I have no idea how the college students furnish their dorm rooms now, they must chain-migrate out to an Ikea somewhere). He heated the milk just to the right point (always conscious that I abhorred milk over which a skin had formed, and I don’t think he ever gave me a cup of coffee with even one little bit of milk-skin floating at the edges. Like I say, our relationship had its sweet spots).

And our kitchen table has a sweet story. Lacking one, we found an old lady’s ad in the Village Voice—Studio Liquidation! Flatiron district, an interior designer who had worked for decades doing freelance for various firms throughout the city and beyond. She was finally retiring, and she was selling everything in her studio and moving to her country house in a village in Connecticut (Connecticut again!). We had coffee and pastry with her one wintry afternoon—she clearly liked both of us very much; she called her doorman to help us get the table out the front door and insisted on tipping him herself. For the rest of that day it was as though we walked through the city blessed.

Which we did, dragging our new table through the snow-blanketed streets like a sled (we were going to paint it anyway). Husband #1 pulling, me riding. Both laughing, drawing affectionate, amused glances from other snow-walkers. Maybe we looked like we were in love.

It was those two windows, the ones that looked out over the street from the studio, that were the problem. Or so I told myself.

Let me back up a step here: there were many other, larger, and frankly better, apartments we could have rented. I had my fellowship. Meager, but enough, and dependable; Husband #1 had the rent from the house he’d inherited when his parents died—about which we shall hear more in future posts—also regular, and mostly enough (bearing in mind that nothing was ever enough, really, for him), and monthly. We saw some rat-holes, for sure, but also some really lovely spaces in Queens and Brooklyn (hardly the hipster haven it is now, for sure). Airy, with high ceilings and old moldings and office space aplenty for me.

But too far. Not the city, not really.

“No es Manhattan.” That was Husband #1’s standard rejection of each and every one. And I gave in (Again, why? Again, good question), ceding before each and every rejection.

And so we got noisy Bleecker Street, and a mobster landlord. Bridge-and-tunnel piss in our doorway every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes on Wednesday if we were lucky. I got a tiny cubbyhole of an office and a brick wall to stare at for inspiration.

And Husband #1 got to be in the middle of it all. It. Whatever “it” was that Nueva York had. That he wanted, and that Nueva York was determined to tease him with, cruelly, and, in the end, not to give him. He spent a lot of time looking out those windows, surely in search of “it”.

Sometimes “it” made him disappear. Literally.

For hours. Literally. Not one or two, more like three. Sometimes (more than once) for four or five. Three or four or five hours during which I suffered an anguish I find difficult to put into words (the Spanish expression en ascuas–literally, rolling around in hot coals, is, I think apt). Which maybe sounds silly. But my anguish had its reasons, and I know its origins.

Which will be the subject of next week’s post, from Madrid. A bit of a throw-back, but I think we need to go back, and being there, I won’t help but be able to think of this… Sorry to be cryptic, but do come back next week. I think you will enjoy.

For now, I must pack. Till next time.

And in the meantime, try not to love too badly—leave that to me, your resident expert.

¡Hasta la próxima!