New York City Breakup

We have less than a week left in NYC, the place that I have called home for nearly eleven years. Behind those eleven years are seven apartments, two boroughs, six jobs, two graduate schools, visits to five hospitals, one marriage and one birth. I feel a little nostalgic about leaving, but mostly I feel betrayed.

I never thought I would leave New York. My entire childhood I dreamed about living here. I watched the movies of the 80s and learned that you could work in a bookstore, yet live in a cute apartment on the Upper West Side and have lots of literary friends (Crossing Delancey); you could get a job on Wall Street, change your hairstyle, read the Post and suddenly find yourself merging and acquiring your way into your own office with a window and a secretary (Working Girl); you could be a starving artist and still rent a gigantic SoHo loft with amazing light and quirky neighbors (any of a billion movies). When I first moved here a lot of those things were no longer true - no one seemed to have secretaries any more, and most offices were cubicles -- but some of them were.

I rented my first apartment near Union Square in a beautiful pre-war doorman building for $1600 a month. It was almost twice what I had been paying in Chicago, but it was everything I had imagined my New York existence would be. And this was because while the rent was high, it was still within the range of what I could afford on my 25-year-old salary. I lived there for three years, and many of my friends lived in walking distance. No one lived in Brooklyn. Why would you?

I went out all the time. I had a 20-something's dream refrigerator -- half a bottle of wine stuck in the door, a jar of mustard, milk, nail polish. I got a boyfriend, changed jobs, broke up, changed jobs again, got a new boyfriend. A friend of mine who was in her 40s would sometimes call and say, "How are you and your young life?"

I discovered pedicures, took writing classes, rode the 14th St. bus to Chelsea Piers and spent lonely summer days sitting in a lounge chair overlooking the Hudson River, trying to make my way through The Power Broker. I never managed to get very far. My rent went up.

I broke up with my boyfriend, changed jobs, discovered martinis, lost weight, found yoga, road tripped, wrote more, got fired. My rent went up.

And then, almost as though I had sleepwalked over the Brooklyn Bridge, I found myself living in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was not my dream. It was a perfectly nice place to live, and it got nicer as the years went on, but it wasn't the plan. But then there was marriage and then there was Milo, and suddenly we needed three bedrooms -- two for sleeping and one to store all the crap that children come with. Our rent went up. Manhattan was out of the question.

Also Manhattan was no longer Manhattan. You could no longer be twenty five and rent a one bedroom in Union Square. You could no longer thrill to the danger of a midnight subway ride. The people started to look different. There was money everywhere. There we thirty-year-old finance people talking about which $3 million apartment to buy at the table next to us at my birthday dinner. There was Prada in SoHo. The price of admission at the MoMa went up.

In the time since I had moved to Brooklyn, so did everyone else. And Manhattan became something clean, exclusive, and boring. And Brooklyn. Well, now it's expensive too. When I'd dreamed my Manhattan childhood dream, I'd forgotten to add "smart real estate investment" or "job in finance" to the list. High-paying job: check. Published book: check. Husband: check. Baby: check. But oh, those qualifiers. REALLY high paying job was what I needed. How could I have known? You never needed it before.

And so, eleven years later, a little heart broken, I'm leaving. I'm sorry it had to end this way, Manhattan. I loved you so.

Next He'll Be Ordering A Pizza

This morning, as I was packing up my laptop and files so I could schlep into Manhattan for a meeting, the doorbell buzzed.

"Who is it?" I called into the intercom. It was a little early for UPS; my money was on Mormons or ConEd.

"Police," said the intercom.

This seemed highly unlikely, so instead of buzzing in the "police" I walked to the front door, where there were indeed two of New York's finest standing on the stoop.

"Yes?" I asked, opening the door. I expected them to say they were going door-to-door alerting people about something. Or maybe this was about that weird truck that had been parked across the street for two weeks, which Steven and I had been theorizing was either a mobile terrorist cell or the CIA.

"We got a call for help from your apartment," said one of the cops.

"I don't think so," I said.

"From a small child," said the officer - he seemed to be the designated talker. "Do you have any children?"

"Yes, but he's 13 months old," I said.

"Well," said the officer, "someone from your apartment dialed zero and hung up. When that happens we have to dispatch a unit."

Two thoughts ran simultaneously through my mind. The first was that I now finally knew how to get a member of the NYPD to show up at my door. I remembered back to a night four years earlier when, after multiple 2am calls to the police about a car alarm that had been going off for all night, Steven and I had finally slept in the living room. The police had said they were busy.

The second thought was that Milo had made his first successful phone call.

"My son sometimes plays with the phone," I explained. He'd probably dialed zeo by accident, screamed "mama dada broom up!" into the phone, and hung up.

"We still need to check the apartment," said the officer. The came in and looked around, then asked to see the baby, who had of course just fallen asleep. I took them into Milo's room where they shined a flashlight into his face to make sure he was alive. Milo immediately woke up and started crying.

"Okay," said the officer. "Seems fine."

"Thanks," I said, following them out of the nursery. "Sorry."

"We just have to check these things out," said the cop.

We both stood in the front hall feeling slightly ridiculous, and then the police left.

"Sorry I'm late," I said when I got to my meeting. "My son called the cops."