Louie Louie

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

There is a place downtown, all white marble glowing in the ambient sunlight and ceilings that feel as high as Grand Central Station. It’s got a patisserie, and delicate nibbles, and a welcoming bar with bourbons and pernods and a restaurant that smells fantastic and looks expensive, and every table is full.

We are downtown looking for lofts; every building is offering two months free, and I can’t really afford my rent any longer, and it seems more polite to leave my landlady high and dry—and leave my wonderful house and my wonderful yard and my wonderful but boring midcity neighborhood—than ask to renegotiate my lease that’s up in June. Women! Aren’t we stupid?

We walk around the magnificent Jewelry District buildings, looking up at their gleaming golden cornices. We hit at least three lofts, enduring a hard sell that includes little psychological tricksies that just embarrass us. “Look in the mirror,” one plump and lovely agent tells us. “What do you see?” We are supposed to see ourselves, at home in the building and our new fabulous urban lifestyle, when really we just want to know what the rent would be after our two months free, and whether or not there’s a view.

It would be a truly fabulous lifestyle—she doesn’t need to sell us, and so it’s irksome when she tries—but one that would include my cat, Cat, shitting in a box inside my home instead of outdoors, in my huge yard, like God and I intended. I am not concerned about my son living downtown; he would love the bustle, and it is bustling. I have never seen downtown actually feel like NYC, and it does today. I am not concerned about my dog, Lilo, not having a yard to romp in. She is a shepherd; she likes to lie around wherever I am. I am not concerned about me. Only once in my life—okay, twice, if you count how I was afraid we would get looted after 9/11—have I feared for my physical safety, and that was late one night in Prague in the un-tender company of a dozen low-level Russian Mafia thugs.

Look in the mirror. What do you see? I see me!

It has been a hundred degrees today, but even so downtown has a breeze. We settle into the bar at Bottega Louie, and order up a refreshing drink. My boyfriend loves it; it feels like Paris. He will go home and help his daughter with her homework. I will go home and deal with the fallout of my brother’s girlfriend waterboarding him, which makes sense, since he is a terrorist when they are on meth. My mother wants me to go pick him up, and I tell her no, he is not allowed at my house when he is on meth or coming off it, due to the terrorism and all. She is disappointed, in me.

I ponder the places we’ve seen today, and none of them is perfect. I would save $800 a month in rent at any, yet I still want the same square footage, and an individualized home that doesn’t stink of sameness, and nothing beige, and lots of cabinetry for storage, and a rooftop pool while we’re at it, and a cat that doesn’t shit in a box. I am as entitled to my former lifestyle as “TARP Wife” is to hers. She’s picked up “new habits, like making donations anonymously and sneaking in late to black-tie galas after society photographer Patrick McMullan has packed up his camera and gone home.” She also turns off lights when she leaves a room, and makes dreadful lasagnas, and doesn’t go to opening night at the Met, and as awful as of course she is, I feel her on that last one. When you’re no longer editor of a newspaper, opera tickets no longer come free. Poor TARP Wife! Poor Rebecca Schoenkopf! Poor my brother, getting waterboarded! Poor Cat, who will have to shit in a box! The dog and the boy, though, will be happy as can be.

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