The Guy Next Door, Part 2

Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune
by Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell

(Page 2 of 3)

I needed to figure out how much to wager at the auction, so that night I sat down and did the actuarial work. Two hundred and fifty dollars and seventy-seven cents a month was about $3,000 a year. So if John lived another five years, I'd be spending $15,000. If he lived ten years, I'd be spending $30,000. If he lived twenty years, I'd be spending $60,000.

I decided twenty years was a good, conservative figure to work with; after all, it wasn't as if John were some female goatherd in the Urals subsisting on a diet of yogurt. Subtracting $60,000 from the apartment's $130,000 value left me with $70,000. Then I subtracted another $25,000 for cost-of-living increases and the hassle of being your next door neighbor's landlord. That left $45,000. That was my ceiling for bidding.

The auction took place a few days later. The setup was much more casual than I'd imagined: a spindly, middle-aged auctioneer stood at a card table he'd set up under the rotunda of the Supreme Court of the State of New York; four of us bidders and our companions huddled round, clutching our checkbooks. Office workers and other passersby drifted past us, unmindful of the tiny acts of manifest destiny taking place just feet away.

Each of the three apartments underwent a short volley of bidding. Because the apartments were being sold with rights-bearing tenants in them, and because there was no formal process by which potential buyers not living in the building could meet or learn the age and medical status of these tenants, the auction attracted only one outside speculator. In the end, all three apartments were bought by people already living in the building.

I felt like I was taking part in insider trading - a dark, sweet, criminal feeling made only more so when I got the apartment for $17,000.

When I saw John in the hallway the next day, I told him that I'd bought his apartment. His face betrayed no reaction. We agreed that he would slip his rent check under my door the first of each month. John explained that Mr. Z - - had four of his rent checks that he hadn't cashed. John said, "Oh, he's no good. He's a louse." The part of my brain that I had been labeling "I Am a Yuppie Interloper" was slightly relieved by this statement; I knew I'd be a better landlord than Mr. Z - - .

But the following day as I was leaving the building, I ran into a fellow resident I'll call Tina. Tina said she'd heard about the auction, and was glad that Teresa in 2E and I had been able to buy our own apartments, but was dismayed that Jere in 1E had bought Mrs. Englehardt's apartment, because now Jere - a building developer by trade - would be waiting for the frail, ninety-something Mrs. Englehardt "to drop dead."

I corrected Tina, telling her that I had not bought my own apartment - I'd bought John's. She laughed nervously.

Eager to undercut the awkwardness, I started rambling, telling Tina that I didn't know much about John and asking her if he'd ever been married. She said he hadn't. She said the only family she was aware of was a brother who lived in the city.

Later that night, I ran into Tina again, this time in the vestibule of the building. She was picking up a brass doorknob that had fallen off the inside door. "If we get new brass knobs, I'm gonna keep the old ones and hit Jere over the head with them," she told me, referring to the man who was waiting for the old woman to drop dead. "I'm not kidding: he better watch it."

I wondered if I should, too.

But to my friends, the fact that I'd bought an apartment that housed a man who'd had two heart attacks was the stuff of comedy. More than once did I hear the line "Getting enough heavy cream in your coffee, Mugsy?"

My early days of landlordship were marked by a certain suspensefulness. One afternoon about a month after the auction, I heard a beeping sound in the hallway; the battery of our floor's smoke alarm was dying. Not having the right size to replace it with, I decided simply to take the smoke detector down, bring it into my apartment, and remove the dying battery.

When I awoke the next morning and saw the smoke detector on my kitchen table, I got a chill. What if John had died in the night and the cops had found the smoke detector in my apartment. That wouldn't have looked too good for me.

But the biggest change that resulted from buying John's apartment was that I became much more conscious of the fact that if the space between our doors was only thirty-five inches, the walls between us weren't even five inches. I heard John through these walls far more frequently than I had in the past. Usually these sounds were unidentifiable bumps or scrapes, but sometimes they were John muttering or yelling to himself. I knew that John liked a drop of whiskey from time to time, and sometimes in the evening, presumably after some liquid refreshment, he would sing softly. One muffled ditty I heard repeatedly sounded like:

Someone runner sleef Angola.
Doctor leaving town his molar.
She was gentle from I lingered.
Now he is a big brown cow.

Copyright © 2007 by Jenny Offill.

About the Author

Jenny Offill was born in Massachusetts and raised in California and North Carolina. Her stories have appeared in Story, Gettysburg Review, The Black Warrior Review, and Boulevard. Jenny is the author of the novel Last Things. She teaches in the M.F.A. writing program at Brooklyn College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a cofounder of Tin House.