Index   Previous Letter    Next Letter

Apartment Life

I'm sitting in the loungeroom, thinking about facing Oscar.

Oscar is one of the night doormen in my apartment building. As such, I'm sure he's seen enough to make last night's escapade look like a very minor event. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm not so keen on seeing Victor again either. Victor the morning doorman. He has a completely different view of me. He probably thinks I'm an obsessive compulsive, but more of that another time ...

Not that it's so easy to go down to the lobby lately. The elevator company is on strike and every day, one less lift works. With a bit of luck I'll be stranded in my apartment on Monday.

But back to Oscar and last night. Around seven my friend Margaret arrived for dinner. I've known Margaret for over ten years. She's from Perth but we met in New York in the heady days when Bill Clinton was prez, newspaper headlines were about oral sex and Iraq was just another country.

Margaret is a real New Yorker. She dresses in shades of black, weighs next to nothing, works long hours and is always in a hurry. She's a great friend and has only two failings.

One is that she always has to give. She'll never come empty-handed no matter how often you tell her, 'just bring yourself'. The other is that she insists on tidying up the apartment before she leaves.

Last night Margaret arrived in Margaret-style, wearing black and bearing gifts. After I'd put the yellow roses in a vase and the Cab Sav in the wine rack, I set about cooking. Salad and pasta with Margaret's favorite sauce. I made twice what was needed as I'm always determined to send my friend away with doggie bags. She needs to EAT!

We ate, drank and gossiped and drank some more. Suddenly it was almost midnight and the evening was winding up. True to form Margaret goes around, emptying waste paper baskets and putting kitchen garbage into supermarket bags, whilst I packed up her dinner for tomorrow night, putting it into separate containers and into a plastic bag. One jar of baby carrots, a container of cheese ravioli with cheese sauce and another one of salad. There were supermarket bags everywhere.

I'll carry them she insisted. I'll help I said. Loaded up with handbags, shopping bags and the plastic supermarket bags we headed off to the compactor room.

Before I chucked them down the chute I asked her was she sure I only had the garbage. She insisted it was OK. So down they went, plastic bag after plastic bag, hurtling past eleven floors to their destination in the basement. And of course, with them the bag with Margaret's tomorrow's dinner - baby carrots, the lot.

"Where's my dinner?" she wailed.

"God Margaret", I said. "I ASKED you!""I wanted those carrots" was all she could say. We took the elevator to the lobby. Maybe it's OK I told her. They probably aren't squashed yet. Probably they only squash the garbage on the hour, not everytime something comes.

The shiraz was obviously affecting our judgement. Anyone who has ever seen a compactor room in New York would be squeamish about retrieving their remote from the piles of garbage. I once threw tickets to see Nicole Kidman in "Blue Room" down the chute and I was in two minds about retrieving them.

But it seemed perfectly logical to both Margaret and myself to retrieve three cartons of food packed in a flimsy supermarket bag.

We approached Oscar. He was charming when we told him we'd thrown something accidentally down the chute. He took us to the compactor room in the basement. At the bottom of the chute is a huge object that catches the trash. Oscar went fishing.

He had a long stick and he started fishing out bags of garbage. "No not that one", we'd say and he'd fish out another, holding it aloft at the end of the stick while we inspected it.

I started to recognize my own food scraps. It was quite disturbing. Yesterday's coffee grounds and the core of a lettuce looked strangely depressing when set against a background of other people's garbage.

"You're getting closer", I told Oscar.

No doubt Oscar was expecting to come up with a string of pearls, expensive theatre tickets, or a remote control. He looked puzzled when Margaret yelled, "THERE it is!" as he fished out THE supermarket bag. It was draped with other people's garbage, and dripping with a suspicious looking yellow liquid. Even I was having second thoughts.

But anything to make Margaret happy. Oscar gingerly lowered the find into a larger clean bag. And off we went.

Margaret to her apartment in a cab. Me to wait for one of the working elevators to take me home.

Ten minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Margaret. "Where are you?" I asked. In the cab but I left my glasses, she yelled above the noise of New York traffic. At first I thought we must have thrown those down the chute too. Oh no, I thought. Another Oscar experience.

But there they were, on the sofa. Margaret told her cab driver to turn back and I headed again to the elevator, glasses in hand. Back to the lobby.

Oscar, back at his desk, looked up in surprise. I gave him a big smile and muttered, "Now she's left her glasses". I waited outside. I saw the cab arriving and thrust the glasses though the window.

Ever the giver, Margaret jammed several one dollar bills into my hand.

"For Oscar", she yelled, as the cab disappeared into the never-dark night of Manhattan.

Kate Juliff
New York
April 2005