How Amy and I Found a Home in New York City

Real estate brokers always talk about how important it is to listen, how that's how they learn about what their clients are looking for so they can make the best match from the available inventory. They talk about other things, too: their kids, their favorite restaurants, how much money they made on their own last move. They're very sociable people.

As a believer in giving people a lot to work with, I go over our simple needs carefully with every broker we call. With Amy's womb swelling by the day, a nursery for the bambino is a must, a lower floor highly preferable. Working at home as I do, a third bedroom in which to ply my modest trade. Finally, given our culinary enthusiasms, would an eat-in kitchen be too much to ask in our humble price range?

"Oh, heavens no," said the broker.

"No we can't have one, or no it isn't too much to ask?"

He laughed. "You said it," he said. "That's the thing about this market, though. I remember back in 1978, I purchased a garden floor-through over on Union Street it from an elderly gentleman who'd raised his family there. He was a professor at the University, I think. When the time came for me to move over to the East Side, what a time I had selling that place! My oh my. And mind you, that was six years ago." He shook his head.

The broker's car smelled of purse leather, air freshener, and Freon. He tended to run stop signs and idle at green lights. "This first place is a nice one," he said. He ran down the vital signs: two bathrooms, gas-burning fireplace, electric kitchen, two bedrooms, wood floors. "There's a great Italian restaurant on the ground floor. Real authentic, not all sterile and antiseptic like most places. Meatball as big as your head."

"Two bedrooms?" Amy said from the back seat.

"Big as your head," he said, piloting the Saab with both hands as if it might start fighting back.

From the outside, it looked promising enough: a tall, narrow brownstone with curtained windows, and here and there a struggling windowbox plant, a symbol perhaps of our own hardy determination to find a niche in the city's concrete and brick. Shabbily picturesque, the promised café dimly visible through the grease-streaked first floor windows. "Number thirteen," the broker muttered as he fumbled with a thick ring of keys. "Top floor. Great light."

Amy nudged me. "Fifth floor walk-up? With a stroller?"

"Love these old buildings," the broker said as we struggled up the deeply worn wood steps of the tight stairwell. "This particular brownstone was renovated in 1987 by a team from the University. Laundry right across the street, I think it's open around the clock. I see people hanging out there at all hours, anyway."

The doorlocks presented a fresh challenge, but eventually we were admitted to a long, narrow kitchen. He flicked a switch, and a yellowing fuorescent ceiling fixture lit the bare walls. "Bathroom," he said, nodding his head to our left. He led us to the wide doorless doorway at the opposite end of the room. "First bedroom is right here, and here's your second. Easy access—for the baby, of course." He bowed to Amy, smiling broadly.

"Where is the living room?"

"Hmm?" he said from the stove, which he had been caressing fondly. He gestured around us. "It's not just an eat-in kitchen, it's a live-in kitchen! Here's your gas burning fireplace right here. Just got to find the attachment." He rooted around in the drawer beneath the aging range.

"But there are no counters," Amy said. "By the time we put in counters, we won't even have room for a table."

"Air conditioner slot below the window," he said. "No need to block the view. Hey, you know who lives across the street? Guess." The second place was immediately more appealing. A pre-war classic six, parquet floors in the kitchen and entry hall, cherry wainscoting, treetop views. I admired the Wedgwood stove on my way through the tin-ceilinged kitchen to the former pantry that would serve as my office. The shutters matched the paneling on the walls. A ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. "There's a small wood stove that goes here," said the broker, consulting the notes on his clipboard. "It's being cleaned."

Amy skipped in, breathless. "I found a third bathroom off the second bedroom. And the master bedroom has a claw-foot tub."

I turned to the broker. "Now you're talking," I said, and clapped him on the arm heartily. "I can't believe this is in our range."

"Yep," he said, consulting his notes once again. "One point two, and I'll bet we could get them down to one point one fifty. Board approval should be a breeze—rubber stamp. Maintenance is, let's see, thirteen hundred. Which really isn't bad, I mean, this place has got to be three thousand feet, right?" The third place was right down the middle of the plate. Three bedroom, one and a half baths, the kitchen open to a large dining room, nice big living room at the other end of a long hall. Second floor walkup—not so bad at all. Marginally adequate funds in the co-op's reserve, but the maintenance fee was low. "What's this?" I said, rapping on a small door halfway down the hall.

"Don't do that! Don't!" He swatted my hand away from the knob. "You must never, never open this? Never, never knock on it! Don't linger beyond the keyhole!" His face had grown red, and his hair stood out from his head in agitated wisps. Gradually he calmed down, dropped his shoulders, smoothed his hair. He gently grasped the doorknob. "Locked anyway," he said in his normal voice. "The bakery across the street has the best muffins in town. I get my muffins there, even though I live all the way over on the East Side." He raised his eyebrows in self-congratulation. Amy and I talked it over. They were really the best three units we'd seen yet—much better than the stuff we saw that one really hot week, when Amy overheated and fainted and we were afraid she might miscarry. The second one had been so nice—I almost convinced myself to try to convince Amy, but even I couldn't see any sense in spending nearly a million dollars over our limit. Much as I tried.

"We could put a little piece of carpet there," Amy said. "To quiet people's footsteps, and remind them to hurry past. You could make up a clever sign or something."

"It would be great for developing the kids' imagination," I said.

"And how loud could the noise be?"

"What noise?"

"Oh, you were in the other room. He just said something about how it made this noise sometimes during the night, but it was no big deal. No louder than the F train, which runs under here too."

"Mmm," I said. We called the lawyer, the mortgage broker, and Amy's mother to see what we could pull together. They always say that the first law of real estate is that whatever happens, was meant to be. If you don't get a place, it's because you were meant to get a different one, the place where you end up, and you look back and you're so glad it worked out this way. It's like anything else that way. I'm so glad that monster black-balled our board approval. I'd never dreamed I'd live on the water, and now we do. We go to sleep to the sound of the waves lapping on the riverbanks, and awake to the call of the seabirds and the longshoremen, who clear their throats in the early morning like cows lowing in the pasture. I watch them smoke the day's first cigarette through the airholes cut in the side of the box.

Amy had thought a washing machine box might do, but I held out for a refrigerator carton, and we're all glad I did. It's wide enough that we could tuck a smaller box into the far end to make kind of a sleeping loft for little Lulu, and I can really stretch out my legs without getting my feet wet, even on the rainiest nights, when we lie side by side listening to the soft patter of raindrops on wet cardboard, and think about how lucky we are to have each other.