Mrs.
Leigh Garnet moved into the Marquee on February 14th. She picked the day specifically because
moving was stressful and if her mind was full of worry it would keep her heart
from breaking. Upon walking into her new apartment
she sighed, there would be a lot of work for her to do.
“Mrs. Garnet, I’m Mark, the
Assistant Manager here at the Marquee,” the young man said. He had snuck up on
her as she stood in the doorway and tapped her on the shoulder. “Sorry I missed
you in the office, I was hoping you had a minute for me to show you around the
apartment.”
Mrs. Garnet felt her breath catch in
her chest and her heart freeze. The man had to be in his early twenties. He was
tall with pale skin and acne. His eyes
were sunken into his face and his dark circles looked tragic against his fair
skin. He was not an attractive man. Mrs. Garnet’s first impression of him was
that he was cocky and arrogant. She watched his mouth move as he walked her
around the apartment and showed her dials on some fancy kitchen appliances and
some strange box that he called an HVAC unit. She didn’t hear anything he said
to her though, all she saw was her husband in him.
When she met Johnathan she was eighteen and about to
graduate from high school. Her mother invited her to a charity event on the
Upper West Side. She was wearing an elegant red floor-length dress. It was one
of her favorites because the way it was cut made her small five-foot-one frame
look so much taller. He told her that he had looked up from his drink and saw her
walking in like something out of a movie. When he approached her she didn’t
think much of him. He was far too tall for her and had an awkward look about
him. “May I introduce myself? My name is Johnathan Garnet.” She knew the name,
his family was very wealthy and respected, “It’s good to meet you Mr. Garnet,
I’m Leigh Warson.” Her mother was estactic when he asked her out on a date the
next evening. Leigh had never shown much aptitude in her schoolwork and didn’t
have any special talents for music or art so she had always planned on
following in her mother’s footsteps and marrying wealthy to secure never having
to work. As Johnathan courted her she grew to like him. He was awkward but full
of himself. She liked the contrast in his personality and saw his weaknesses as
her gains. Despite his family name and money, she didn’t find much competition
for his love. It only took two months for him to propose.
“Well Mrs. Garnet, if you have any questions please
don’t hesitate to call or stop by the management office downstairs. We are open
Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm.”
She looked at his outstretched hand, “Thank you.”
They shook hands and he walked away. It was only a
few minutes before the phone on the wall rang, “Good morning Mrs. Garnet. This
is Chuck, from the service entrance. I have your movers here and was wondering
if I could let them up.”
“Yes, thank you,” she said after a deep breath. She
turned and shuffled over to her front door. Her hands were twisted from
arthritis. She missed when they were slender and soft. She didn’t recognize the
hands she had grown into. Her knuckles stuck out and her hands curled in and
doing anything with them was so difficult. The new handles and locks at the new
apartment were foreign to her and getting them to turn was harder for her to do
than if someone asked her to explain Einstein’s theories. She missed the doors
that she had used for sixty years, the doors at her home with Johnathan.
Halfway through the move, she realized she had too
many possessions for her new abode. She called the management number from the
move-in packet that Mark had given her.
“Thank you for calling the Marquee, this is
Alejandro.”
“This is Mrs. Garnet in 1510. My apartment is too
small, my stuff won’t fit. Can I please have a different apartment?”
“You want a new apartment?” the man’s voice was full
of confusion and shock. “Ma’am, you will have to call the renting office about
that. You signed a lease for that apartment, I can’t help you change
apartments.”
She liked the sound of his voice. She knew the
request was preposterous, but Johnathan had told her that he would never take
no as an answer so she resolved to never take no as an answer either.
For the next month she called
Alejandro as much as she could. She had nothing to do, so it was something to
do. She would call and ask for help using her dishwasher. She would call and
ask for help because her apartment was too cold and she couldn’t figure out how
to use the dials. “Mrs. Garnet,” he would say with exacerbation in his voice,
“the Super determines the temperature in your apartment, we can’t make it
hotter just for you, there are 899 other apartments in the building and most of
them would not be happy if we turned the heat on when it’s 86 degrees outside.”
When she complained about something the office could help with he would tell
her he was going to send a handyman up. She would tell him, “I only want Gio,
send me up Gio!” When it took too long for Gio to get to her apartment she
would call incessantly. Alejandro would tell her, “Mrs. Garnet, there are other
work tickets. You are on the list but we go in order of when people called us.
Gio is in another apartment, he will get to you as soon as he finished his
other jobs.”
One day Alejandro called her up
first thing in the morning, “Mrs. Garnet, I was wondering if I could schedule a
time for you to meet with Mr. Parson. He’s the Senior Manager at the building
and is concerned about all the problems you have been having with the
apartment.”
“Can he do tomorrow at three?” She
asked.
“Of course, Mrs. Garnet. I’ll call
and confirm tomorrow okay.”
She started to panic. She wondered
if she was in trouble for calling the office too much. Would they kick her out
of the building. When she complained that “this place will kill me!” or “I just
can’t live like this, I just can’t,” she didn’t really mean it. What she meant
was that she just couldn’t live without Johnathan. He had always done
everything for her. She had left their co-op apartment because everything
reminder her of him. The bedroom reminded her of all the nights she fell asleep
with him by her side. The kitchen reminded her of all his favorite dinners,
like stuffed peppers and lemon chicken, and all the times she surprised him
with them after he had a rough day at the office. She had to leave their
apartment, but it didn’t change her memories. She had Gio hang her portraits in
the new apartment. Johnathan had always told her that she was his “beauty
queen” and constantly commissioned artists to paint her. At the time she
appreciated him supporting her vanity. Looking at the pictures in the Marquee
just made her sad. She didn’t look like that, despite the hair dye and facials
and expensive creams and makeup. With Johnathan gone there was nobody to call
her a beauty, and the pictures seemed to mock her aging body.
Mrs. Garnet wished that Mark was the
one coming up to see her. She wanted to be reminded of how Johnathan was when
they met. She wanted to relive the days when she thought he was pretentious and
annoying. Mark reminded her of the man she married for all the wrong reasons.
It was easier to think of Johnathan like that, so much easier than thinking
about how she had fallen in love with him. They had been married a year before
she realized she loved him. She had been sick and in bed for three days when he
came home early from work. He brought her flowers, chicken noodle soup, and fresh
French bread. He put on his pajamas, got into bed with her, and said, “I can’t
stand the thought of you here, sick, and alone. Tell me what will make you feel
better and I’ll do whatever it takes. Then, once you are back to your health,
let’s go on vacation, anywhere you want.” She had started to cry and replied,
“I love you.” She had never said it to him before, they both knew why they got
married, but that moment changed it all. It was only a few months later that
they conceived their first child.
She called Alejandro, “It’s too
loud. I can hear my neighbors. They are making so much noise. I think there are
children running around above my head.”
“Can I send someone up to your
apartment to listen to what the noise is that you are hearing?” Alejandro
inquired.
“Do you think I’m lying? I know what
children running around sounds like. I can’t live with this noise.” She was
furious. She had raised two children, she knew what playing and laughing and
growing up sounded like.
“I understand Mrs. Garnet, but if I
can please send someone up they can try and help me figure out which apartment
the noise is coming from.”
“Will you send Gio? Or Mark?”
“They are both busy. I’m going to
send Chuck from security to you okay?”
She
hung up on him. She could deal with noise from the street or people arguing or
a party, she couldn’t deal with children laughing or crying or existing. She
missed her children too much. She never thought she would want children of her
own, and once they were born she couldn’t remember life being happy before she
had them. He oldest was a boy. He was big like his father. The youngest was a
daughter who came out taller than her but nowhere near as tall as her dad and
brother. They had been trouble but she adored them. The night they died she
didn’t know how she would ever be able to breath normal or have dry eyes. They
had been out to a party and the car was involved in a crash on their way home.
A cab ran a light and hit them. They weren’t wearing seatbelts, the driver was.
They died and he lived. Johnathan took care of everything from the funeral to
the lawsuit. She fell in love with him even more after the children died. He
held her together. He never got angry with her as her sorrow consumed her. When
her depression got so bad that she couldn’t get out of bed he started doing
much of his work from home, or more correctly, from bed. She couldn’t believe
the man she married for convenience, the man who was so in love with himself,
could love her above everything else. His company suffered with him so
distracted, but he never complained to her about it. When she finally came out
of her intense grief she gave him all the extra love in her heart, the love
that was meant for their children. She wished Mark would come up and stop the
children and remind her of the Johnathan she put up with.
Her meeting with Mr. Parson wasn’t
as bad as she expected. He was a short man, just a tad taller than herself. He
asked her to show him all the problems with the apartment. When she showed him
the door and how difficult it was to open, he said, “I see what you mean. That
does stick. I’m sorry nobody has fixed this. I’ll make sure Gio comes up today
and makes this easier for you to use. We don’t want you stuck in your
apartment, and we don’t need you feeling unsafe when you can’t get back in. I’m
very sorry that this is like this.” When she showed him the kitchen he told
her, “You have a very nice kitchen, one of the nicest in the building because
it’s so new. Everyone wants the stainless steel appliances that you have. I see
how the shelves are too tall for you, I understand being short. I’m going to
call the main office and see if we can do something about maybe building you
some lower shelves on this blank wall here.” He seemed very nice, but she
didn’t really like him because she would have rather had Mark or Alejandro
visit her.
She spent the rest of the day
calling Alejandro and asking when Gio would be coming up and installing the new
shelves. Each time he would tell her, “Mrs. Garnet we have to get approval from
the main office. You’ll have to sign the alteration agreement once they give it
to us. After all that we can schedule Gio to go and put them in, but he can’t
do that today. It will probably be at least a week before we get the contract,
maybe longer.”
That evening she decided she
couldn’t deal with it any longer. She took her walker and headed downstairs. It
was slow work and exhausting, but it would be worth it. She got to the street
corner at York and 79th and waited for the light to change green. It
had to look like an accident, the poor old lady who couldn’t get across the
street in time. She stepped off the curb and started across the street. After
she was almost halfway she stopped. She was out of breath. The cars were
starting to come and it would soon be over. She didn’t move into the Marquee to
live, she moved there to die. She had nothing left since Johnathan had died of
cancer in December. Horns were honking and cars were swerving around her. She
kept on walking. The tears were pouring down her face as a car pulled up behind
her and a man jumped out.
“Mrs. Garnet, are you okay?” Mr.
Parson said, “let me help you.”
He walked her across the rest of the
street. She knew he was just trying to be a good person, but his act of
kindness felt like another win for the cruelty of life.
