The Door to My Apartment Cracked Open

The door to my Hell’s Kitchen studio apartment cracked open just a few months more than 35 years ago. And my life has never been the same. 

It was a summer’s night, and my (then) boyfriend Howard and I had gone out for Mexican food at Jose Sent Me, our favorite Mexican restaurant near my apartment on West 56th St. 

It was the place where only months earlier we had decided to make our 4.5-year friendship a “thing.”  Not the type of friends-with-benefits kind of thing. Something deeper and enduring.

Before then, we saw each other most summer weekends in a shared rental house in the Catskills mountains. We were the only two single people in a house of couples. 

We sang together, barbequed together, floated down the Delaware together in large blow-up rafts. Our mutual housemates and friends Judy and Lenny and Cindy and Andy all thought we would make a perfect couple. He played the guitar, I liked to sing. He grew up in Boston, me in Philly. We liked the same kind of movies and books. 

At summer’s end and throughout the rest of the year, we would get together, the couples, plus Howard and I, for a movie or dinner, or a hike in the woods. But never did Howard and I meet separately. I didn’t call him, and he didn’t call me. 

It’s not that I didn’t want to. I felt something more than friendship on those lazy raft days floating down the Delaware. But I was not sure Howard felt the same. And I had my boyfriends, though they weren’t the kind I’d bring home to my parents.

There was Larry, a wannabe rock star from Indiana who conveniently, lived in my building. He liked me just fine but not enough to stop serial-dating the other 20-somethings in my building.

David lived in Philly and would come up for weekend visits. And he said he liked my big blue eyes. But he also was partial to young girls 10 years my junior.

Then there was Robert, the photographer who told me he loved me in nightly calls before I went to sleep. In the guise of transparency, he let me know that though I was special, I would never be the “one.” I was not “his type.” 

And so while he told me he loved all those overnights at his Chelsea apartment, he never bothered to dump the mascara-stained Kleenex left in the bathroom from the last girl who had spent the night. 

So, at the end of that fourth summer, when Howard announced that he was leaving the city for a job back in his native Boston, a swell of sadness washed over me. I had never told him how I felt all those summers, and now I would never get the chance.

Or so I thought. Howard had been gone only a few months when he started writing me letters. Not love letters. Not “I miss you” letters. No, he had written to tell me that life back in Boston in a job that placed him just blocks from his beloved Red Sox was not turning out the way he wanted. He was moving back to New York City for a video editing job and was coming back to look for apartments. 

“Could I meet him for dinner? Maybe we could go for a hike on Saturday?” He hadn’t asked Lenny and Judy, Cindy or Andy. He had just asked me.

And so it began. Hikes and dinners, movies and plays. But still no confession of long-lost love. Not even a kiss at the door. I asked my friend Maryanne and her husband Jimmy to size us up during one of those theater dates. Something was different between us, they agreed. Something was up. But what?

A Valentine’s card from Howard—the first ever from him—signaled a what’s what. I crafted my own card on pink speckled paper festooned with hearts in response. I had always felt something for him, I wrote, much more than friendship. I asked him if he felt the same. 

I gave him multiple-choice answers to choose from: 

A – You’re talking science fiction, forget about it. 

B – I’ve never thought about it. 

C – I feel just the same. 

D – None of the above. 

I stuffed the envelope and mailed it.

Just two days later, my phone rang. “Yes,” he said, when I answered. “I feel the same. Let’s go out to talk about it.” 

We made a date to go to Jose Sent Me. Two golden frozen margaritas later, there was less to talk about. The first kiss, then the two-block trip back to my apartment, and well, the rest was history. 

A history of nights together—at the Argentinean boxer dive bar down Eighth Avenue, at the pizza joint  around the corner on Ninth Avenue, or during that golden fifth summer—the house in the Catskills. Only this time we didn’t go our separate ways after those long drives back to the city.

We didn’t go our separate ways the night we returned to my apartment to find the door cracked open. 

And that was a good thing. Because when I tentatively pushed the door in, I saw an apartment in disarray. 

Broken glass from the fire escape window pushed in. The gate around the window bent and open. The contents of my refrigerator thrown helter-skelter on my living room-cum-bedroom floor. 

Nothing had been spared — not the moldy cheese from last month’s trip to the Red Apple, not the dirty towel from the shower he or she had taken. Not the toilet that had not been flushed.

The police came, took my vitals, then left, never dusting for prints. I felt so violated, afraid to be alone.

That night, Howard and I cleaned the broken glass and cleared the debris as best we could. We huddled together under the covers. 

And in the wee hours of the morning, he rose, making his way to the subway back to his apartment, where he would pick up his car, find an open hardware store, drive back to my apartment in the city, and fix the broken pieces my intruder had left behind.

I was not in the apartment to see all of this. I had gone to work, not wanting to spend one more minute alone in the apartment. 

I came back at day’s end, turning the new key my super had given me to unlock the door. I cracked the door ever so slightly. 

The apartment had been cleaned spotless. The window was covered with wood. And in the center of the room, on the table where Howard and I had shared some 55 meals together was a vase filled with red roses with a note: When things seem disheveled and in disrepair, just know that you are loved.

Several weeks later, when my dear friend Keith’s boyfriend was laying in an AIDS ward dying and his mother June needed a place to stay, I gave her my apartment and moved in with Howard. I never moved back.

Months later, on a cold December night, on my birthday, Howard asked me to marry him. And, I said, “Yes, yes, I would.”

I did not think I would ever find love all those years on 56th St. I never thought I would find someone who found me just enough.

But then someone entered my apartment unannounced and left a mess. More than 35 years ago, the door to my Hell’s Kitchen studio apartment cracked open just ajar. And my life has never been the same.