I once owned an apartment with a splendid terrace in a twin-tower Moderne building in the West Nineties, and for several years after I sold the place, I made a point of staying away from the neighborhood. I only saw the building if I was sitting on the left-hand side of an airliner coming down the Hudson. There it was, 5, feet below, my terrace and the windbreak of spruce trees in boxes and the awning under which my friends and I used to sit around a glass-topped table on warm nights and drink wine and talk ourselves silly.
And then it was gone and the plane banked over Staten Island and made its approach into La Guardia, where I caught a cab to our new apartment, three blocks west of the old one.
A marriage ended in that first apartment. I spent many evenings in the living room, writing letters to my wife in Copenhagen, reading her replies. And after the marriage, a romance began and ended there. And then I met Jenny, whom I would marry. And three women is too many for one apartment. So I sold it. On the last day, I walked through the rooms with a video camera and taped each one, the little kitchen like a Pullman galley with the stainless-steel cupboards and the fridge with glass doors, the gloomy dining room full of books, the living room with the immense work table, the anonymous Sheraton-like guest room, the master bedroom with a sitting area and writing desk and bathroom with an old green-tiled shower stall.
That night we held a candlelit last supper, my love and I, and stood on the terrace for one last time, and in the morning the movers came. But then, one day last August, five years later, the loss of it came crashing down on me. We were in London. My 2-year-old daughter and I were walking along the Serpentine, keeping pace with a pair of swans swimming. A twelfth-floor terrace in New York is a large white elephant.
Weeks go by when a chill wind blows and you venture out only to water plants and hose off the black grit that New York deposits on us daily. Every year the terrace springs leaks and workers come and replumb a drain, caulk a seam, replace some tiles.
