Read Online I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron - Free Book Online

bedrooms. It seemed to me that if I lived in the building for twenty-four years, the fee would amortize out to only a thousand dollars a year, a very small surcharge—only $2.74 a day, which is less than a cup of cappuccino at Starbucks. Not that there was a Starbucks then. And not that I was planning to live in the Apthorp for twenty-four years. I was planning to live there forever. Till death did us part. So it would probably amortize out to even less. That’s how I figured it. (I should point out that I don’t normally use the word “amortize” unless I’m trying to prove that something I can’t really afford is not just a bargain but practically free. This usually involves dividing the cost of the item I can’t afford by the number of years I’m planning to use it, and if that doesn’t work, by the number of days or hours or minutes, until I get to a number that is less than the cost of a cup of cappuccino.)
    But never mind the money. This, after all, is not a story about money. It’s a story about love. And all stories about love begin with a certain amount of rationalization.
    I had never planned to live on the Upper West Side, but after a few weeks, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, and I began, in my manner, to make a religion out of my neighborhood. This was probably a consequence of my not having any other religion in my life, but never mind. I was a block from H&H Bagels and Zabar’s. I was a half block from a subway station. There was an all-night newsstand across the street. On the next corner was La Caridad, the greatest Cuban-Chinese restaurant in the world, or so I told my friends, and I made a religion of it too.
    But my true religious zeal focused on the Apthorp itself. I honestly believed that at the lowest moment in my adult life I’d been rescued by a building. All right, I’m being melodramatic, but that’s what I believed. I’d left New York City a year earlier to move to Washington, D.C., for what I sincerely thought would be the rest of my life. I’d tried to be cheerful about it. But the horrible reality kept crashing in on me. I would stare out the window of my Washington apartment, which actually had a commanding view of the lions at the National Zoo. The lions at the National Zoo! Oh, the metaphors of captivity that leapt to mind! The lions lived in a large, comfortable space, like me, and had plenty of food, like me. But were they happy? Et cetera. At other times, the old Clairol ad—“If I’ve only one life to live, let me live it as a blonde”—reverberated through my brain, although my version of it had nothing to do with hair color. If I’ve only one life to live, I thought, self-pityingly, why am I living it here? But then, of course, I would remember why: I was married, and my husband lived in Washington, and I was in love with him, and we had one baby and another on the way.
    When my marriage came to an end, I realized that I would never again have to worry about whether the marginal neighborhood where we lived was ever going to have a cheese store. I would be free to move back to New York City—which was not just the Big Apple but Cheese Central. But I had no hope that I’d ever find a place to rent that I could afford that had room enough for us all.
             
    Whenever you give up your apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there” is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a visitor, the city seems to turn against you. It’s much more expensive (because you have to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don’t mind this when you live here; when you live here, it’s part of the