It was like a church—the sun blew lazily through the thick glass brick, casually diffuse, gently floating down like a clean sheet, smelling of toothpaste and of Tide. Rose petals, unswept, and so gone sweet, had settled on the floor. And a crackly piano wafted from down the hall, unstressed.
I mean, really though, it was more like a shithole. The glass brick was grimy, and to it—seemingly at all times—gripped at least some degree of moisture. And the floor tiles, a once-rich cream, had long since gone bad (a bottle of superglue stood at attention on the shelf next to the thorny plant, ready for when they’d loosen). That wallpaper ached and peeled; the ceiling light would whine, the fan would groan, and the faucets shrieked.
But I’d set myself down on the floor, by the door, my feet propped against the bathtub, and reach for the grimy, peeling, long-since-gone-bad magazines. My fingers, sifting through the soft paper silt, past The New Yorker and past Time, would clamp to a copy of Christopher Street, its pages frayed and warped but wholly legible in that lukewarm light. Then I’d read, lingering until the piano stopped—and suddenly, it was time to go.