Jennifer Gersten

Artist-in-Residence

Some years ago I was living in an old mansion on the other side of the city. A wealthy couple needed an attendant in exchange for free lodging, as the person who occupied the post was moving overseas. The house was six immense floors if you included the attic and basement apartment and contained, at any given turn, a cabinet heaving with silver, birthday wishes from some commander-in-chief, an armored safety deposit box braced for the end of civilization. In the dining room there hung a tentacular gold chandelier strewn with dried hyacinths that struck me as the stuff of myth, like a god frozen mid-metamorphosis. The back of the house featured a courtyard with a spiral staircase from which you could rubberneck onto the courtyards down the rest of the block, including the basketball-playing teenager two doors down whose dribbling, I would later learn, comprised the neighborhood ostinato.

My duties included occasionally vacuuming, though the couple’s ancient objects, many of which were truly ancient, made more sense to me covered in dust; if anything, I should have let myself collect dust in order to fit in. The most onerous of these tasks was watering their twenty or so plants, not a few of which lightened my burden by dying immediately after falling into my care. Because the owners were often traveling, the house was mostly mine. I had the idea that the owners were too accustomed to their money to even realize what sort of deal we had made in exchange for doing almost nothing.

About a year into my residency, the couple left. What started as a family vacation had been engulfed by an international emergency. In the interim, the couple said I could stay. I would be allowed to live there by myself, free of obligation, while the world sorted itself out. Suddenly I could set up on any of five floors in this house at the city’s heart and practice the violin—my profession, under less catastrophic circumstances—unseen and unheard, a fabulous privilege.

Within a few days, however, the situation already felt ridiculous. I practiced at a pulverizing volume, walking between the fifteen sumptuous rooms, playing something different in each one, playing not even for the sake of getting better, but just because I could. Long after I left a room, I imagined the sounds still lingering: sonatas swinging from the chandeliers, scales slithering into my bed.

When the owners told me they were finally on their way back and that I’d need to leave,  I planned my move gladly. My need to fill up all the empty space had become compulsive, and I thought I could use a place with fewer floors, more boundaries. That very night, I started my search for a place where I wouldn’t be living alone, and found my roommate Lucy. I’m listening to her now. On the other side of our shared wall, the show she is watching has been proceeding in the same fashion for some time. Someone yells, someone else yells back, there is a crash or a clink, then there is a long stretch of mumbling, then the yelling restarts. I cannot hear exactly what they are yelling or why, but from the diversity of voices I can at least report that everyone on the show is getting a fair chance to express themselves.

I’d ask her what she’s watching, but she made clear from the outset her disdain for my questions. We met on a housing website for young people, where her profile was among the few not claiming to enforce an “intentional household,” implying authoritarian rule by vegans. In our first messages to each other, she said that she was a floral designer professionally, but upon moving in I discovered that the apartment plants were starting to plan their own funerals, which I guess is a sort of work-life balance. She was dismissive of my enthusiasm, and I was starting to suspect we might not be a good match. But when she said she didn’t mind that I was a musician who needed to make substantial noise on a regular basis, I thought about getting her name tattooed. This I reconsidered on the day that I moved in, when she dropped my key out the window by way of greeting and withdrew for the rest of the night. I lugged my boxes inside and opened the door to find her cats darting in and out of her room like panicked nurses. They still scramble if I come close, as does Lucy.

At Lucy’s, I remembered that closer the quarters you keep with strangers, the more you have to keep up the pantomime of privacy. At first I was alarmed by her reluctance, sometimes even her refusal, to respond to anything I said or asked, or how her calculations to avoid ever making eye contact could launch the next space mission. But now I have learned the drill. If one of us sees the other approaching, the other averts her eyes. If one is in her room, the other pretends she did not see limbs flashing behind the cracked door. This is the footnote to all small shared spaces, that they are even smaller if you take into account everything you are trying not to notice.

This tendency of hers was what ultimately made Lucy the perfect roommate. The violin is the instrument that, perhaps above any other, demands an early start on account of how long it takes to become even remotely proficient. The novitiate’s squeaks and scratches are easier on the ears when the novitiate is also cute, less so when she is paying her own taxes. You cannot let on to a musician that you can hear them working without firing their apology reflex, though there is nothing they can do about the state of affairs. Mention that you have enjoyed the sound of practicing and the musician will understand that you have issued an eviction warning. Lucy, blissfully, has never said a word, but I worry all the time that she might, and so I am careful. When her TV characters drift over the wall, I let them in without a word.

Some weeks ago, I was in my room when I overheard an electric guitarist whom I think lives on the floor above. For many months now, I have heard this person work through the same few passages, practiced mostly as one should. Slowly, diligently, until they ring. Starting and restarting, more slowly this time, now much too fast, now the bitterly slow tempo of someone who knows better. A brief silence, for thinking, then restarting. I have memorized every note that this guitarist plays, and in the spirit of romance, I think about playing the passages back as a kind of echolocation. I place my hand against the wall, as though I am quieting an animal. The sound squeezes into my room, lands on its feet, sniffs around. I stick a finger in its mouth and feel the sharpness.