Chapter 74 THE APARTMENT HUNT

Chapter 74 THE APARTMENT HUNT

POV: Reese Calloway

The first apartment took Cole forty seconds.

He walked in, looked left, looked right, looked at the ceiling, and said: "Works for me." He said it the way he said things that were settled, flat and complete, and then stood near the door while the agent explained the building amenities to a space that had already made its decision.

I walked to the window on the east wall.

South-facing light. The window caught it wrong, coming in at an angle that would wash flat by ten in the morning and stay flat for the rest of the day. I wrote east-south, poor depth after 10 in my notebook and walked to the bathroom to check the ventilation for the darkroom conversion.

Inadequate. I wrote that too.

"No," I said.

Cole looked at the agent. The agent looked at his list.

We moved on.

The second apartment Cole approved in sixty seconds. I found the east window blocked by the building next door at a distance that would kill the morning light entirely for eight months of the year. No, I said. Cole nodded and we went back to the elevator.

Third apartment, ninety seconds for Cole, inadequate wall space for the main arrangement, bathroom too small to convert. No.

Fourth, fifth, sixth. Cole approving each one before I'd finished checking the second window. My notes filling up with light assessments and wall measurements and bathroom ventilation ratings that the agent was beginning to look at with the resigned patience of someone who had encountered serious buyers before and understood the process would take as long as it took.

"The seventh one," the agent said, in the elevator between the sixth and seventh, with the tone of someone deploying their strongest option.

The building was on the north side, closer to the lake than my current apartment by four blocks. We went up to the eighth floor and the agent unlocked the door and stepped back.

I walked in.

The main room had floor-to-ceiling windows on the east wall.

Full height, the whole wall, the morning light coming through them and landing across the empty floor in a way that made the room look larger than its dimensions because light at that quality and that volume changed the geometry of a space.

I stood in the middle of the room.

The light moved across the floor in the specific slow way that east light moved, the way I'd been watching from my kitchen window for months, but fuller here, broader, the whole floor catching it rather than the narrow band that came through a standard window frame.

I stood in it and looked at the wall opposite.

Fourteen feet of unbroken wall space on the south side. Ceiling height good. The bathroom was through the door on the left, and I went and checked it and the ventilation was adequate and the space was large enough for the conversion with room to spare.

I came back to the main room.

Cole was standing near the east windows looking at me.

"This is it," he said.

"The ceiling height in the bathroom isn't quite ideal for the drying line length I'd need to—"

"This is it," he said.

I looked at him.

Then I looked at the light on the floor. The way it was already doing the thing I watched for every morning, moving in the slow shift that meant the day was starting properly.

"Yeah," I said. "This is it."

We signed the lease that afternoon.

I sat at the agent's desk and signed my name beside Cole's on the documents and the agent made copies and handed them over and that was the thing done, the east-light apartment on the eighth floor with the floor-to-ceiling windows and the fourteen feet of wall space belonging to us in the formal documented sense.

In the car I took out my phone and photographed the empty main room through the building's glass entrance, the light still visible through the windows from the street. I sent it to Dana with no caption.

She called back in ninety seconds.

I could tell she was crying from the first word and I sat in the passenger seat of Cole's car while he drove and listened to Dana cry happy and said the things you said to Dana when she was crying happy and somewhere around the second minute my eyes did something I hadn't planned.

Cole drove and said nothing and handed me a napkin from the console without looking at me.

I took it.

Moving day was a Saturday.

Cole arrived with a single bag.

Not a bag in addition to the boxes and furniture and accumulated material of a person's life. One bag, the same size as the one he'd packed for training camp, plus his skates, plus his equipment in its separate case.

That was everything.

I stood in the doorway of the new apartment and looked at what he'd brought and then at him.

"That's all of it," he said.

I looked at the bag again.

Then I looked at the fourteen feet of wall space on the south side of the main room and at my boxes stacked near the east windows and at the equipment case for the darkroom conversion already in the bathroom where it belonged.

Cole's things fit into a corner.

My things filled the apartment the way my things had always filled spaces, the camera bags and the print boxes and the books and the darkroom equipment and the accumulated evidence of a person who had been living in her own life with both hands for the past several months.

Cole sat on the floor in the middle of the main room and watched me open boxes and begin arranging the wall.

Documentary prints first, the best twelve from the shoot, in the order I'd established across six weeks of looking at them. Magazine work beside them, the ceramicist and the muralist and the trumpet player and the rest. The new series images I'd selected, the Chicago winter work, going in the space between the window and the far corner.

Cole watched all of it from the floor.

When I stepped back to look at the full arrangement he said: "You should put one of mine up."

I turned and looked at him on the floor.

"You're not a photographer," I said.

"No," he said. "But you took one of me I want on a wall."

I looked at the wall.

I knew exactly which one.