Gotham Diary:
Clerical Error
9 July 2015

For a few days, I pray, it is going to be very quiet around here. Kathleen has flown up to Maine for her annual vacation/bucolic spa retreat/collapse. She stays with old friends; they were camp counselors together, back in the early Seventies. (They were all campers together before that.) Two of them have houses on a nearby lake (it’s called a “pond”); a third alumna has a house right across the much bigger lake from the old camp. Now that they’re all respectable matrons, they find themselves roped in for an afternoon, or even a full day, of volunteer housekeeping; last year, they squared away the meeting house and museum. The owner of the camp, a grandson of the man who ran it when they were girls, is a little bit afraid of them; it seems that Kathleen’s cohort is unique in keeping watch from a nearby vantage.

I always wonder what the current campers make of them, although I’m sure that it involves the usual reactions: a bit of shuddering, and a determination never to “look like that.” Plus, how weird is it that the old broads know all the songs. Could they really have been young once, too? Meanwhile, Kathleen and her friends laugh over old scrapes and near-scandals that the youngsters, to hear them, would turn pale as the high moon.

But the important thing is that Kathleen is allowed to sleep unconscionably late, and to take naps before meals — to the preparation of which she is called upon to contribute nothing.

Kathleen almost always packs for a trip after dinner. If it’s a short business trip, or a weekend with her father in North Carolina, the packing takes a few hours. If it’s for a longer trip, and she has just, say, changed the place of her employment, and her brain is fully occupied churning out a manic stock ticker full of unfamiliar symbols, packing takes longer, and is somewhat frenetic. I didn’t complain or say anything, but I was a nervous wreck by the time she crawled into bed. I myself am a very organized packer: I know where everything is; I always take the same things and proceed in the same order, and I am always done much sooner than I expect to be. But that’s because I used to be like Kathleen, or perhaps much worse, and had to reform or die. When Kathleen packs the way she did last night, I’m clawed back to the bad old days, as if by the ghost of Christmas Missed. It’s too awful.

As further proof that my blameless way of life is no protection, this morning, shortly after Kathleen called to say that she had landed safely and so on, the house phone rang. I don’t like it when the house phone rings, unless I’m waiting for Chinese delivery or a case of Absolut. I have nothing to fear from the FBI or the KGB, but I’m a fervent dreader of the Wrong Man scenario — the nightmare of which is always heralded by an unexpected doorbell — in our case, the doorman calling on the house phone. The doorman on duty is new, and I haven’t worked out his accent yet (it’s not Latino), so I didn’t fully understand him, but I gathered that a Mrs Somebody from “our office” wanted to come up to the apartment. In thirty-five years’ residence in this building, no one from”the office” has ever visited our apartment. Within seconds, I was little more than a gaggle of chattering bones. In the middle of writing a letter, I found that I could not type, I was shaking so badly. Mrs Somebody kept failing to ring the doorbell, giving me more than enough time to make the bed — really, too much more.

Then Kathleen called again. Trying to tell her what was going on, while trembling all the more with gratitude for having her at the other end of the phone, I was barely more comprehensible than Leporello announcing the Stone Guest. She kept insisting that it would be all right, but I recognized this as yet another herald of the Wrong Man scenario.

The house phone rang once more. This time, it was Mrs Somebody herself. Her voice was vaguely familiar. I asked what the trouble was, and she said that she didn’t like to discuss it in the lobby — because, of course, you can’t use the house phone from the office, you have to go out to the doorman’s desk — but she did let on that the problem was “our account.” Could I come downstairs and talk about it? I said I’d be right down. I grabbed a blank check and a Post-It and headed for the elevator.

A few months ago, while I was paying the bills, I noticed that an inexplicable “past due” figure, in the amount of $7000, was appearing at the bottom of our rent bill. What could that mean? And why weren’t we being hounded about it? In the old days — but then, Helmsley Spear did know what they were doing — a shaming notice would have been slipped under our door by the twentieth of the month. I asked Kathleen to talk to the office about it (because I’m a chickenshit when it comes to the office, as my paroxyms of shaking betrayed), but she had too many other things on her mind.

But our problem wasn’t the $7000. The nice woman who keeps the office humming directed me to a glassed-in conference room, where I was joined by another nice woman, the one who showed us the apartments that we might take in the lieu of the one that we should have to leave. So this was Mrs Somebody! Perhaps she had remarried. We sat down and I asked what the problem was. She showed me a piece of paper with a table on it. I didn’t really understand the table until it was no longer necessary, but she told me that we had not paid rent in April, May, or June. When I said, basically, What?, she scrunched her face and said, “I know, it’s so weird, you’re always so punctual.”

I wrote out the check for the July rent, which I had intended to hand in tomorrow, and assured Mrs S that I would produce copies of the canceled checks for April, May, and June, which I had written and mailed and which I’d ticked off a list in conference with Kathleen, who, every couple of days, reviews our banking situation. The checks had all cleared; somebody other than us had that money. As I explained this (because we are so punctual &c), the pressure dropped to normal. There was no longer an emergency, with eviction notices and sheriff’s tape lurking in the background. I went back upstairs quite relieved. I called Kathleen to tell her how things had worked out, and she agreed to contact the bank later this afternoon.

When I hung up, I realized that I’d forgotten to make a note of the rent payment’s check number — that’s why I had taken the Post-It. Too dizzy to think of anything else to do, I went back downstairs to the office. After a minute, Mrs S came forward and told me the number. I thanked her and left. Then, out in the hallway, as I was about to press the elevator button, she called me back. “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “They were crediting the money to your old apartment.”

She’s a nice lady. She didn’t apologize for the misunderstanding, but this is New York. Her smile made me whole.

And, now, can we please be quiet for a few days?