Page 54, “The Persuasion”
It was already very sticky, ninety degrees at seven, the elevators weren’t working, my room was on the twelfth floor, and we’d only snagged one of the cotton hampers-on-wheels that the college provided for students vacating the premises. The day after graduation, I had to move out of the dorms and into the apartment, which meant that we had to get up early.
In reality, most of my clothes were now in his closets, as were my most precious books (Pippi Longstocking, The Golden Notebook, and my slender Penguin volume of Mr. Donne) on his shelves, I still had an ungodly number of objects in my dorm on W. 112th and Riverside. How one young person who did not have much money and who claimed to eschew the material world had acquired so many possessions was bewildering.
With its wide steps, Tonin’s building, The Magestic, was my favorite on his street. Granite lions sat to the sides of oak doors so massive that opening them required leaning in with the full weight of my body. The original mailboxes, each with its own combination, lined the wall of the marble foyer and the iron-cage Otis Elevator from 1893 was still in operation.
Tonin had the sunny five-room corner apartment on the fifth floor. His bedroom windows and the kitchen faced east toward the stairs sweeping up to St. John the Divine; the living room, filled with coleus, spider plants, and 14 avocado trees that he had sprouted from their pits over the past year then nourished to bushy five-foot heights while hoping they would pollinate, faced south. The room that had been Janos’s painting studio when he lived there during college was now Tonin’s for design, facing north and overlooking a small courtyard belonging to a building on 112th Street.
