Did I insinuate that she designed and implemented its construction?
She didn�t.
Narcissists never undertake a task that someone else is willing to complete for them, and true to form, she coerced an ex-boyfriend to drive down from upstate and help her with the construction.
He arrived with a pickup truck and a plastic case full of battery-powered tools that would have inspired my envy if they didn�t seem to run out of juice every fifteen minutes.
Steve, or Mike, or whatever his name was seemed like a nice enough fellow, but he obviously harbored some severe hidden deficiency that would explain their now-defunct relationship.
At this point, I was becoming convinced that no one could willingly enter into a relationship with someone as mentally unstable as she was without the benefit of some glaring self-hatred or loathing. So when he appeared to be superficially normal, I theorized that he probably suffered from any number of personality disorders that would explain their connection.
Perhaps he was a codependent. Perhaps they shared a common bond through some pervasive substance abuse. Or perhaps he was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, a romantic casualty of happenstance.
Alas, I�ll never know.
So when Jeff, or Ted, or whatever his name was arrived, he immediately set to work. As a professional electrician, he�d had some rudimentary carpentry experience, so a square wood platform elevated above a door would naturally be a simple task. By the time I got home, the loft was up in the air and he was already applying the deck.
The ruemate had apparently contributed an occasional hand and several words of encouragement.
Go team.
A few hours later, we met up with a friend of theirs and all went out to eat at one of the many funky diners in Williamsburg. The food was good, the conversation: tolerable.
Shortly thereafter, I excused myself for the night to dance with the sugarplums while their party train continued rolling along.
The next morning, I unfolded myself from the couch just a short while before she and Frank, or Bob, or whatever his name was came down from the loft in search of breakfast and showers.
Ever vacillating between tactical lies and candid slip-ups, when he left to go back upstate, she attempted some sort of confiding, perhaps in search for some friendly advice from me.
Advice from me, Arbor falsus.
She dropped hints on the floor to the point of littering. In passing she mentioned something about the unpleasant parts of getting help from an ex-boyfriend, then insinuated some sort of sexual favor granted in return for his help on the loft.
I shrugged it off, saying something to the effect of, �Well, yeah...you know...I don�t know...I guess...unpleasant things...�
Translated, it meant that I didn�t care. I didn�t care if she fucked his brains out while I slept gleefully beneath them. I didn�t care if she begrudgingly swallowed his Manonayse as a reward for such dexterous screwing and hammering. And I certainly didn�t care to know that any of this might be troubling her.
I also neglected to mention that regardless of weather or not someone deserved them, trading sexual favors for construction help effectively made her a whore.
But what was the sense in further complicating her self-image?
I felt that I had to set a precedent for our expected level of personal intimacy, and she was slowly encroaching on the barriers I expected to remain sound. I didn�t really want to know anything about her, and that�s covering the gamut from childhood memories to personal politics. The less I know about a person and what they�re thinking, the better I can live with them. I want to choose my friends, and having one forced on me purely because of my living situation is not acceptable.
Returning to my self-absorbed little world, I set to work laying out a floor plan for my loft that incorporated two fully operational levels. The upper level would encompass the bed and my wardrobe, while the lower level would be divided into an office and a darkroom.
Because the available space for my loft was so convoluted, the floor would be divided into three roughly square areas sitting on 4x4 support legs.
The design called for a total of ten posts with shoulder joints, dividing the load among a series of redundantly overlapping beams. It would be slightly complicated and overly lumber-intensive, but I expected that a cow could stand on the upper level with no fear of collapse.
How I would get a cow up the stairs, well, I was still working on that problem.
The Ruemate drove me to a local lumberyard, claiming that they had good prices. I walked out an hour later with a bleeding checkbook and a pile of dead pine.
I�m told that Jesus was a carpenter, but I never see his name in the liner notes.
