Dishevel Me Max DeVoe Talley
A
t age forty-three, Susan Campbell shouldn’t have been living in a hallway called a one-bedroom apartment on East 62nd Street in Manhattan. Though the dank, noisy flat cost $2,900 a month, her rental agent insisted, “It’s such a steal.” Originally a long, slender studio apartment, the landlord had separated the back third with a wall into a cramped bedroom overlooking an air shaft. From outside the bedroom, the corridor expanded slightly to a kitchen area that merged with the suggestion of a living room. Susan returned to the postgraduate existence of her early twenties when her marriage to Bill Eaton in the Hudson Valley crumbled. After trudging downstairs from her fifth floor walk-up, Susan launched out of the vestibule into the perpetual chaos of city life. Uptown traffic unloaded
from the 59th Street Bridge onto the slim exit avenue crossing just west of her building, then it veered east toward First Avenue. Toward her. The constant thrum of pent-up male energy rolling in at night to eat, drink, smoke, snort, fuck or fight, before retreating in the bleak hours before dawn to whatever boroughs it had emanated from. Rap and reggaeton and classic rock and heavy metal and techno and dance pop rumbled from vibrating cars. “Hey, uptown girl,” a man in a silver Camaro yelled. Susan didn’t show any acknowledgment. “Want to go downtown?” The light changed and a dissonant fanfare of car horns boiled up from behind. He screeched away. Pedestrians spoke foreign languages into smartphones, chiding, pleading, demanding.
11.
