Although two decades of his life had passed with that apartment as the physical center of his existence, he had no real emotional attachment to it, or to the town in which it was.
He had moved to this small town of ___________ on New York’s Long Island, which was about an hour’s drive from Linda’s house, because he needed a place to stay after his divorce. A temporary place, small in size was all that he had wanted at the time, and that was fortunate, because it was all he could afford. His former wife received most of their possessions and savings through the generosity of the divorce court. His subsequent anger and bitterness at the State of New Jersey, where they had been living in a large rental apartment, made it impossible for him to stay there. A sister of his lived on Long Island, and she said that this town was “very treesy with lots of birds.” Bill had never displayed an interest in plants or wildlife before, even if they were presented as programs on television with amazing close-up video footage—the beauty of nature was completely alien to him—but he didn’t have another destination in mind, so he passively followed his sister’s suggestion. This surprised her immensely, since he had rarely paid any attention to what she said before.
What had been at first a temporary answer to an immediate problem had become over time a lasting choice. At present, it seemed destined to be a permanent habitation for Bill’s remaining years. He sometimes toyed with the idea of moving to a larger apartment, since he made a good salary and had done so for quite a while, but the higher monthly rent attached to a roomier place quickly squished such stray thoughts. Ever since his divorce he had saved earnestly—to show his ex-wife and the State of New Jersey that he could survive and thrive despite their ravagings—and purchasing real estate a long time ago would have been the smartest financial decision for him. He could have had a much lower monthly outlay by now. But he had always been a renter, and the asking prices, even for a studio, always seemed too high to the tightwad in him to justify home ownership. He couldn’t see past the initial expense. In the updated words of an old expression, Bill was penny wise and dollar dumb. Although he hated wasting money, he would never have anything to show for all the years of leasing. The situation, so thoroughly contrary to his normal hoarding instincts, bothered him once in a while, but he coped by pushing it out of his mind as quickly as possible.
There was one drawback, however, to his living arrangements that he couldn’t overlook so easily, try as he might. Despite satisfying his basic needs and being undeniably well-maintained, with an abundance of large trees and birds, not one of which was a pigeon, the town and the plain brick building in which he rented were undesirable for a major reason that he was reminded of every weekday: Their location was extremely inconvenient to Manhattan.
The train station was by far the most popular place in town, more frequented than any church, store, or bar. From it, a person could escape the boredom and provincialism of this particular suburbia by taking a two-hour train ride to Manhattan. There, residents could feel alive again, caught up in the midst of things. But most who traveled that route, like Bill, were commuters, who had to go to Manhattan for work. They were so continually exhausted from four hours of traveling during the weekdays, that their capacity for feeling anything extraordinary, or doing anything more than necessary, was very limited wherever they might be. On this day, as on any other day, Bill was tired. Although he had driven to Linda’s home in the morning and went with her to Penn Station on a much shorter train ride than usual—Linda also had a medical office for acupuncture treatments in Manhattan, close to where Bill worked—he had still spent four hours traveling, and arguing with Linda had not refreshed him. Sometimes he thought of moving to another rental studio in a location closer to work, but, like the miser he was, he would shudder at the idea of paying moving expenses and become paralyzed with inertia. The prospect of his moving to another residence appeared as likely as the possibility of the Statue of Liberty swimming to Russia.