By Jenai Engelhard Humphreys
There comes a point when one openly admits to being in a bad roommate situation. For me, that point came just a few days after I moved in.
When I called the number listed on the online ad to rent a bedroom, a man with a thick Eastern European accent answered. Actually, Klaudia answered. Years of chain smoking had drastically altered her vocal cords.
Apparently, Klaudia had already interviewed hundreds of people for this very bedroom, but none had been right. None, she accentuated. She wanted someone tidy and quiet, who never cooked. She especially hated the smell of Chinese food. And no boyfriends. Bringing over any guests, for that matter, was discouraged.
This is just a temporary living situation, I thought. I am unable to cook anything edible as far as I know. I am obsessively orderly. And the no guests rule? I didn’t have a boyfriend, nor did I expect to drum one up soon.
‘Okay, it sounds like a good fit,’ I said. ‘I prefer silence, solitude, and cleanliness.’
Pause.
‘Well, sometimes I go rip shit,’ she said.
Rip shit?
Intrigued, I proposed an-in person meeting the next day. Whether or not I moved in, I needed to meet this character.
*
In the online ad, three things had lured me:
- The bedroom in question was located in my favorite neighborhood in greater Boston, with cafes, a vintage movie theater, a Trader Joe’s and a beloved bookshop.
- I could afford the rent, even though I was mired in student loan debt and subsisting on low paying editing projects, and
- I could avoid the standard yearly lease, allowing me a sense of stability: the definite knowledge that I could pick up and move to another country as soon as that opportunity presented itself.
The woman at the door was enshrouded in smoke, with a head of black hair that poofed in all directions. She wore a slinky robe that left nothing the imagination, with black bracelets that covered her forearms. Her cigarette dangled. Back-up cigarettes were stuffed into her cleavage. I nearly expected a chorus of Tim Burton characters to emerge.
My eyes wandered straight to the bookshelves: most of the walls in the condo were lined with shelves of books, thousands of books. It was a dream come true: I could live in a library!
Over coffee, I learned that Klaudia was the daughter of an elite Polish intellectual, poet, translator, and art and theater critic. Her father had moved to the United States in 1966, lecturing at Yale and Berkeley. His illustrious circle included the filmmaker Roman Polanski and the British playwright Tom Stoppard, whom her father had mentored. Lidia had dated Stoppard for many years – the number was indeterminate, as it seemed to change daily – but further investigation confirmed that it had undoubtedly spanned at least a decade. I was never entirely sure what Klaudia did during the day, but she did take the 66 bus to Harvard every morning, where she “taught English.”
Two words dominated each sentence she spoke: Fuck and Shit. Never have I heard these words used so innovatively and to such hilarious effect. Her aura — the unruly black hair disproportionate to her small frame, the all-black ensemble of boots, tights, skirt, and top displaying décolletage, and the raspy voice cussing like a sailor— stopped many a passerby in their tracks.
Indeed, this eccentric woman intrigued me, and my taste for the unusual betrayed my better judgment. Knowing I would inhale ungodly amounts of second-hand smoke on a daily basis, I decided to move in.
*
I quickly learned that Klaudia loathed the German neighbors downstairs.
‘F-ing Nazis,’ she would yell down the stairwell when they did something to piss her off. A couple years before, their remodeling project downstairs had gone awry, inciting Klaudia’s unyielding fury. A deluge of dust had floated upwards from their apartment, through the floorboards into Klaudia’s condo, covering everything– including hundreds of books— in a film of white dust. The sight of this atrocity traumatized her. Klaudia got pneumonia the next day and was bedridden for weeks.
They never even apologized, Klaudia said.
(In a later conversation with the German woman, I was told that she had indeed apologized, incessantly).
Something else became apparent. Though 40 years older, Klaudia had a much more active love life. Not only did she relish male company, she elicited their attention.
One morning, a plumber was due to arrive to fix the dryer. When he buzzed to come upstairs, Klaudia was conveniently unclothed, having just stepped out of the shower.
Klaudia then shuffled around the apartment chaotically and screaming, “Hold on, hold on, I am buck naked!! Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, I am buck naked!!”
By the time the plumber mounted the stairs, Klaudia appeared at the door in a robe, reiterating the fact that she had been — just seconds ago — buck naked.
A nearly identical scenario occurred a few weeks later, when a male worker from Comcast arrived. The same chaos ensued: the naked shuffling, at least ten undeniably impressive variations of Fuck, and Klaudia’s voice echoing down the stairwell proclaiming herself buck naked.
One summer, Klaudia went to see a psychic, who predicted that she was going to meet a man walking his dog while she watered her plants. This was hardly a prophecy worth paying for, considering how often Klaudia watered the garden. A few days later, Klaudia met Lance and his dog. Soon after I came home to find the living room in a state of disarray. In her words, Klaudia had decided to “jump in the sack.”
*
Eventually, they stopped seeing each other, likely because Lance’s dog was the love of his life. I continued to run into Lance and his dog all over the neighborhood, which was continuously awkward for us both.
*
There came a time — though I cannot say exactly when – that Klaudia and I stopped being as friendly toward each other. I started dodging any possibility of a conversation with her, because a cordial five minutes often turn into an hour. I could never figure out how to courteously slip away.
Also, something had occurred for which I secretly resented Klaudia. Nearly every morning one summer, I woke to Klaudia shuffling loudly outside my bedroom, shouting at Roman Polanski in Polish over a research project for one of his films. Before she left for Europe to work on the film, she left a large suitcase sprawled out in the middle of the floor right outside my bedroom door. I tripped and fell on my way to the restroom during the night, producing a deep gash in the middle of my left leg. For some reason, this wound never healed properly, leaving an unsightly scar.
The Scar came to embody everything that I considered wrong with my life at the time, not excluding the fact that I was living with someone who made me feel suffocated. One glance at The Scar could bring on a rant and rave about the woes of living with Klaudia, my student loan debt, the unrelenting Boston winters, the seeming debacle of my career and the mounting tension between me and my mother regarding wedding plans.
I became monomaniacal about The Scar, as if erasing it would take away my problems. I tried every product on the market to make it fade, but to no avail. My obsession with The Scar did not die until I finally moved out.
*
I lived with Klaudia for two and a half years, despite my aggravations. I suppose I adopted some version of the-devil-you-know-is-better-than-the-devil-you-don’t-know attitude.
On the day that I moved out, Klaudia huffed and puffed around the condo, hoverering in and out of my bedroom, looking over my shoulder. When I finally escaped in the moving van, I received several voice messages, accusing me of stealing one of her lamps.
I then thought about how I panic inordinately when I can’t find something and tried to empathize. I prayed that Klaudia would find her lamp, thankful that this season of Buck Naked had ended.
* * *
Jenai Engelhard Humphreys is an essayist and college writing instructor. Her own writing has appeared in the Boston Globe and Quillette.