In 1964 Joan Didion left New York City. She recorded the event much later in Goodbye to All That, the modern gospel on leaving New York, and also on leaving.
 

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, she writes, and harder to see the ends.

Exactly 50 years after Joan Didion left New York, so did I.

The summer beforehand, itchy, half in and half out, caught in the Didion-ian moment where the heroine was no longer as optimistic as she once was, I took a job with the client of a yoga teacher friend to work as her personal assistant in a penthouse in the West 50s.

I’d done a lot of this kind of work in the City. It was one of the few jobs that you could command $25 an hour for; the other one was catering. Interestingly this was seen as a controversial rate for babysitting though. Carrying a plate of expensive food would routinely earn you 7 dollars more than carrying someone’s toddler.

Personal assistant work encompassed most things not involving food or toddlers. Filling out healthcare forms, searching by phone the country’s Bed Bath and Beyonds (and beyond) for a matching sham cover for a newborn’s crib, waiting to let the art handlers in, and on one occasion helping an Hawaiian ex-body builder sort through her competition outfits in her cat-filled brownstone in Cobble Hill.

You moved things, listened to stories, were offered coffee and, in some cases, takeout.

The first conversation I had with Anthea Baxter was across a square table in a sunlit breakfast room uptown. Inside, the apartments in that part of the city have the muffled sound signature of a cardboard box. They’re near the park but nearer the Time Warner building in spirit. The bodegas are different up there; there are salad bars and sports bars. Inside, the air is manufactured. These homes are suspended in the secondary sound strata above the baseline of traffic. You get to them via cramped elevators or Gilliam-esque stairways traversed by delivery persons.

Anthea was white, in her 50s, large eyes, somewhat bulbous. She was heavy set, though with the air of having been voluptuous once, and with a crown of thin, short, red hair that seemed to have come to rest on her head rather than grown out of it. Over weak coffee she asked me if I knew who she was. I didn’t. I opted to shake my head, but with a cultivated enthusiasm that I hoped would give me the look of an eager ingenue rather than an idiot in case she was in fact famous, and therefore safeguard my likability. In these jobs likability was secret magic. Early in my assistant career I shed the guilt of invoicing for time I fully acknowledge was spent snacking in someone’s kitchen. Most things are billable in New York City, easy company among them.

I’m a famous feminist, she said, cutting to the chase and flapping both hands in front of her. This apartment belongs to my ex-husband, he still lives here. She paused and I wondered if this referenced her famous feminism, but she carried on: technically we’re still married; I’m on his health insurance, that’s why. I have lupus so I need it. She conveyed this information with the plainness that New Yorkers deploy on the topic of health insurance and marriage. He has a nurse; I don’t talk to him. He was an awful brute.

We ate muffins (you were often given muffins) while she delivered a treatise on her ex-husband, detailing the cheating, brutalising newsman he’d once been. Her hatred was complete and entirely mundane. She also had a marvellous ability to talk about her ex-husband as if he was both dead and gone (and good riddance) and alive and breathing in the next room. As it turned out, all of these things were true.
We left the breakfast room and I followed her through a kitchen where a Latina woman in a uniform was preparing something viscous and bland and through a door into a large sitting room.

The walls were covered with books. Sitting in a chair in the corner near a window was an inert man of roughly 70 years. I had mostly combed the room before I noticed him. He had the look of a car, a late model Buick, that had until lately been cruising at comfortable speed only to have swerved for no reason off the road and into a deserted landscape where it had come to a sudden, inexplicable stop, the only sound the click and fleck of retracting metal and, distantly, the wind tormenting something not quite torn from its moorings.

His hair had been seen to; he wore corduroy trousers. A woollen sweater over a collared shirt. His gaze turned on us as we entered but he observed us vacantly. Like a man watching pigeons.

Anthea ignored him and turned to the shelves. She started removing volumes and stacked them on the lacquered Chinese long table running the length of the sofa. These can all go, she said. I nodded and said hello to the man, he turned and faced the window. My gaze strayed past him to a nook in the bookshelf where two carved wooden foxes dressed as butlers stood on their hind legs, candle holders in their forepaws. On the wall above them was a framed edition of 50 stamps bearing identical likenesses of Edward R. Murrow.

Later, Anthea showed me the rest of her apartment and indicated with impish cunning how the division had been made. The wall that ran on the South side of the kitchen had been put there to effect two separate apartments. On her side was the kitchen, the breakfast room, a terrace, her bedroom, bathroom and entrance hall. And on the other, the library, another bathroom, his room and another utility exit, a back door of sorts. The Latina woman was her housekeeper, and also his nurse.
 

My task over the next two weeks was to sort and throw away (donate, dispose of, register for auction) objects from the apartment, both sides. This was to coincide with the imminent occupancy one floor down, in a studio apartment used by Anthea as a writing space, of Jack, her agent, also former newsman, stage acting enthusiast and, for many years, her lover.

Looking back, it stands to reason that throwing things away upstairs was to do with making room downstairs. Sometimes reason is a thing of retrospection though. Then, there seemed a rounder, redder, more expanding thing behind it. Like Alice blowing up in a room full of china, it felt urgent. As if certain things, if not conveyed safely out, would instead be pushed. Would jettison untethered through windows, harpooning pedestrians below.

So, that day, I began to carry things out of their lives, and continued for two weeks without stopping. Dispersing them by hand into the city below.

Each morning I arrived to a list of things to be sorted and dispatched, and sometimes to boxes and piles prepared in my absence. On the piles rested brown cardboard gift labels with instructions from Anthea in scrawling cursive.

It would have been one thing if the belongings, objects, books I was dispatching were simply rubbish. Detritus, things outgrown, ill-used, supplementary, worn or dropped in the bath. But in most cases they weren’t; they were vivid and seemingly current articles of a life. In many cases they were beautiful. And as I worked, and the piles of things to be taken away grew, so did the dawning realisation that a great quantity of the things I was discarding, weren’t hers.

The sorting took place south of the wall, a room Anthea treated like a frozen tundra, empty of life, but in which on most days her ex-husband still sat. Each day I would greet him and each day introduce myself. Sometimes he replied. Just as the piles of things would replenish overnight though, like fluid in the heart of a cactus flower, so a nothingness would restore inside the old man between these occasions, and I was reborn a pigeon each time.

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