Under Construction

Manhattan, 1981.

- Jonathan Franzen

My girlfriend, V, and I were finishing college, with a summer to burn before the next thing, and New York beckoned. V went to the city and signed a three-month lease on the apartment of a Columbia student, Bobby Atkins, who may have been the son of the creator of the Atkins Diet, or maybe we just enjoyed imagining that he was. His place, on the southwest corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam, had two small bedrooms and was irremediably filthy. We arrived in June with a fifth of Tanqueray, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and Marcella Hazan’s Italian cookbook. Someone had left behind a spineless black plushtoy panther, manufactured in Korea, which we liberated and made ours.