I have never met Timo in person. He is the Swiss bachelor who is renting my apartment in Brooklyn, and though the broker who arranged the rental tells me he is young and strikingly good-looking, from the tone of his occasional emails, I can only picture him as a finicky elderly gentleman.
Timo works for the United Nations and his diplomatic training has helped him to overlook my sad American standards of tidiness. He contacts me occasionally with friendly updates about how clean he is keeping my apartment, or to remind me that the Swiss are in general much neater people than New Yorkers.
For example, last spring he emailed me with a cheerful memo on the state of the windows. “I have been doing a little spring cleaning in the apartment, now that the sun is shining more frequently,” he wrote. “I will tell you, cleaning the windows was like working in a coal mine. I have never seen anything like it!”
He has been patient with me as I learn from him about cleanliness, and we get on well. Occasionally he even asks me for guidance in his missions of sanitation. In a recent email, for example, he wondered if I had any advice for treating the flooring, whose imperfections were quite harshly illuminated now that all the coal-mine dust had been cleaned off the windows. “The scratches were not as striking in winter, but really look quite unfortunate now. How did you use to take care of them? I am not an expert on hardwood floors,” he admitted.
I am not an expert on hardwood floors either, but if Timo would like to spend his free time polishing my engineered wood, that is okay with me. I Googled and sent him a detailed list of instructions, which seemed to make him happy. “I bought a mop and am planning to treat the floor with it later this week,” he responded. He closed his email with the winky-face emoticon.
These interactions have been good for our relationship, and in truth, it is important to me to have a good relationship with Timo. The totally bizarre intimacy of having a stranger live in my home and use my belongings would feel even more uncomfortable if I didn’t know at least a little bit about him.
My apartment is still furnished with all my things: The chocolate brown couch I spent a whole paycheck on when I got my first job in New York. The art I have collected piece by piece. The plain white linen sheets and down comforter I used to sleep under. But now Timo is using them. He soaks in my bathtub. He cooks in my kitchen. He probably even has sex in my bed—assuming there is anyone in New York City who wants to have sex with a fussy Swiss germaphobe. There probably is. I wonder if he keeps a bottle of hand sanitizer in my night stand for these occasions.
But, actually, that thought isn’t the weirdest thing about having a stranger live in my home. The weirdest, most uncomfortable thing about it all is the thought of Timo messing with my books. I wonder frequently what private things about my life and personality my library reveals to him. The thought is at once kind of embarrassing and kind of thrilling, like changing clothes in front of an uncurtained window.
Timo probably appreciates my neatly cataloged collection of Vogue magazines, arranged in chronological order, white spines lined up evenly and satisfyingly along the office bookcase. He may have nodded with approval if he noticed the few slim volumes I’d managed to read in French. Perhaps he was impressed at the breadth of my art books, which range from Sally Mann’s creepy photos of her dead dog to a gorgeous, clothbound catalogue of ancient textiles I bought at the Met one time.
I wondered if he’s ever stumbled on the one sex book I own? It’s not even a cool sex book—it’s more of a practical, how-to manual—but maybe it’s still enough to shock his Swiss sensibilities. I kind of hope so.
Recently, Timo sent me an email requesting permission to remove my books from the shelves. He wanted less clutter, he said. He would box them up and put them in the storage unit in the basement for me.
I surprised myself by being offended. It actually hurt my feelings that fussy Swiss Timo didn’t want my books around, and it dawned on me that the books we keep and display must be tied up somehow with our vanity. Or, at least, mine is.
I realized that I wanted Timo and anyone else in my home to recognize important, profound things about me when they look at my bookshelves. I had to acknowledge my secret fantasy that Timo would pick up my novels and see my notes in the margins. “What a fine mind that Kerry must have!” he might say. Or, simply, “Brilliant!” I wanted him to consider the fascinating fact that I love to re-read British murder mysteries, to absorb the philosophy behind my many cookbooks, to stumble on the boarding pass stub in my copy of The Wind-up Bird Chronicles—evidence that I am willing to read Murakami on vacation.
My library represents the side of me I most want to present to the world, not so different from an ultra-flattering photograph I might frame for my mother’s mantel. And I have to admit that my library is a little bit Photoshopped. There are augmentations: Several never-opened volumes decorated my shelves, including Anna Karenina, which I keep meaning to read, and Richard Ellmann’s hefty biography of James Joyce, which I don’t even lie to myself about. There are also omissions. I had purchased and thoroughly enjoyed each of the books in the Hunger Games trilogy, for example, but I didn’t display them in my living room.
Fussy Swiss Timo has made me recognize these choices, made me question the whole nature of collecting books. In the end, I think maybe we do this because books tell us something we want to believe about ourselves, something we want other people to recognize, too—that we’re smart, or interesting, or eclectic, or unique. This, of course, is why Timo’s request hurt my feelings. His rejection of my books felt like a rejection of me in some way, my tastes, my experiences, all the things I think make me special and interesting.
My books are now in the basement storage unit of my condo building, housed in dozens of cardboard boxes. My feelings about that remain a little bit complicated. The upside is that Timo almost definitely noticed that sex book when he was packing up. I like to think his embarrassment was in equal proportion to my injured vanity.
