It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened

At the end of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, protagonist Newland Archer, surveys the evidence of his life - a life shaped by compromise and the negative space of what didn’t make it into this room. It will always be one of the saddest lines in literature to me. We all either lack for real things or rooms. And where do the real things go when you leave?

Things I can’t prove happened:

A bedroom in Hoboken where I saw the body of the man I love for the first time. Mild early September days gave way to a heat wave and my air conditioning was broken. We stripped down to our underwear and laughed our “what now?” laugh to break the tension of being awed by each other.

His old Sunset Park apartment, where I was never supposed to be. I liked to imagine that one of my long, dark hairs - a color nobody in that place shared - got trapped in the couch or some corner of the shower, and that someone found one and it ruined their day.

An old one-bedroom “flex” on the Upper West Side with my brother. I lived in the dingy basement, but I was briefly one of those chosen people with an outdoor space in New York City. The neighborhood was gorgeous but lonely, and I felt ungrateful in my loneliness, because this is what postcards of New York look like. Once I ran in Riverside Park and my feet were the first to mark the fresh snow, like I was the one who personally damaged the postcard shot.

The studio in Prospect-Lefferts Gardens he rented to rebuild his life. He didn’t have much, so I gave him a coffee table and a butcher’s block that had both followed me from South Carolina. It was a nice but selfish gesture to ensure there was always something of me there.

My studio, a ten minute walk away. I learned to be alone in it. The floors weren’t level and everything seemed scaled down as if only me specifically was meant to be there. I filled it with rose printed linens, velvets, and bubblegum pink stools at the little built-in kitchen. I hid my grinding instability under princessy froth.

We finally shared an apartment around the corner. At Christmas we glittered as hosts of our first and last party, stuffing the space with friends and four varieties of cookies. The pandemic nullified our wedding plans so we got married right there. The seagrass rug, somewhere in storage, bears the gaffer tape he put down to show us where to stand for the Zoom ceremony. Our marriage certificate will be a 2020 relic, stamped with “pursuant to Governor Cuomo’s executive order.”

We had to leave the city we love. These places stand empty or painted over by other lives. We have to be each other’s memory, hearts and minds external hard drives to house real things, waiting for a room to welcome them.

—Molly Ann Starr

Seed: “It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened”

Source: The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton

Molly Starr is a student at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives with her husband in New Mexico.