The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney Page A

space so I would have room to work. Lofts abounded but they all needed “fixing,” which meant painting the walls, putting in lights, bathrooms, and kitchen—installing everything needed for a bare-minimum existence.
    I couldn’t afford to pay “key money” for the lofts that were available with the basic improvements. Looking for a place to live was, as it always is in New York, a discouraging process. I went street by street, building by building, asking supers, owners, artists, anyone I could collar, if they knew of space for rent. I thought I was running my life, but then I realized real estate was completely in control. It was a depressing time. Often on weekends, when my son was away, I would lie in bed for hours and not want to eat or move. Finally I heard from a building owner that a small-job electrician might want to renta space on West Broadway. The gallery scene was just beginning to flourish and SoHo’s wonderful cast-iron buildings were about to be developed by uptown real estate barons. The wide street was in a central location and, most important, it was safe.
    It wasn’t a loft, it wasn’t an apartment, but it was perfect. It had been a small outbuilding on a farm a hundred years ago. Two floors, each one far smaller than my uptown living room, were newly painted with titanium white walls. The kitchen was made for very small people: it measured less than five feet square, but it had a window. All in all, it was about six hundred square feet. The rent was $350 per month, not including electricity. In addition, Irwin, the landlord and electrician, wanted a security fee of $475.
    I didn’t have the money but I desperately wanted the place. P, my assistant from the days of the French photographer shoot, happened to be with me when the electrician had shown me the space. She offered to lend me the money. It was the first and last time I have ever accepted a loan. But she was gracious and insistent, and I wanted the place so much that I took her up on it. I paid her back, fifty dollars a month plus a tiny bit of interest, over the next year.
    My son and I and our Norwegian elkhound, Pookabee, moved in. I adored the creaky steps, the uneven wooden floors, and the windows that looked onto the night-and-day industrial busyness of West Broadway. We had no furniture to speak of, as I had paid the last of my savings for a bed and bookshelves for my son, who had a room of his own.
    I rented a huge industrial floor-sanding machine andshined up the old wood, then cleaned and waxed and scrubbed until the entire place was as spotless and gleaming as I could make it.
    Metropolitan Lumber was around the corner and they gave me a great deal on some unusable wooden doors and sawed them to size at no charge. I sandpapered, painted, and painstakingly gold-leafed them, and then devised a way to install them as sliding panels on the windows so we had privacy at night. I slept on a mattress on the floor next to my son’s room, and organized my paints and canvas rolls and stretcher bars on the floor below.
    Every morning after I returned from taking my son to school, I stood at the window of my sweet small space on West Broadway, where I could watch the famous painter Alex Katz walking down my street with his black dog, its tail wagging nonstop. I was on my way to becoming a genuine artist. But I needed money. The cosmetics project had come to an end. I had to pay for half of my son’s school tuition plus rent, gas, electricity, food, phone, subway fare, my own tuition at graduate school, and art supplies.
    I decided to call Alexander Liberman, an artist and sculptor as well as the legendary editorial director of Condé Nast. While I was at Glamour we often discussed the art scene, and I had told him about wanting to be a painter full-time.
    When I phoned his office, his secretary remembered me and gave me an appointment to show him slides of my paintings. He didn’t end up