EllenPall.com - JOURNALISM

URBAN TACTICS; Imaginary People In Real Gardens

by Ellen Pall

from The New York Times City Section, May 6, 2001, Sunday

MOONING over the real estate classifieds is as close as most New Yorkers come to living in the fab hi flr 3000 SF 3BR in F/S wht glv bldg of their dreams. But writers of fiction can install their characters in the palace of their desires. And in this turf-driven city, novelists do it all the time.

My family's sixth-floor apartment is at the back of our building, with limited sunlight and unlimited views of apartments 6A and 6E (though if 6A leaves both front and back shades raised, we can see New Jersey). Our kitchen is small: to open the fridge, we have to evict the shih-tzu. Not to complain. Except for those drawbacks, it's a lovely place.

Nevertheless, when I invented Juliet, the amateur-sleuth protagonist of my new murder mystery, ''Corpse de Ballet,'' I gave her a duplex high above the Hudson, with sweeping views north, west and south, along with a wraparound terrace, an eat-in kitchen and a full dining room.

This also happens to be a real apartment in my building, where a friend really lives, but never mind. Juliet is quiet, and invisible. My friend hardly knows she's there, enjoying the two full offices on the second floor, one for Juliet, one for her unobtrusive assistant. (My office is half of our dining room.)

Maybe it sounds pathetic, living on vicarious real estate. But returning to a handsome residence day after writing day can take the sting out of a slender advance. It's a pleasure not every plot can afford, of course: Melville couldn't give Bartleby a brite 1Br/1Bth. But Thane Rosenbaum, an Upper West Sider who lives and writes in two rooms shared with his daughter, gave the family in his forthcoming novel, ''The Golems of Gotham,'' a brownstone off Riverside Drive.

Brian Morton, who has written and lived in the same one room off Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side for a decade, housed Leonard Schiller, the writer-protagonist of his 1998 novel, ''Starting Out in the Evening,'' in a classic six.

The vintage Greenwich Village apartment that the novelist Emily Prager really shares with her daughter, which has views of a cobbled street in front and a flowery courtyard behind, is quintessentially quaint. But after a single visit to the Dakota, Ms. Prager decided to spare the characters in her 1987 novel, ''Clea and Zeus Divorce,'' the cozy charm and sloping floors.

In keeping with the author's theory that a successful marriage requires 1,500 square feet for each spouse, Clea opens a ''great wooden door'' to enter the ''antechamber'' to ''Zeus' wing.'' Their apartment looks down, way down, onto Central Park, where ''moving umbrella specks'' trail ''minuscule Akitas along miniature bridle paths.''

And so on. You don't have to live in squalor to long for what you haven't got. The Morningside Heights apartment where Lynne Sharon Schwartz resides is about the size of the pretend one Brian Morton imagined for Leonard Schiller. But Ms. Schwartz misses her old, much bigger kitchen, lost to fire in 1983. So Bea, the caterer-materfamilias in Ms. Schwartz's 1999 novel, ''In the Family Way,'' cooks in a newly remodeled kitchen roomy enough to house a playpen, a reclining chair and her bustling catering business.

As for me, I have a contract to write another mystery. I suppose it could be about a woman who kills her neighbor to get her apartment. (How's ''Drop Dead View'' for a title?) But I'll probably just remodel. Juliet and I may add a pvt rf deck w/sumptuously planted grdn to our terrace. That should complement the three philodendrons on my office windowsill.