St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, is not a good city for short-term rentals. That’s the first thing I discovered when I started thinking about doing a stay there. There are some vacation rental options, but they’re a bit pricey if you’re planning on more than a couple of nights’ visit, and most other rentals in the city tend to be found by word-of-mouth and Facebook postings, unless you contact a realtor, and realtors want you to sign a one-year lease. It’s a city of a little over 100,000 but compared to New York, it operates like a small town. So it took some digging, even with my journalism skills, to find somewhere that I could live for just two months, which is the amount of time that I had calculated I could afford to explore my dreams without having to give up my place in Brooklyn. In the end, I negotiated a decent deal with a woman named Charlotte who had posted her place as a vacation rental and wasn’t gettingmuch interest. Ironically, Charlotte wanted to rent it out because she was moving in with her boyfriend and didn’t want to give her place up until she decided whether she could make things work with him or not.
So while Laura was working things out with Nick, I was subletting this woman Charlotte’s place while she tried things with Brett, her fisherman boyfriend who lived twenty minutes down the coast.
I would find out all these details later. When I flew into St. John’s with my two pieces of luggage and laptop bag, all I knew was that I had found a decently priced rental on the second floor of a small two-family rowhouse right in the city center.
My first impression of Newfoundland was that I couldn’t see much of Newfoundland. I arrived there by flying from Manhattan to Montreal and then switching to a smaller plane to make the second leg of the trip up along the Atlantic coastline. The first of July was a rainy day, and for most of the flight, I could see nothing but clouds, drifting in wayward columns like a goth metal album cover. Then suddenly we were dropping down through misty layers and emerging over a small city covered in fog and half-surrounded by water. St. John’s is part of the Avalon peninsula, which is roughly the size of Connecticut and extends outward from the southeastern part of the much larger island of Newfoundland. It was the first region of Canada that was settled by Europeans, and the city remains the most populated part of the whole province. It has a protected port, and for centuries it has been a friendly stopping point for people braving the northern Atlantic on their way to North America from Europe.
Once we landed, I tottered along with my luggage through the small St. John’s airport and managed to find myself a taxi. It all felt so cute that I was trying not to feel superior about it—the worst thing New Yorkers can do is point out how adorable thingsare compared to home. My taxi driver grabbed my luggage and immediately introduced himself as Rick. He turned out to be my second favorite kind of taxi driver—the tour guide—and he kept up a steady stream of conversation as he drove me through the unassuming suburban neighborhoods on the way downtown. (Thebestkind of taxi driver is the life advisor, but they’ve become increasingly rare in the era of Bluetooth headphones; why should a guy listen to your relationship problems and hand out free advice when he could be chatting with his cousin in Karachi?)
I soon learned about Rick’s love of theNew York Timescrossword puzzle and his devotion to life on Newfoundland, where he had lived since he was born.
“This is the big city, here, St. John’s,” he said, as we pulled into the downtown and curved past a large Catholic church and down a steep hill, slipping along ribbons of rowhouses and grimy commercial buildings. The rainy day gave the city a dreary cast, in spite of the brightly painted colors of the houses, and I had a brief moment of wondering what the hell I was doing here. Then I looked out across the water and the fog parted to reveal a lonely green hillside across the bay, stark as the west coast of Ireland, laced with rocks. Gulls were wheeling, and mist brought in the scent of the sea. It was beautiful and lonely, and I remembered what I had fallen in love with: this ideal, remote city I had in my head, which was not completely different than the real place. But there was also a faint smell of…
“Cow manure,” Rick informed me. “It blows in sometimes from the fields, depending on the direction of the wind. The rest of the time it smells like fish.”
Excellent. Fish and cow manure. The taxi squeaked as it pulled to the side of the road.
“Here’s the Fishing Net.” I was supposed to stop by Charlotte’s work to pick up the keys to my apartment.
“I’ll just be a couple of minutes,” I said. “Please wait. I’ll pay for your time.”
“You got it. Oh, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Ten Letters, Taylor Swift album.”
“Reputation?”
“You’re a genius. Guess that’s why it’s theNew York Timescrossword. All New Yorkers know this stuff.”
“Every single one of us.”
“There’s a good bar scene here,” Rick told me as I opened the taxi door. “Maybe too good. In the winter, people do a lot of…” and he gestured with his hand like he was chugging a bottle.
“I promise I’m not doing any of that now,” I replied.
It’s funny how when you visit a place that gets lots of snow in the winter, you can sense it even when the weather is warm. It’s something about the low doorways, the compact windows, the sense of everything being ready to hunker down against bitter weather. I traveled to Quebec City once in summer, and I had the same feeling about it. It was a winter city, briefly enjoying the respite of flowers and sunshine before returning to its regularly scheduled programming of long nights filled with spiked coffee and wood-burning fires.
The Fishing Net had a slightly desperate, lonely air, like every bar does around three in the afternoon. The few patrons looked like they had been planted in their seats for hours already, blinking at the flash of sunlight as I swung open the door. I found Charlotte cleaning a table in the back with a rag. She was a tall brown-haired woman around my age who looked like she might be from one of Canada’s First Nations tribes. I wondered if our similar age was why she trusted me with her apartment. She and I were both old enough that we’d been doing our own dishes for a long time; you don’t make a mess in your late thirties and expect someone else to clean it up.
“The front door sticks,” she said as she handed me the keys, “so just jiggle it a few times. And ignore Mrs. Mahoney on the first floor, she’s a bitch.”
“Got it.”
“She’ll give you a hard time about using the washer and dryer in the basement, but she doesn’t own them, so there’s nothing she can do about it. She just doesn’t like the noise. I’m friends with the landlady, so don’t let Mrs. Mahoney say she’s going to complain about you. She can’t do a damn thing.”
“I’ll try to use the washer and dryer at reasonable hours.”
“Won’t make a difference. She’ll bother you about it anyway. But here are the keys,” Charlotte said. “The apartment should be empty.”
Those words—should be empty—could have been a red flag to me, but I didn’t register them at the time. I was too busy trying to get out the door before I ran up the meter on Rick’s taxi. I had decided to do without a rental car in Newfoundland, given my sordid history with rearview mirrors, so it was going to be taxis and walking for me. I decided to take Rick’s card.
A few minutes later, Rick dropped me off with my bags in front of a small red two-family rowhouse, squeezed between taller ones on either side. I stood for a moment alone before trying my key. Maybe this was all a horrible mistake. The house had a slightly lopsided air, like it had suffered from a stroke, and one side had settled farther than the other. Trying the lock, I found that Charlotte was right: the front door keys did stick. I negotiated my bags into a narrow front hallway with two doorways and a set of stairs. I assumed one doorway led to the first-floor apartment and the other to the basement. I headed up the narrow wooden stairs, which definitely had a distinct lean to the left-hand side. This was an old house without a lot of what real estate agents call ‘modern updates,’ which was one of the reasons it was so affordable. I opened the apartment withmy key, put my bags down, and discovered immediately that someone else was living there. There was a coffee mug on the table, 1980s New Wave music playing, and the distinct steamy smell of a recent shower.
“Hello?” I began without much hesitation, because I’m a longtime New Yorker and interacting with weird strangers is safely in my city living toolkit. “Hello? Is somebody…”
A tiny blonde woman emerged from the back of the house, towel-drying her hair. She was wearing a Sex Pistols t-shirt and long baggy pants, and her hair stuck out at weird angles like it had been cut at home with scissors.
