A Modern, Fully-Equipped Apartment in Nørrebro
Part III of the Copenhagen series
I.
Noah, the owner of the one-bedroom apartment at 18 Meinungsgade, which I’m renting for the weekend with Gwyn, met me at the front door as part of the check-in process. I’m used to self-check-ins, popping keys out of metal lockboxes planted somewhere discreet or creative, like the Airbnb I had stayed at in Florence, which I visited in the peak hot, crowded European summer for a friend’s wedding. That host had stuck a lockbox on the axle of a wheel-less bike wedged behind a dumpster and wished me a happy stay over Airbnb’s messaging service.
“I like to do check-ins in person,” Noah explained as he welcomed me into his home. “There’s a stigma in this neighborhood of turning apartments into Airbnbs. We don’t want to be like something in Barcelona where it’s Airbnbs all down the hall. You’ve seen the photos. Ugly lock boxes stacked on top of each other. In fact, if anyone asks who you are, you can just say you’re a friend of my sister’s.”
This wasn’t a secondary residence that Noah had bought to rent out. It was Noah’s home, where he lives with his infant son. The closet is full of their clothes and personal items. The walls are covered in vinyl records, books, and family photos. He is more comfortable with someone staying here after he’s met them person.
We took our shoes off at the door, both of us in thick, cozy grey socks. It’s cooler in Copenhagen than in Paris, which is one of the reasons why I chose this city for a weekend trip in August. I can’t stand Parisian summers. When the temperatures start to rise, I open up Airbnb and look for an escape I can afford. I’m already planning my summer 2026 escape out of the city, maybe up to Oslo, but also, if you go south enough, like Cape Town, you wind up in another country’s winter.
“I started renting out the apartment after my divorce,” Noah said, as he walked me through the kitchen and opened the overhead cabinets to show me his extensive spice collection, the espresso machine, the French press, and the induction stove, all of which were “free to use.”
Noah, as was the trend throughout Western and Northern Europe, married late in life, after checking off the must-dos he had assigned himself, the necessary steps to become a man ready to have a wife, start a family, which included:
Earning his master’s from ITU in Digital Design and Communication, though he really had his heart set on the Rhode Island School of Design.
Establishing his career in user design, first by working his way up at a respected brand, and then by becoming a freelancer who ran his own business.
Saving enough for a down payment on an apartment, putting 20% down, with the rest financed between a loan from his bank and a realkreditlån.
Having various and varied sexual and intimate relationships, experiences that stretched him, literally and figuratively he joked, so that when he looked someone in the eyes and told them he loved them, he knew exactly what he meant when by “I” and by “love.” (He forgot, even with his careful planning, to make sure he understood the “you.”)
He did all of these, and still, what a mess he had found himself in. House poor, raising a child half on his own, which he guessed is always the case, even when you’re married, half alone, or alone half the time, but he never wanted to be a dad who has to bundle up their child, bike them across town, and drop them off at the other half of the family.
After buying his ex-wife out of the apartment, he rents the place, every now and then, to help him with the mortgage, staying at a friend’s couch nearby as strangers occupy his home.
I felt like I was auditioning. He needed me to prove that I was respectable, that Gwyn, who wouldn’t arrive until much later, that is my friend who he would never meet, and so he could only judge her through me, through how I presented myself, thinking if he knew the man then he could know the type of people the man associated with, birds of a feather sort of thing, was also respectable. Upstanding. Clean.
“I’ve lived out of Airbnb’s in Seoul, Sofia, Vienna, Tbilisi, Annecy, Paris, and more,” I said. “Florence. Bucharest. Krakow. Bangkok.” You can trust me, I was saying.
I told him that several Airbnb’s hosts had messaged me privately and asked me to stay longer, which was only a little lie: just one host had asked as much, Manana in Tbilisi, who wanted me to keep renting the long corridor studio apartment on Giorgi Akhvlediani, next to a gay club, one of Tbilisi’s few, and a Russian bar, and a Russian cafe, and another Russian bar. I don’t like to dwell on regrets, though I’m proud to say I’ve lived enough to have a few, but one of my big ones is not taking dear Manana, who welcomed me into her Airbnb with a freshly cooked lunch, up on her offer, not staying where rent was only $550 a month, where I could walk down the street and get an Aperol Spritz to go for $5, where I was only five minutes from where Sasha lived. I’ve thought about returning, but of course, that itself is not really an option. My friends who have remained in Tbilisi say it’s changed, and not for the better. And Sasha, last I heard, was living somewhere in Morocco, married, if you can believe it.
When I stopped talking, I expected Noah to say either, yes, you’re respectable, you’re the perfect guest, you can stay here, sit and sleep on our furniture, use my body wash and tea-tree shampoo or I’m sorry, but you’re not worthy of my home. Instead, he simply nodded, and then showed me where the trash goes, the little notch he made on the shower faucet to signal when hot water turns to scalding, and then he shook my hand and walked to the door to put his shoes back on.
“You said you’ve stayed in Paris?” He asked me, bracing himself with one hand on the doorway.
“It’s where I live now.”
“My wife and I visited there years ago. I went back last year on my own. It’s changed, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. I’ve only lived there for a little over a year myself, but I could tell that Noah would not be able to return to the Paris he had once known.
II.
After arriving in a new city, I like to take a shower, whether it’s morning, afternoon, or night. A baptismal ritual to wash off where I came from, along with any and all interactions that I had made on the journey: from the bus to the metro to the tram to the plane, repeat.
Refreshed and pink-splotched, with one of Noah’s plush forest green towels wrapped around my waist, and a thinner, white towel draped over my shoulders, I wet-footed through the apartment, getting myself oriented and doing the most innocent of snooping.
In the kitchen, which was joined with the dining room, there were photos on the wall of him and his son. There were piss-poor drawings of rocket ships and a dinosaur (perhaps?) done in crayon, framed and centered on the most prominent wall like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. There was a photo of him, his son, and his ex, hung on the pillar furthest from the room, partially hidden by a long-stemmed drooping plant hung from the ceiling. There was one of those mid-century modern wardrobes full of vinyl records. I went through some of the sleeves and sent photos to my dad back home, who I haven’t seen for nearly two years.
Here on the large kitchen table — more like an oblong conference table where meetings are held about the strategic vision of the project — Gwyn and I will play a version of Scattergories. On pieces of paper, creased and torn smoothly from my travel notebook, we will come up with a list of categories: movies before the 1980s, diseases, things you pack, European sports teams, things you fear, dog breeds. Here she’ll tell me about her five-year plan, to become fluent in Korean, to never be misunderstood again in that country, and to buy property in Wales that she can rent out, so she can travel as much as she wants, so she can bring back a woman and put her in a home of their own.
I moved to the living room, which was half living room, half play room, with a small little desk where Noah’s son can draw and take his lunch while his dad sits on the long, skinny couch against the back wall, and watches his tv, the same couch where Gwyn and I will sit on the last night of our trip, enough space between us for two people, exhausted by the city and each other, and watch a Danish film, no subtitles.
In the bedroom, there’s Noah’s small bed, which Gwyn and I will share, separated by individual duvets. Pushed directly up against the bed is a crib, wooden and tall. On Saturday, Gwyn will get piss-drunk on the Copenhagen Ultimate Pub Crawl, hosted by Esteban from Ecuador. I’ll leave early. We had first met years ago on a pub crawl in Seoul. That’s how I had met most of the friends I had made in my travels, though admittedly I talk to fewer and fewer of them these days, and soon I know I won’t talk to any. We never had much in common except for being strangers in a strangeland. That’s the problem with Gwyn and I in Copenhagen, it’s too familiar. We want to get away from each other. I’ll wake up that night to a sassy buzzer: long buzz, long buzz, three short buzzes, long buzz. In comes Gwyn, smiling like she had snuck in. “You have hairy legs,” she says to me, pointing at my hairy legs. She strips down to her underwear and tells me not to get any ideas, her left boob, the smaller one, poking out. “God, what a stupid night. Stupid people. All of them. Young kids. Did you know how young they are?” She’ll recount for me who made out with whom and who made it to the last bar. Her thinness is striking. Her chin, an unearthed fossil. Deep clavicles form hollowed ponds beneath her shoulders, a back arched and curved like some elongated alien birthed from a cramped pod. The only fat on her is her belly, a little pouch that is ballooning with all the alcohol she’s thrown back, a celiac girl processing gluten for the first time in months. “I’m such a fucking idiot,” she’ll say. “I blew everything. I want to text her. You know it’s day now in Seoul.” She’ll get in bed, hold onto her phone, then get out of it, pace back and forth, then get back in, then she’ll give me the phone. She’ll start laughing at herself and say she’s being a baby. “Look, here is where I belong,” she’ll say, throwing one leg over the crib and climbing in. “Look, look, take a photo.”
III.
I spend my last day in Copenhagen alone. Gwyn and I have nothing to say to each other; it’s not anger, it’s a lack of interest. She has her five-year plan, of which nothing in Copenhagen is helping with, except to illustrate the kind of life she does not want.
Me, I have Paris, who I’ve been thinking of leaving again. I had tried to leave her twice before. The first time, I got as far as Latvia, into the arms of a married woman, and then another married woman. How’s that for a sign? The next time only as far as Rouen, where I stayed celibate in a sort of self-appointed hermitage, reading the trial records of Jeanne d’Arc, then the Collected Letters of Flaubert, what a slut he was in the Orient, and learning how to moonwalk via a YouTube tutorial in my Airbnb, which was a stone’s throw away from the high-spired, chalk-white plastered Church of Saint-Maclou.
When I came back to Paris for the second time, I texted her to let her know I was in town, staying in the 13th. Chinatown. Pathetic. I wanted to make it sound like I had left for a reason. That I was exploring new areas. That these moves of mine were intentional. She said she was with someone, but I could come by later. I waited outside on the steps until they were done. Then she buzzed me in. I passed him on the stairwell, faceless, with a heavy, musky scent, whereas my cologne was always more floral and spring-like. She let me into her apartment and told me to make some coffee as she showered. I took my clothes off without being told; she has a rule about outside clothes, and slipped into a pair of pajamas she keeps in the hallway storage. She lives in a small studio on the 7th floor (by French reckoning) of a servants’ building in Montmartre. When she comes back out, fresh and clean, she looks tired. In the shadows, you could be forgiven for thinking she’s young, but under the overhead light, you’ll see. Strands of grey hair throughout. Yellowed teeth. A heaviness in her thighs, breasts, and neck. She asks me how long I’ll stay this time. She’s bored. The soles of her feet are rough. Her tongue tastes like cigarettes.
Perhaps I could leave Paris for Copenhagen. Wider, cleaner streets. I like the way people dress here. I like the beer. Their chunky words have weight. The pastries. You can have the best croissant of your life in Copenhagen, but it’ll cost you 6 euros and you’ll wait for fifteen minutes. Or you can have a good croissant in Paris, for 1.5, on the go. Which do you pick? I have photo after photo of the cyclists in Copenhagen. A parade of bicycles every morning, afternoon, and evening, like the traffic patterns of Arizona highways during rush hour. The city’s pulse. In the bike lane, you’ll see, side by side, an executive in a dark navy suit, a brown leather satchel strapped across his back, an Indian delivering Vinted packages and Amazon boxes, a little kid, backpack clasped tight, on his way to school. They move in such a rhythm, how do they even get started?