God Loves the Danes
The apartment was in the part of Santa Monica where the avenues are named after states: Montana, Idaho, Washington, California, Arizona. Fig trees formed an arch over the numbered cross-street and the road was sticky with years worth of dried fruit. The avenue was lined with palm trees. Both were prime positioning for birds to shit on your car, but we didn’t know that yet. The lease entitled us to just one covered parking spot.
The forty-something landlord, who I’ll call Tatiana, met us at the street corner in denim mini shorts and platform wedges. Wrapped around her torso was beige elastic wrap.
“I just got lipo,” she explained.
The complex was just two stories and included only a handful of units. It had white stucco walls and red clay tile roofing. The windowsills and railings were teal blue. Tatiana explained that the apartment had been in her family for years.
Tatiana’s last name was a mouthful. It also happened to be the last name of a famous filmmaker who’d won Oscars for Best Director and Best Screenplay decades earlier. During my months-long stretch at my parents house in the pandemic, I’d seen his most famous film, but thought nothing of the shared last name. Tatiana didn’t operate in the manner I imagined a person with a cinematic pedigree might. She seemed scrappier than that and more fun.
“Where are you girls from?” she asked.
“California” was the collective answer. Michelle, Southern. Anne and I, Northern, though different parts.
Tatiana eyed Anne with a combination of admiration and envy.
“Where are you from from?”
“My parents are from Denmark,” Anne said.
“God loves the Danes.”
With that, Tatiana turned and walked inside. Unknowingly, she gifted us with a nonsensical refrain for years to come. A catchall response administered liberally, to anything and nothing in particular: God loves the Danes.
If the outside was beachy and bohemian, the inside was even better. There were arched doorways, a rounded fireplace and a small window connecting the kitchen and living room. The same teal from the exterior windowsills and railings was replicated on the backsplash. We reeled with excitement. The apartment embodied the sophistication and aesthetic character with which we would enter our post-college life.
Tatiana’s apartment tour was imbued with the nostalgia she had for the wild twenties and thirties she’d spent in the same spot. She pointed to a hatch in the ceiling.
“There used to be a staircase connecting up to the roof and we’d have parties up there all the time. It was the best.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Maybe we can put something back in for you girls.”
We cooed. It felt like a done deal.
A rooftop is a perfect tanning venue and this was an exceptionally tan time in our lives. We were three months graduated from college and none of us had jobs yet. We spent entire days laying out in the sun at the beach and on the rooftop of our friend who went to Pepperdine and lived in Malibu. If Texans have the refrain The higher the hair, the closer to God, then Californians have something along the lines of The unobstructed UV rays get you as close to God as you need to be.
We signed the lease and packed out of South Central.
For years, I’d tell people, with a combination of pride and sadism, that I didn’t have the capacity to hate anyone. That is, anyone except for my old landlord in Santa Monica. Things soured quickly and not just because we never got the staircase to the roof. Our water was routinely turned off for days at a time. Tatiana showed up at the apartment at odd times and stayed for hours without any good reason. She treated us like we were teenagers staying as guests in an apartment that she still lived in. She insisted that the tenant downstairs, who invited a rotating cast of characters to loiter on the street outside the building, who screamed for her needles at three in the morning, was doing so because she was diabetic.
It’s hard to remember now exactly where my rage came from. Perhaps it was particularly potent because it was one of my initial encounters with the feeling. Before that time, my response to unpleasant situations was primarily sadness or anxiety. With this dynamic it was rage that coursed through my body so that I had to take walks around the block to burn off energy. I think the root of it is that I sensed a person who was going to try to pull a fast one on me.
In her book “Fool Proof: How Fear of Playing the Sucker Shapes Our Selves and the Social Order―and What We Can Do About It,” Tess Wilkinson-Ryan describes how fear of being made a sucker is often a powerful driver for decision making. In business, politics and law, people often forgo a better deal in favor of one that doesn’t make them feel duped. In a social experiment in which people were offered to unevenly split a sum of money with another person (e.g. one person gets $9 and another gets $1), many people reject the deal altogether so that neither person gets anything. People would rather have nothing than feel that they’ve gotten an unfair cut.
In Tatiana, I found a person who seemed to prey on my deference. I wasn’t going to make a stink about her lingering in our bedrooms for hours over the weekend. We didn’t get any sort of reimbursement for time spent without access to running water in the kitchen. When we decided to move out, we helped to find tenants to take our place. As our move-out date approached, I had a sinking feeling that another shoe was going to drop.
Sure enough, there was a security deposit battle in the end. When the hair on the back of my neck had started to prickle months before, I started taking screenshots. I had a folder of evidence of all the ways our legal agreement had been broken on her end. Confident in my odds at civil claims court, I asked to be connected to her lawyers. Rage had emboldened me. Eventually, Tatiana backed down, we moved out and I never saw her again.
A year or so later, the famous director with Tatiana’s last name died. Obituaries ran in the New York Times, the LA Times and the Hollywood Reporter.
“Did you know that ____ was your landlord’s father?” Michelle’s dad texted her. She passed the message along to us.
It felt like being given a set of keys to Tatiana’s family home while she was out of town and unaware of my entry. Affairs, ruthless behavior in business, a controversial reputation built over decades. All of this was outlined in great detail on the internet by reputable sources. Private information poured like water through a sieve. This is not the sort of access you’re supposed to have to your former landlord’s backstory. I speculated on her childhood and then admonished myself for doing so, like demanding that a kid stop staring at strangers in the supermarket checkout line.
I ran into the next set of tenants the year after we moved out, at a bar in Venice, and they spilled their frustration and disbelief at Tatiana’s behavior. I can’t remember if we’d warned them. My guilt at saying nothing would have been outweighed by my desire to wipe my hands clean of the place.
With years and thousands of miles of distance between me and the Santa Monica apartment, it’s hard to reflect on the intensity of that era with anything other than bemusement. Hatred was far too harsh a reaction, but then when have twenty-three-year-olds been known for emotional restraint? She was terrible, but we found an opportunity for a shared enemy and seized it. This much remains true, God loves the Danes.
Remember when she hired a cleaner and it was just her in a wig
I still love that apartment !!! And u girls