Cleveland Heights

Cleveland Heights enters the narrative through a rented apartment on Coventry Road where the narrator and Emily try to live together. The place becomes the setting for an effort at ordinary partnership, but that domestic project unfolds alongside their drug use and the instability surrounding them.

The Coventry Road Apartment

The narrator rents the apartment, and Emily moves in during the first week of April, shortly after graduating from college with honors. He makes a deliberate, if uncertain, attempt to furnish a home: buying furniture because he believes that is what people do when they move in together. The apartment is therefore less a settled domestic refuge than a stage on which he tries to perform the habits of a conventional couple.

Domestic Life and Its Contradictions

The narrator takes Emily to a one-man show inspired by Ella Fitzgerald, whose music she greatly appreciates. He buys the tickets in advance and a dress for her; after she exchanges it for another, they dress up and go out. They are the only people in formal clothes among an older, affluent audience dressed in L.L.Bean. The narrator mocks the audience’s apparent comfort and calls it the life they were fighting for, making the outing expose the distance between respectable domestic aspiration and the couple’s circumstances. The show is acceptable, but the evening ends back at the apartment: they take more Xanax and pass out.

The Apartment and the Wider Plot

The attempted home life does not insulate the narrator from the troubles of his associates. That same night, James Lightfoot tries to call, but the narrator does not hear the phone. James is arrested while attempting to break into a building he mistakes for the narrator’s; police find a knife and drugs on him. The passage does not establish that the mistaken building is in Cleveland Heights, but the missed call sharply places the apartment’s private, drugged quiet beside the criminal events unfolding around the narrator.