When my family moved to Washington so that I could cover the Trump administration, I wanted to live in an apartment building. My wife objected, ascribing the desire to my Soviet childhood spent in a communal flat. I conceded the point: If the desire was rooted in a Proustian yearning, all the more reason to honor it.
We settled into a brick colonial. Still, one dreams. On my plodding runs, I regularly pass a residential building known as the Foxhall — nine curving, beige stories rising from parkland, its balconies jutting out like cliffs, solid and precarious at the same time. Floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall windows turn the building’s facade into competing bands of glass and concrete. I dream of life inside, which I idealize as a cross between college dorm and commune. Someone is always playing the piano, mixing drinks, baking cookies, learning to paint. Children run laughing through the hallways; people come out of their apartments, delighted at the sound, and they also begin to laugh.
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