(Photo: Mark Heithoff)

The kitchen is a square of quiet and complicated appliances. A Miele Incognito dishwasher, a GE Advantium microwave, and, most notably, drawers that have some sort of contraption that keeps them from slamming. A mother’s window over the sink allows you to wash your dishes while looking at the Empire State Building.

There are three bathrooms, two on the main floor and one next to the bedroom. They all have sinks in that popular squared-basin style, which bothers me as a guest, because all your toothpaste munge spreads out and doesn’t go down easily. But I guess that is what housecleaners are for. In the upper bathroom, the owner has installed a whirlpool tub.

Except for some style choices, and the fact she probably doesn’t feel searing pain every time she receives her student-loan bill, the owner and I aren’t that different. She is a yoga devotee like me and has a vast collection of Tibetan chant music, yoga books, and yoga videotapes. She also has three yoga mats and two extras still in their wrappers. That’s more than $120 in yoga-mat yardage. But if I had the cash, I would probably do the same. I would also replace my cheap oatmeal breakfasts with wheat-free, gluten-free Erewhon cereal for $5.49 a box. And I would also really focus on cleansing my body and buy bottles of emulsified oil of oregano, Cytozyme-AD, and Amino-D-Tox.

On one of her many bookshelves are Light on Yoga, Deepak Chopra, and the I Ching, all of which I own. On the shelf above it are books on money and investing, all of which I don’t. One title stood out: Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, by T. Harv Eker, who urges the reader to “place your hand on your heart and say ‘my inner world creates my outer world’ … then touch your head and say ‘I have a Millionaire Mind!’ ” It also has handy “wealth principles” like “Practice thinking and creating ways of having ‘both.’ Whenever alternatives are presented to you, ask yourself, ‘how can I have both?’ ”

These are the truths I must learn to Have It All.

Her bedroom, surprisingly modest—if you don’t account for the spectacular view—is the room where Laura and Mary Ingalls would sleep if Ms. Ingalls Wilder wrote another book called Huge Deluxe Penthouse Near the A Train. I could imagine my owner, exhausted from creating breathtaking architectural spaces all day and wiped out from her private yoga class with Rodney Yee, coming home and flopping on her pillowy bed, looking up at her shelf, and knowing, inherently, how to make her inner world give her outer world money like it was spitting out of an ATM.

I put my iPod in her speaker station, and my playlist (Ray LaMontagne, the Go-Go’s, Broken Social Scene) sounded huge and symphonic as it reverberated over all the hard surfaces. I lay in bed, hovering like some figure in a painting by Chagall, floating over the colored bits of the city, in a gorgeous space of aspirations and light shafts and soft beds and slamless drawers, all my toxins and toxic thoughts flaking away and flushing down into sewers I didn’t see.

In the morning I was hungry and I snuck a bowl of Erewhon wheat-free, gluten-free cereal. (I’m sorry, owner! I’ll make you breakfast at my place sometime!) I wished I could have stayed another night. I wished that I will be able to stay in my neighborhood, after all this luxury happens. Of course, this town has been gentrifying since it was traded for a bunch of beads, and you can’t live here without embracing the changeable city, but there comes a point when you wonder if the changeable city is embracing you back.

I returned to my warm, dusty apartment and the animal friends that inhabit it. I didn’t feel as resentful as before. I left the place more sympathetic for this woman, and her attempts at self-work. There was a sense of generosity-gone-high-end about her. The people in those glass houses aren’t stormtroopers—but if they insist on floating above me, in their gorgeous homes, they should stop doing so much yoga and have more parties. I dumped all my freshly clean laundry on the floor and flopped down on my own bed. In quarter-hour intervals, I can see a plane out my bedroom window approaching La Guardia. I always imagine it full of people looking down at Brooklyn, getting a moment’s perspective, for $1,000 or less.

Oh, I almost forgot. The asking price of the duplex is $2.5 million.

Related:

• Archive: “VU Archive”
• Table of Contents: April 16, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!