In 2017, it was time for Gene Batiste and his husband, Scott Honeychurch, to downsize. They had owned a three-bedroom condo in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington D.C., since 2006. But when Dr. Batiste decided to move to Houston to take care of his ailing mother, “We figured,” he said, “that, since we’d be separated because of our careers, trying to keep up with a mortgage and my rent in Houston would be too much.”
Mr. Honeychurch, now 63, who worked in nursing administration, stayed in Washington and began renting the top floor of a Victorian house in Mount Pleasant; Dr. Batiste, now 65, found an apartment in Houston, where he had gotten a job as the chief diversity officer at St. John’s School.
Moving to Texas together wasn’t an option, since their careers dictated where they lived. The couple managed the distance for four years. Mr. Honeychurch even tried relocating to Texas, but couldn’t find work comparable to his nursing job in Washington, and after a few months, returned to D.C.
Dr. Batiste spent three years traveling between Houston and San Antonio — about a four-hour trip — where his mother, Gertrude Batiste, lived. She died in May of 2020, in the throes of a Covid lockdown, but he was able to spend the last five weeks of her life by her side.
After the funeral, Dr. Batiste began to consider his next move. “Once she passed,” he said, “there was nothing holding me in Texas.” He started a job search, looking for opportunities that would allow him to move closer to Mr. Honeychurch.
In the spring of 2021, he received an offer from an independent school in northern New Jersey. He was excited about the position — he would be the assistant head of school for development — but the job posed a logistical problem. He needed to move within a few months, and he wasn’t able to take time off before the school year ended to apartment hunt. He had never lived in New Jersey or the New York area, and would soon have to rent himself an apartment, sight unseen.
Luckily, the administration at Dwight-Englewood threw him a life line by connecting him with a parent, Roberta Friedman, who once had a child at the school, and who was also a real estate agent for Sotheby’s International Realty in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
“Roberta was amazing,” Dr. Batiste said. “It was very serendipitous.” She gave him the lay of the land, explaining the different neighborhoods in the area and helping him figure out what he could afford.
Working with an agent who had a connection to his new school also helped Dr. Batiste relax into the process, and to have faith in Ms. Friedman. “I had an implicit trust that she wasn’t going to steer me in the wrong direction,” he said.
That trust was secured when Ms. Friedman sent him several options for rentals, including a three-bedroom unit in the building where she lived in Fort Lee, N.J. When she sent over the floor plans, Mr. Batiste was interested, but it wasn’t until Ms. Friedman met with him on Face Time from the apartment that his jaw dropped.
He was immediately sold on the stunning views of the Hudson River and Manhattan, and moved in July of 2021. Even his Welsh terrier, Bravo, was impressed. The dog often sits and stares off toward the city.
“I guess we have to thank Apple for that,” Dr. Batiste said, referring to the ease of touring an apartment remotely without setting foot inside.
Dr. Batiste enjoys the neighborhood he lives in, and he especially appreciates the ones he can see out his windows. He once tried to take Bravo on an adventurous jaunt across the nearby George Washington Bridge, but they got caught in a downpour. He phoned Mr. Honeychurch and described the misadventure. “He said, ‘You had Bravo on the George Washington Bridge with all that rain and all that loud noise?’” Dr. Batiste remembered, laughing. “He didn’t give a whit about me!”
$5,000 | Fort Lee, N.J.
Gene Batiste, 65
Occupation: School administrator
Days off in New Jersey: “When Scott is up to visit, we go to a restaurant we really like in Edgewater, called Haven — it’s right on the water. And we love the Whole Foods and the Trader Joe’s there.”
On navigating the theater district in Manhattan: “I tried New Jersey Transit onetime, and I made a major goof. I’ll try it again, but for now I drive, and I use a parking app called BestParking. It’s so easy.”
Dr. Batiste and Mr. Honeychurch have been together for 20 years. They met at a hotel bar in Marina del Rey, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, where Dr. Batiste was traveling for his job as vice president with the National Association of Independent Schools. He was living in Crystal Springs, Va., at the time, and Mr. Honeychurch was living in Los Angeles and working as a nurse practitioner.
When Mr. Honeychurch suggested they live in the same place, Dr. Batiste wanted to make things official. “Beyoncé hadn’t come out with ‘If you like it, then you shoulda put a ring on it’ yet, but whatever the equivalent was in 2003, that’s what I said.”
They had a commitment ceremony in Hawaii on Valentine’s Day in 2003, and Mr. Honeychurch moved to Virginia soon after. Same-sex marriages have been legal in Washington since 2010, and Dr. Batiste and Mr. Honeychurch got married at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church there in 2014. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell vs. Hodges that same-sex couples were allowed to marry nationally.
The pair have found it easy to manage the distance between Washington and Fort Lee, especially given the time off they enjoy with school schedules. They travel to see each other every five or six weeks, Dr. Batiste said, and often join each other for work events.
While work and a long-distance marriage make little time for leisure, Dr. Batiste has been enjoying his proximity to Manhattan. He was a professional opera singer — on top of being a teacher and later a school administrator — in the 1980s and ’90s, and loves taking advantage of the cultural opportunities in New York. Last fall, he went to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time.
He saw “Fire Shut Up In My Bones’, by Terence Blanchard, based on a 2014 memoir by The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow. It was “an amazing first Met experience for me,” he said.
He has been back to the city often and seen a number of play on Broadway and Off Broadway, often with an old classmate who lives in the area. “Every opportunity I have now, the city is my escape,” Dr. Batiste said. “For both professional and personal fulfillment and also, quite frankly, for self care. Whether it’s to worship, or it’s to have fun, it’s in the city.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
