Chapter 3 #2
I recovered because I always recover. That is, if nothing else, a thing I know how to do on my own with no help from anyone.
But when I came home that night, I had to grapple with the fact that she is now the one on the other side of my wall.
I stood in my kitchen holding the tentacle novel pages, even reading them.
It’s not that I can’t see why someone would enjoy it, but today it was the thing that threw me off my game.
I tried to determine the correct response to the situation.
Do I return them, burn them? Finish reading them?
What I did know, returning them required a conversation I’d already had too much of that morning, and I could not bring myself to get tangled in another fruitless exchange with that chaos.
It was hard earlier, her standing there in daisy-embroidered denim, looking at me like we are two entirely different brands of adults.
And I already had more contact with this woman in one morning than I had with almost anyone else in weeks and all of it had been negative.
So I grabbed the titillating tentacle pages and taped them to her door.
I never asked if she received them and she has never mentioned it.
But I know she did because days later, I heard her recording them, like it was nothing.
She eventually found out I am the one on the other side of her wall, and now that interaction remains the foundation of every one since.
The shower, I decide, is my only option tonight.
To stand under the coldest water I can tolerate for as long as I can.
Which accomplishes nothing except making me colder, more awake, and somehow more aware of her voice that I can still hear even from here.
I know that’s not true, but once she’s in, she’s unshakable.
The first night it happened, I turned up with some concern.
It wasn’t sexual moaning, I would never have showed up for that.
But a fight so violent it was either that or call the police.
When I showed up at her door, she was obnoxiously proud of the small space she had built out.
Showing me every bit of padding and drapery, explaining how I shouldn't even be able to hear her. But as evidence indicated, I very much could. And to this day, months later, that hasn’t changed.
In my head she has implanted herself from repeat offenses.
And while I know it’s not possible, it feels like her voice comes through the plumbing just as easily, dripping from the shower head with every spray of water.
She is everywhere. I press my hands against the stone wall of my shower and hang my head low, letting the water run itself down my body trying not to imagine exactly what it is she’s trying to evoke.
It’s clearly not working, so I am just standing in a cold shower like an actual schmuck.
She doesn’t shower with such misery, I know this because the architectural geniuses put a large window in her bathroom that she leaves perpetually open.
Which means, I know when she’s in the shower.
Fucking great. I’m sure the office building across the street gets a good view.
I also know because she actually sings, and if my balcony door is open, her voice strolls right in like it's been invited for dinner.
I scrub my hands across my face, through my wet hair. The steam filling this space is from me, fuming with the thought that this girl can be so wildly ingrained, uninvited, in my brain that the classic ‘cold shower’ did nothing.
I yank on a fresh pair of joggers and hope I’ve given her enough time to finish. But walking back to my bedroom wall, she is going full force. And apparently, so are her main characters.
I form a fist and slam it against the wall, right where I know she is.
But she just turns up the volume. I ‘knock’ twice.
She just plays a scream that cuts through every room of this apartment.
It’s a deliberate escalation, a conscious decision to take what I’ve just communicated and reverse it, to tell me, through the medium of her screams, that she has heard me and has chosen to do the opposite.
Every escalation I take is equally matched or exceeded, and we have found ourselves in a standoff that will soon impact the entire floor, not just units A and B.
I cross my apartment in the dark, out the front door into the hallway, and I bang on her door with the full intention of saying something that I will have prepared by the time she opens the door, because right now, my feet made this decision before my brain was consulted.
So I have to manage it while standing on her ‘Hello Sunshine’ doormat.
The neighbor across the hall opens his door.
He is a small man, mild-mannered, who should be, by any reasonable logic, on my side.
But I also couldn’t tell you his name if I was on trial and I know she picks up his groceries for him.
I know because he mentioned it in the elevator, twice, and it appears to have constituted a binding agreement of loyalty, he didn’t shut up about what a ‘neighborly’ thing it was to do.
And because of that, I know he looks at me monitoring the situation on behalf of the wrong party.
I hear her footsteps as she makes her way to the door, and they are not the footsteps of someone who is ready to let this go. They are quick, forward-moving, and fueled by something. I think it’s rage. Me too, sweetheart, me too.
The locks disengage.
The door opens.
And there she is.
It’s beauty that doesn’t need to announce itself and therefore arrives when I haven’t prepared for it. And fuck, am I not prepared for it now.
The chin up, the widening of her eyes, the way her jaw sets.
She believes she is right and is prepared to be right at any volume necessary, which I will admit is professionally admirable, but personally catastrophic.
Her hair is half-captured, her eyes are bright and already loaded, headphones hang around her neck, and she is lifting herself on her toes, which she does when she’s preparing to fight with me.
So I straighten my spine to stretch every inch of myself in the frame of her door. It’s the only leverage I have.
In a meeting, in court, I am never underprepared. I don’t show up without knowing what I’m going to say and why, what every possible response is, and how I’ll meet it. That’s the standard, that’s the fucking floor. But here, in this hallway, the floor is lower. I manage with what I have.
‘By the way, I haven’t seen Claire in months, hope she’s okay.
’ Great, now she thinks my relationships merit a Dateline level investigation.
She mentioned my girlfriend, though the word girlfriend is only still applicable with ex as the pre-fix now, so casually.
Why wouldn’t she? I watch it cross the air between us and I make the accurate and instantaneous read, she doesn’t know it’s loaded.
She is not cruel in the calculated sense, I know enough people who are that I can recognize it.
She is, if anything, the opposite of calculated.
She is a person who fills silences by instinct, and this one has misfired.
She just doesn’t know it yet. Because someone who bakes ‘apology muffins’ doesn’t scream intentionally cruel. Sometimes she just screams.
But she says it, and it lands. I organized almost all of my life to be impressive and almost none of it to be known, because my grandmother is the only person who ever did the latter without requiring me to earn it first, and I spent long enough trying to earn affection from two people who were too busy to prove they were winning.
The problem, the one I have not resolved, and which Claire hammered in any chance she could, is that no one ever gets close enough to know me.
Certainly not close enough to unravel me, except for one notable, loud exception.
Claire ended it by saying that I wasn’t available in any way that mattered. She was right. And I had no interest in fighting it.
“That,” I say, “is none of your business.”
I step forward, keeping one foot on her doormat because it’s the last piece of the self-possession I have. I came out here already losing, but she can’t know that.
She slams the door in my face hard enough to rattle the frame, and while I won't admit it to anyone else, it rattles me.