I heard my neighbors arguing late last night. The fight started in the courtyard of my apartment complex and spilled into the driveway. There was silence. And then it started again. She yelled at him from their apartment door and he yelled at her from the middle of the courtyard. I tried to understand what they were fighting about. But it was clear that they were fighting about everything and nothing at the same time.
I wonder if anyone else was awake. I can’t imagine others could have slept through the argument.
There was a second bout of silence. And then I heard the screaming and the yelling, blunt and muffled, coming from inside their own unit.
It reminded me of when I was a kid and would will myself to sleep, praying that my parents would stop and praying that they wouldn’t get a divorce.
I heard the sirens bleed through the air five or six minutes after I first smelled the hint of a fire. I smelled the fire 30 seconds after my roommate asked me if I smelled something burning. Originally, I thought it was the overheated, burnt coffee that festered in the bottom of the pot for a couple minutes too long. I tend to leave my coffee pot on for a couple of hours when I am home.
You know that moment when the late night turns into the early morning? It is a moment taht has no “in between.” The transition is whole, complete, and instant. That was the same experience when I first had the sensation of smelling the smoke. All of a suddent, there was a heavy scent of smoke and fire, where the was only the nothing scent of normal urban air an instant before. The air now smelled electrical, of melting plastic, and of burnign wood.
I opened the front door to my apartment. A thin veil of brown smoke dominated the air but, at the same time, was barely distinguishable from it. I placed a call to 911, bot knowing where the fire was, only know that a fire was.
Others had already called.
Each moment of controlled chaos fell into the next. The momentum of each urgent moment propelled time forward into the next moment of quiet panic. We heard the sirens in the distance. By now, I discovered the fire. It was burning the far corner of the apartment complex next door. As I left the house, I did not grab anything–I did not think to. I thought we would be allowed to return to our own building. I remember being concerned that an ember could float from the burning roof to ours.
I remember thinking that this could be bad. I remember thinking, “Everything does not always end well.”
Fire trucks arrived. Five of them A news chopper circled overhead. Sheriffs evacuated our apartment and cordonered off an area. We, neighbors, stood from behind the yellow plastic tape, wondering what had happened, wondering what would happen.
And then, for us, for those who lived next door, the excitement and anxiety left as quickly as it arrived. Shrug. An unwritten law of nature, I guess.
Everything does not always end well. That’s true. But, most of the time and for most of the people, this is also true: everything usually ends well.
And so it did.
I heard my neighbor vomiting.
There’s a woman that lives in the complex across the alley. Multiple times a week, I hear her hurl into the toilet. Two or three times a week, she gets on her knees and prays to the Porcelain God.
Hearing a person vomit is an odd experience. At the very least, it is uncomfortable, and unpleasant. But usually–at the very least–its contextual. The inflicted is a friend or a family member and you know he is sick or she is hung over. Hell, you’re usually holding the hair, while you’re looking away. Hearing a neighbor vomit is just downright unpleasant and unexpected.
And that’s what happens to me, multiple times a week.
I admit, I thought nothing of it at first. I considered them isolated incidents, unfortunate bouts of botulism. The result of a long, crazy night that one must ultimately repent for via a long, hard hangover.
One day, as I heard her spew forth the contents of her gastric pouch, it dawned on me what could very likely be occurring across the alley. This woman, my neighbor (the one who fucks a lot), suffers from an eating disorder. She suffers from bulimia, hyperphagia, binge-and-purge syndrome, bulimia nervosa. Whatever you want to call it, I realized that she’s got it.
And then the story that I used to think changed. Instead of this woman–if it is the same woman–who spend her mornings, afternoons, and evenings having active, verbal sex became complex and injured. A nymphomaniac. A bulimic. I start thinking about her life and her world. Do her partners know the price she pays for having such a hot body? Do her partners know the price they are paying? I wonder if her partners are the ones who inflicted the initial damage, or if it was her parents or her brother or her boyfriend from an earlier age?
But I admire her, too. You see, I have spent a few nights sprawled on my bathroom floor, comforted by the smooth coolness of the tiles, with my arms half-wrapped around the toilet waiting for the next bout of gastrointestinal distress to take hold. And when I vomit, I am loud. In that bathroom, in that apartment, I can hear my own abdominal contractions and guttural gags echo off the white, narrow space between the two apartment buildings. I have oftened wondered if my neighbors have worried about me in the way that I have worried about them.
She threw up again today.
I heard my neighbor having sex yesterday. It was during the middle of the day in the middle of the week. And I heard her moan and groan and ‘ooh’ and ‘aah.’ I live in an apartment complex and my exterior wall faces an alley of sorts (in fact is just the driveway to the rear parking lot of the apartment complex next to mine). A whole slab of windows spills the noises from that apartment complex into my kitchen, my office, and my bathroom.
This was the second day in a row that I had heard this woman having sex.
She’s nothing if not persistent–and noisy. Over the five years that I have lived in this apartment, I have heard her have sex often. Always the same woman, with the same sex-induced breathing and sexual pitch of ecstasy articulated. She’s commanding and gives her partner directions. And he, dutifully and silent, takes her directions like an eager temp the first day on the job. Always responding to her demands to increase the rate (”faster,” she pants) and intensity (”harder”). She punctuates her satisfaction with a long, drawn out “Yes!”
“Good man,” I think.
They have these trysts during the night time, too. Friends have been over when she was getting down and dirty and nasty and slutty, when she was pleasing her man as best she could. We were watching TV or listening to music or telling stories and laughing and joking–and drinking. And then it began, as it always does. The sounds are quiet. Subtle. Almost inaudible. Like a summer lightning storm approaching from the distance. A friend first heard it and punctuated this auditory discovery with a simple, terse “Shh.” He held up his index finger. No one moved a muscles. Eyes darted from friend to friend.
“Is someone having sex?” he asked.
And, before any of us could answer, she did. From across the alley. In the privacy of her own bedroom. So the friends turned off the lights and sauntered quietly to my open windows trying to figure out–in vain–where the sounds were coming from.
I make up stories about this woman. None of them are true. I think she’s a devoted girlfriend to her long-time boyfriend. I think she is a woman of questionable morals who lives fast and plays hard and loves her sex the same way. Some days, I imagine she’s both, and invites these men into the bedroom that she shares with her boyfriend or husband and makes a little extra money on the side (or, worse, she does it for free and just for the thrill).
But I don’t know who they are. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what apartment they live in, nor do I know what they look like. My entire relationship with her is intertwined with the most intimate aspect of her existence–her sex life. And, one day, one of us will move out and move on. And–just like every sexual encounter she’s ever had in her apartment across the alley–in an instant our time together will be over.
I’ll get the kleenex.