I woke to the sounds of an argument coming from downstairs. I could hear everything that happened in the building, upstairs, downstairs, because the walls and the windows and doors were all so thin. You could probably put your hand through them if you wanted to. Sometimes I thought about doing that.
The voices were dim because I was half dreaming still and so the sounds became part of my dream.
Then I woke up.
There was an empty takeout carton on the floor and the room smelled bad.
I went to open the window and put my head out and looked down to the ground floor and there standing beside the main entrance was Mr. Weiss who lived downstairs.
Once a week or so his wife threw him out and told him she was leaving him, and when that happened he would stand outside on the pavement and for a couple of hours the arguing would continue and she would lean out of the window to shout at him, and after a while of that his tone would become contrite and wheedling and she would let him back in.
He was saying, “Come on, baby, take me back. I didn’t mean it, I swear.”
She, above him, yelled indeterminately.
I shut the window.
The clock on the wall said it was gone half past three in the afternoon. I hadn’t slept till almost dawn the night before, and when I finally did it had been broken, fitful, colored with unsettling dreams of fractured and half-remembered faces that slipped away quickly from my waking brain as I tried to get a clear sight of them. There was an odd ringing whine in my head and I pressed my hands against my eyes and small red lights moved about inside my eyelids.
My body felt old and tired, my head thick. In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my cheeks. It didn’t do anything. I stood, hands gripping either side of the sink, looking at my face in the mirror, watching the slow movement of water droplets sliding down my forehead. I looked exhausted and small and pale. The twin points of my shoulders showed under my shirt. Everything about me seemed for a strange moment to have shrunk in on itself, and I felt that I was held by my own eyes in the mirror.
After a second I shook my head and turned away.
The kitchen cupboard was empty and that meant that I would have to go and buy food from somewhere, or maybe later I could stop by the bar although it was my evening off and they would have leftovers because they often did toward the end of the week, and maybe there would be French toast or some pancakes today and maybe I could take a little cream from the fridge because I was friendly with the chef.
The apartment was empty now because the girls were all out at work, and I wandered inside it with nowhere to go, moving the dirty plates on the sideboard into the sink and turning on the tap without any intention of cleaning them and turning it off again; tuning the old radio on the windowsill in and out of static and watching the people and cars moving about the hot loud street under the window and splashing tap water listlessly on my face, and drinking yesterday’s cold coffee from a cup on the table.
Tuning in the radio, tuning it out again.
It began to grow dark and I thought I would go out and walk down to the ocean and look at the lights on the water. I wanted badly to be out of the apartment and not to look at the old plates in the sink and smell the old coffee and feel the walls close on all sides.
I locked the apartment behind me.
Downstairs at the front doors of the building was the shape of somebody behind the frosted glass. I paused and then opened the door and stepped from the dark hallway into the street light outside.
My husband, Cal, was standing on the pavement.