Illustration by Rama Duwaji
The first place my husband and I lived was an old six-unit building that ought to have been rent stabilized but had been deregulated sometime in the last decade. All the units were railroad apartments, pretty and small, with a door at one end of the hall and a door at the other. Ours had no partitions except for the bathroom, just one long tube of living. You get a very animal sense of yourself that way. You hear your lover shuffle and eat and you know he’s experiencing you too.
That might activate your sense of shame, for instance. Mine comes and goes. It’s atrophied in parts, but when I hear somebody else in the building, an organ inside my own personal bundle of neurosis starts to kick. What must they think of me, tap-dancing across their concentration, opening the fridge in the middle of their thought.
It’s a pretty self-centered way to get in your own way. Like any neurosis, it’s not unreasonable, just wrong. I developed this habit of thought after clashes with roommates and neighbors across a decade-long string of living in bad, expensive apartments, and who didn’t? All of us duking it out in our cramped places. Say you’re the inconsiderate one, or you trip over somebody’s pathology and go flying. Like one time I moved in with a friend and her boyfriend and the friend had a BPD crashout in my direction and threw a chair at me. I locked myself in my child-sized room and waited for somebody to walk me out of the apartment. I listened for her in the hall.
Or another time in another apartment, a friend passed suddenly. I shattered and after two days of loudly voiced grief, I heard a knock at my door and saw cops out in the hall. They said the neighbor in the unit beside mine (who I’d never met) asked them to check on me. A bewildering gesture, passive-aggressive and still weirdly compassionate, from somebody who decided to call the cops rather than break our anonymous experience of each other, or even thump the wall between us.
That first building with my husband had thin walls and kids in both apartments upstairs. The phases of their young lives fascinated us in that casual, neighborly way. Those two are teasing each other into a fight. That one’s learning to scream. Their steps crescendoed as they ran across our ceiling. They encountered the stairs up to their home as an obstacle, which turned the outside of our apartment into a learning theater for young people asking to be picked up, dissolving into tantrums, shouldering responsibility.
We reasoned that these yuppie Greenpoint people couldn’t be that interested in our lives. But at a normal volume nothing could really be kept to oneself. If you stood in the hall and you listened you could tell who was home and what they were up to. We listened to our neighbors going through their days and we understood that they must hear us, too, our conversations and our sex. Did we fascinate or bother them, we wondered. I grew up among tetchy, nervous gossips and at the far end of every projection I sense a phantom like that, an intelligent and not exactly malicious woman keeping tabs in a dossier that will eventually emerge, like a report card for your soul.
Around the time I moved in I started calling him Daddy. I forget when or how but it unlocked something and I walked through that door. I said it again and again, at all hours of the day, at a wail or a purr. I said it by way of goodbye, and on the edge of sleep, and when I got back home in the evenings. During sex I said it like a spell to bring on quick immense climaxes.
Our bed stood next to the second door in the apartment and we got a good earful of the building that way. In our sex we became more conscious than normal of doors swinging open in the building and the coming and going of its inhabitants. We’d get muffled until another door closed and then I’d start to bellow again. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. I’ve never been a quiet come.
We started shooting our half-embarrassed smiles towards our neighbors, a preemptive apology. We talked about it amongst ourselves, how it must sound: Daddy, the tear-you-apart sex. How one would talk about it, say, with friends or offspring. Pathetic, to keep up appearances in our stretch of moderate-income Brooklyn. What would you do? At any point you measure yourself by the fantasm who must be measuring you. You wage shower fights with her scolds.
They didn’t take us up on our implied apologies, so maybe they missed the embarrassing details or endeavored to spare our feelings or wanted us to spare theirs. How different this bourgeois charade is from gay people, with our special disinhibition, with our darkroom habits that let you freak it in proximity to your sis with the mental wall up. How close the charade comes to exhibitionism, without the element of choice that makes it lively.
Now we live in a brick building that deadens sound except the trucks going by. We’ve got inner walls now. We shout across the apartment: devotion, pet names, commiserations, tasks. The building absorbs most of it. What was that, we ask. Can you repeat that one more time.
