The familiar creaking noise beat the kettle’s screams from the kitchen by a few seconds. A fallen quarter rattled on the tattered hardwood floor as a pair of feet pounded up the apartment building’s staircase. He counted from his chair—one, two, three steps on the way to the upstairs apartment. Cacophony, he whispered to himself, as much to expand his vocabulary as to paint the scene in his mind’s eye.
The kettle’s impatient screech now grew to a clarion call that pulled his attention toward the kitchen again. Tossing aside the thesaurus and gripping his tattered armchair, he rose to shuffle into the next room.
The tea kettle was a faded white with yellow lemons decorating its middle, a pattern his late wife had selected in their later years. “This will be a real charmer for you,” she had joked, winking and nudging him. As he lifted the handle, he grimaced to remember all the little jokes about their inevitable parting of ways, the moment when everything had paled and a piece of ceramic could reduce him to all black, no crevice for light. He hated her and loved her in equal measure for it, and wasn’t this proof? He kept it always, though no one else knew the exact reason. He slammed the kettle down on the burner.
Lost in a prism of kettle-ridden sadness, he almost forgot about the living drama ensconcing the apartment above. Like clockwork, the footsteps had meandered their way to an all-too-familiar rhythmic pulse that rattled through the ceiling beams above. Soon, the faint reverberation of moans followed. He gripped his mug with its instant coffee and headed back to his chair. When he reached the side table where he always set down his diluted drink, he paused to grimace at the ceiling as the intrusion grew louder and more absurd.
Every afternoon for the past week! But could he give in to the stereotype and reach for a broom, wave his fist and use words like “racket”?
“Racket,” he whispered. “Stop all that racket.”
Instead, he mimed the tip of a hat to the young lovers, shrugged his shoulders, and eased his way back into the ragged armchair. Her face was always on the other side of sight, and so he tried not to close his eyes, but soon, as the afternoon sunshine drifted in through the window, she won the room.
When she was alive, he didn’t notice the changes. But now, the images played over his mind like a reel of film projected on the back of his eyelids: the body pouted and curved, then shrunk and faded to grey and, as a grand finale, gasped its last breath in a slow scrape that quickened to a sharp, loud crack.
He woke up with a start to the sound of footsteps pounding back down the stairs. His heart was beating with the desperation to shake up the edges that haunted his sleep, so he pulled himself up again to walk to the window.
Peering outside, he expected to catch a familiar glimpse of one half of the upstairs duo. Instead, he met the eyes of a stranger.
All other thoughts screeched to a halt.
Meredith and Charles.
Please join us to celebrate the union of Meredith and Charles.
Meredith and Charles, who had been busy every afternoon for the past week interrupting his lonesome revelry with their quickened rhythm from the floor above.
Or so George had thought.
That wasn’t Charles.
Who the hell was that?
Charles, a stunning specimen of height and sun-kissed olive skin and hardened pectorals. Suit and tie during the week, carefully coordinated athleisure (Merriam Webster’s latest addition) on the weekends.
This man, scrawny and dark-haired and seemingly in women’s pants. Black, everything black. Cigarette between his thin lips. He squished it into the sidewalk with his pointed boot and strolled away, indifferent.
George shook his head in disbelief, for once unaware of the fact that he did it for no one at all. He had been listening to those steps day after day, surmising them to be Charles’.
Charles makes his way up the creaking stairs in loafers never imagined for unpolished surfaces.
His fingertips glide over the railing, smoothing the surface until they curve up her skirt.
He had imagined Meredith’s skin. The flush of Meredith’s cheek.
He could see it all. He knew both the picture and the frame. Now they both shattered. He was roaming around in the shards, and this wasn’t the way it had all added up for him, until now. Until, of course, the sudden appearance of the man with the skinny pant leg.
They never spoke of it, and so he had remained still. Stillness centered her face for him, kept anything else from making its way inside. But now, everything around him spun out of control and order did not return. He couldn’t see straight. He hobbled over to his chair, grasping at his thesaurus, but its pages bended at the edges, jumbling all the letters together into one indistinguishable blathering of text.
When he closed his eyes he saw flesh and it blended with the sun. Unlike everything in waking sight, it did not twist or distort at all. It was clean and he could reach out and touch it.
He stood in the center of the living room, panting. A droplet of sweat glided from his forehead to his nose. Unable to find anything solid to hold onto, it dripped out onto the floor.
George made a steadied beeline for the door.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he paused to take a breath before tapping just above the metal “M” and “C” affixed to the old wooden door.
She answered after a few knocks, dressed in shorts and a t shirt. Her hair didn’t show clear signs of being disheveled, but it was naturally curly and would hide that well. He was going to need more information.
“Hey George,” she said with total normalcy.
“Meredith, spring greetings.”
She could not hide her disapproval of such an odd statement, darting her eyes from left to right despite the lack of a sympathetic companion.
“Good to see you. You doing okay?”
Get it together, George, he imagined her saying to him.
“Milk. I need milk for my coffee. Do you have any?”
She smiled, no longer in a panic over his forced pleasantries.
“Come on in, George.”
As he walked in, his eyes searched for signs. He sat in their armchair, patient for any small detail to drift its way into a clue.
The outline of the apartment guided George’s gaze over each unknown crevice. They all shared the same floor plan, and yet, without the touches of light that lingered on the expected lines or the creak under his foot as he shifted his weight, he couldn’t have recognized anything around him. What made the space so different? The living room was still old and sparse but cleaner—was it just that they had painted the walls a brighter shade of white? The furniture offered little in the way of comfort but brought that coat of paint into modernity. The space between the two apartments now felt so vast that George was no longer sure he would find his way back.
He ran his index finger over the sofa’s fabric and her words finally echoed to him, clearing the fog: Who buys a white couch? You can’t keep it that way.
Did Charles sit here? He put his hands in his lap, afraid of marring the clean slate. His hands with their cracked, dry skin. Far from olive.
“Minimalism” George whispered to himself. “Just the minimum.”
George leaned his head to peer into the galley kitchen. Meredith was lifting the carton from the rusted fridge. She turned her head and looked back at him, then slammed the refrigerator door. He wondered if she would devour him, but then she crumpled on the sofa, shaking her head and looking toward the floor.
“It went bad. It’s not even real milk and it went bad,” she chuckled, her shoulders heaving.
Was this a good sign or a bad sign? Anything, he thought, just give me any little thing.
“For Christ's sake” she cried, brushing back her dark curls and wiping each side of her face with determination. She didn’t look anything like his late wife, but he knew that resolve.
“How long have you been living here George?” she asked, staring straight ahead.
“What do you think of this, this--” her arms were sweeping in every direction now--
“palace?”
Now they both laughed.
“Well,” he stalled, surveying the living area, expansive but in need of more touches of neoliberal gentrification (Scrabble would never be the same since he picked that one up).
“It’s a whole hell of a lot nicer than mine” he offered.
She chuckled, then asked,
“Is this how you thought you’d end up?”
He paused. What did he think? He met her eyes, hoping she’d understand his sincerity:
“I’d always thought I would die first. So, in that sense, no,” he sighed as he adjusted his bifocals.
Now his eyes were swelling with tears.
George had run out of words.
He didn’t know Meredith and Charles all that well, of course, but well enough that they invited him to a housewarming a year ago and chatted with him in the hallway on occasion after getting the mail at the slots by his door. She ran her fingers through her hair during small talk, always searching for a place to run her fingers, as if they lacked a proper home. Charles was brusque and monosyllabic. Inscrutable, and so George spiraled in his thoughts. During these chance meetings, everyone’s mind was elsewhere.
George always, always wondered what his wife would have said. In any number of circumstances: when a commercial was stupid, when the housing market fell, when he tried Melba toast and didn’t hate it. And especially about Meredith and Charles, so mismatched, so sterile in their presentation, so out of place in the building. She could always find the signs, read into the little nuances. What would she think? What would she say?
He lifted his head. He scanned the room, unable to tell one strategically placed succulent from the next. And then it was clear: he would never find out. He would never, ever find out.
Not even if he learned every new word for every new time that he lived without her. He would live it all without her, and never know what face she would have made, or what soap she would have bought.
He thanked Meredith for the idea of the milk after vague gestures to “get together soon.” Then George closed the door with care and prepared himself for the deluge of steps that awaited his slow creep back to his apartment downstairs. His trousers, a faded grey, creased with each movement. He stared down at the dancing fabric for a few steps.
Midway through, he realized he wasn’t alone. When he glanced down to place the next step, a new pair of shoes faced his on the stairs. From there he traced the perfected crease of a trouser that mocked his own, and kept going until he was looking up to meet the glow of a face far younger, yet even more hidden, than his.
“Charles,” he whispered.
“George,” he replied, even-toned and solemn as ever.
He smelled expensive. His suit never betrayed him. Everything stiff and put-together. Nothing undone: not a glint of the eye, the hint of a smile, crooked tie, nothing.
And yet there it was—the skin he could reach out and feel, with nothing waiting on the other side of light.
They faced each other on the stairs.
Without a moment left, George grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him close.
It didn’t take a miracle. He stepped into the light.