The Hum

The apartment got real quiet after Maren left for college in September. I'm Jackson, forty-three, landscaper, and for eighteen years my place on Willow Court was a two-bedroom situation with my daughter's stuff crammed into every corner. Then one U-Haul and one tearful goodbye at the Amtrak station later, and it was just me and the hum of the fridge.

You don't notice how much noise a kid makes until there isn't any. The dishes got quieter. The TV stayed off. I'd come home from a job hauling mulch in the East Bay heat and the whole warehouse conversion would just sit there, silent, like it was waiting for me to do something about it.

So the first thing I did was try to remember my neighbors. Twenty units in this old brick building, and I'd met maybe four people in a decade. My daughter used to know everybody. She had the whole gossip map. I had exactly nothing.

Second thing I did, about two weeks into the quiet, was hear something I probably should not have heard.

It was a Tuesday. I know because I do the Colemans' yard Tuesdays and I was beat. I was sprawled on the futon with a beer, half watching a rerun, when the voice came through the bedroom wall. My bedroom shares a wall with the neighbor's, and the wall in this building is about as thick as cardboard. The previous tenant used to complain he could hear my alarm clock, that's how thin it is.

At first it was just mumbling. A woman talking. I figured she was on the phone, whatever, people talk on the phone. But then the tone changed, and I want to describe it carefully here, because the tone is what made me sit up.

She was doing that low, breathy thing. The kind of voice you use when you're telling somebody something private. And then she laughed, this warm, dirty laugh, and said, clear as anything, "You're not going to believe what I'm wearing right now."

Oh. Oh wow.

Now, the decent thing, the thing a better man does, is turn on the fan or the TV and pretend he heard nothing. I will tell you truthfully about what I actually did, which was sit very still and keep listening. I finished my beer. I got another beer. The whole time, that voice kept going through the wall, rising and falling, little gasps, a laugh here and there, and I just sat there like a fool with my ears practically pressed flat against drywall.

It went on maybe twenty minutes. Then it stopped, and the quiet came back, and I felt like I'd shoplifted something.

Here's the part that got me, though. Two nights later, Thursday, same thing. Same voice, same warm laugh, a little louder this time, and I swear the timing was suspicious. I'd gotten home later than usual, and just as I was putting my key in the lock, I heard her starting up. Like the show only ran when I was home.

Coincidence, I told myself. People have schedules.

Third time, the following week, I caught an actual word I could grab onto. She said "Jackson."

Well. Hold on. Hold on now.

There's exactly one Jackson in my life and it's me. But lots of people are named Jackson. Guys named Jackson call phone sex lines every day, probably. Except, and here's where my brain started doing arithmetic, there was one particular woman who used to say my name in exactly that tone, twenty-some years ago, in a greenhouse behind the horticulture building at Laney College, when we were both twenty-two and she was dared to read her horoscope out loud in what she called her "phone voice."

Lucy. Lucy from the Tuesday-Thursday plant propagation class. Lucy who sat in the front row and said whatever came into her head and made the whole greenhouse laugh. We'd gone for drinks a few times after class, me and her and a couple other students, and one night the others bailed and it was just us on the patio of some dive on Telegraph, and she'd looked at me over her margarita and said, "You know you're the only quiet one in that whole program, right? What's going on in that head, Jackson?"

And I, being twenty-two and an idiot, had said "nothing much," and that was that. Nothing came of it. She finished the program, I finished the program, we both went our ways, and that was twenty-one years ago. She'd be forty-three now, same as me.

But that laugh. You don't forget a laugh like that. It starts low and then tips over, like a wheelbarrow going too fast down a ramp. Nobody else laughs like that.

So now I had a problem. Because I was pretty sure the woman in the next apartment was Lucy from horticulture class, and I was definitely sure she was having very loud phone sex with her window situation aimed directly at my bedroom, and I was absolutely sure I had no idea what a person is supposed to do with that information.

Do you knock on the wall? Do you leave a note? "Dear neighbor, could you keep it down," like some HOA complaint about noise? Or the opposite, some weird fan letter? Neither. Neither was a road I was ready to walk down.

What I did instead was even worse. I started timing my evenings around it.

It wasn't every night. Maybe twice a week, sometimes three times. I noticed it happened after ten, usually. I noticed the street noise from Telegraph died down around then, which made it easier to hear. I noticed she liked to pace, because the voice would travel along the wall, close, then far, then close again. I noticed there were different voices on the other end sometimes, men, more than one regular. Good for her, honestly. I'm a divorced guy whose daughter just left, and even I could hear that this woman was having a great time.

And look, I know how this sounds. A middle-aged man crouched against his bedroom wall listening to his neighbor. It's not a great look. I'm not defending it. I'm telling you it was the most alive my apartment had felt since Maren took her stereo and her posters and her whole noisy self down to San Diego, and I was lonely enough that a voice through a wall felt like company.

Then came the night everything changed, and it changed because of a window.

My bedroom window faces the airshaft, which faces her bedroom window, maybe eight feet across, and I'd never opened it because the street smell comes up and it's grimy up there. But that night it was hot, first warm night of the season, and I had the window open, and I heard her voice not through the wall but through the air, doubled, and then I heard something that stopped me cold.

I heard her stop. Mid-sentence. I heard the man's voice on her phone, tinny and far away, saying something I couldn't make out. And then I heard her laugh, that wheelbarrow laugh, and say, in a voice pitched not at her phone but at the airshaft, at the open window, at me:

"Enjoying the show over there, neighbor?"

My beer nearly went down the radiator.

Because that's the thing about Lucy, and I remembered it all at once, twenty-one years of it flooding back. She wasn't careless. She wasn't oblivious. She was bold. She'd been bold in that greenhouse at twenty-two and she was bold now at forty-three, and there was no way on this green earth that woman had been carrying on like that against a paper-thin wall without knowing exactly who lived on the other side of it.

She'd known since the first night, probably. Maybe since before the first night. Maybe since the day a U-Haul pulled out of my parking spot and she heard me come home to an empty apartment and turned the volume up.

I stood there in the dark with my heart pounding, one window apart from a woman I'd fumbled twenty-one years ago, and I heard her say, sweet as anything, "Well? Are you going to say something, or do I have to come knock?"

My mouth opened. Nothing came out. Through the window I heard her laugh again, lower this time.

"Jackson," she said. "I can hear you breathing, honey."

"I'm not breathing loud," I said, which was both a lie and the dumbest possible answer.

"You're breathing like a man caught in an act," she said. "It's fine. I left the window open on purpose, in case you're wondering."

"In case I'm wondering," I repeated, like a parrot.

"In case you were listening on purpose, which you have been for about six weeks, and which I find flattering, honestly, more than anything else." She paused, and I could picture her sitting on the edge of her bed in the dark, one leg tucked under her, the phone still warm against her ear. "Also, your alarm goes off at five forty-five every morning and it has a very smug little jingle."

"It's a rooster," I said stupidly.

"I know it's a rooster! I've been waking up to it for most of that decade!"

And then she laughed, that wheelbarrow laugh, tipping over the top of the ramp, and something in my chest that had been sitting tight since September came loose about an inch. I sat down on the floor under my window with my back against the wall, the shared wall this time, and I said, "Okay. That's fair."

"So," she said. "Jackson from propagation. Twenty-one years."

"Twenty-one years," I agreed. "You look... well, I can't see you."

"You're not missing much. Forty-three looks exactly like you'd think." I heard her shift, bedding rustling. "How's Maren? I heard her arguing with you about a dress for her senior formal through this wall, you know. And her birthday parties. And that year she learned the trumpet."

Oh God. Oh God, the trumpet. "She's at UCSD," I said. "Left in September. It's very quiet."

"Yeah," she said, softer. "I figured that's why you started sitting on your floor at ten o'clock at night with a beer."

"You knew about the beer?"

"Honey, I can hear the fridge door. I can hear the bottle cap. I can hear you not fast-forwarding past the commercials on the sports radio you stream too loud." She was grinning, I could hear the grin. "The only thing I couldn't figure out was why you never just knocked. It would've saved us both a lot of whispering."

"I didn't know what to say."

"You could've said hi. You could've said, hey Lucy, funny running into you through a wall." A pause. "Or you could've done what you did in the greenhouse, which was stand there holding a flat of succulents and say nothing much."

"That's cold."

"That's history," she said, and laughed again, and then there was a beat where neither of us talked and the airshaft hummed with the building's old pipes and somewhere below on Telegraph a bus sighed past. "Look, it's late. I've still got a phone call to finish, and the gentleman is waiting, and now I'm going to be self-conscious about it, which is a new experience for me at this stage of my life."

"Don't be self-conscious on my account."

"Oh, I'm not doing it for you," she said, quick as a snap. "I'm just saying. Goodnight, Jackson."

"Goodnight, Lucy."

And then, because apparently I had no shame left at forty-three, I added, "Say hi to the gentleman."

She laughed so hard I heard her knock her phone against something. "I will absolutely not," she said. "Goodnight!"

That was Tuesday. Wednesday I did another client's yard as a normal man would, hauled mulch around the East Bay, ate dinner standing at the counter, and told myself I'd behave. Wednesday nights, I should note, weren't usually one of her nights, or I didn't think they were. I went to bed at ten like a person with a five forty-five alarm.

At ten twenty the fridge door opened in the apartment next door. I heard the bottle cap. I heard her laugh.

I lay there staring at the ceiling for a solid minute, arguing with myself, and lost the argument fast. I got up, got a beer of my own, sat down on the floor against the shared wall by the bed with my knees up, and listened to Lucy from Laney College have the time of her life twenty feet away. It was a different man's voice that night, lower, slower, and she was gentler with him, more drawn out, and at some point I realized I was smiling into my beer like an idiot and I did not care one bit.

Afterward, through the airshaft, she called out, "Did you enjoy the show, neighbor?"

"Every minute," I called back, before I could stop myself.