The Key to Next Door

Wendy had lived in the building for exactly three weeks and she still could not get the damn key to turn on the first try. The lock on apartment 4B was old, the kind of lock that came with the building in 1920 and never left, and it had a trick to it that she had not figured out yet. You had to lift the key a little, maybe jiggle it left, and pray. Some nights it took her four minutes standing in the hallway like a fool.

She was doing the jiggle now, six forty on a Thursday, work bag sliding off her shoulder, when the music started up through the wall. Thump. Thump. Thump. Somebody in 4A had a bass problem and no manners, or maybe just a Friday mood a day early. The wall between the apartments was so thin she could hear her neighbor's phone buzz sometimes. She could hear him cough. She could hear his alarm go off at seven in the morning, every morning, even Saturdays.

That was the nature of this building. It was prewar, which the listing had made sound charming, and what it actually meant was that Wendy had learned more about the man in 4A in three weeks than she had learned about her last boyfriend in three months. His name was Trey, she had gathered that from the mailboxes, and he was twenty-eight, which she knew because last Sunday she had heard his mother sing happy birthday to him on speakerphone through the wall, loudly and a little flat.

She pressed her ear close to the door, key still in the lock, and the bass rolled through the wood and into her skull. Wonderful. It was going to be one of those nights. She would get in, eat cereal for dinner, and lie in bed listening to somebody else's good time.

The key finally turned. She shouldered the door open and her bag slid all the way off and hit the floor, and a wine bottle she had stood upright in the bag eight hours earlier rolled out and thunked against her shoe. She had been planning on one glass. Maybe two. The dating scene in this city had worn her down to a nub over the past six months, three first dates and two second dates and one man who cried at dinner about his ex, and she had sworn off all of it in March, which was why she was forty-two years old standing alone in a hallway with a bottle of cheap red and a neighbor she had never actually met.

She picked up the bottle and that was when she saw the keys.

They were in the door of 4A. Just hanging there, a ring of three keys with a little rubber lizard on the ring, sticking straight out at the hallway like a flag. Anybody could walk by and pull them out. Anybody could walk by and pull them out and let themselves in, and the music was thumping loud enough that the guy probably couldn't hear the door open over his own stereo.

Wendy stood there for a second. Then she knocked.

No answer. She knocked harder, with her knuckles this time, and the music dropped. Footsteps. The door swung in and there he was, 4A, the man she had heard cough and snooze and talk to his mother on the phone for three weeks. He was taller than she expected and thin, dark hair buzzed short, a week of beard on his jaw, wearing a faded shirt from some band she didn't know. He was twenty-eight but he looked older when he was tired, and he looked tired right now.

His eyes went straight to his keys in his door and something crossed his face, quick, like a man catching himself.

"Oh man," he said. "Those have been out there all day, haven't they."

"Since at least noon," Wendy said. "I heard your door close this morning and they were already in it."

He laughed, short and embarrassed, and pulled the keys out and held them like they had personally betrayed him. "I do this. I do this constantly. My ex used to say I'd lose my head if it weren't attached, and she wasn't wrong about much but she was wrong about that." He stopped, and Wendy saw the stop, the little hitch where a sentence hits a wall inside a person. "Anyway. Thanks. Seriously."

"No problem. I'm Wendy, by the way. 4B."

"Trey." He didn't shake her hand, which was fine, because his hands were full of keys and his eyes were already drifting back inside toward the music. He was a graphic designer, freelance, she knew that much from the deadline phone calls that came through the wall. It was one more fact about her neighbor, filed away with his name and his seven a.m. alarm.

"Well," she said, and hoisted the bottle. "Thanks for the concert, I guess. I've been listening to that record through my wall for three weeks. I know all the words now."

His face did something complicated. "That bad, huh."

"It's not bad. It's just very present. Like a roommate."

He rubbed his jaw and looked at the floor. "I'll get a rug," he said. "Or headphones. I keep saying I will."

And here is where Wendy did the thing her sister had warned her about, the thing she always did, which was decide in one second flat that a stranger was safe. He looked like someone going through a difficult period. She knew rough stretches. Six months of first dates and a bottle of red in her hand and a key that took four minutes to turn, she was an expert on rough stretches.

"You want to just come listen to it on this side of the wall instead?" she heard herself say. "I don't have an opener for this bottle and I've been standing out here thinking about it all day. That's actually why I knocked. Half the reason. The keys were the other half."

Trey looked at her. He looked at the bottle. Then he laughed again, a surprised bark of a laugh, and it was a good laugh, the kind that comes out before a person can stop it.

"You're asking to borrow a wine opener you don't own from a neighbor you've never met."

"I'm asking to borrow a neighbor who owns a wine opener. Two separate problems."

"Mine's a corkscrew with a broken hinge," he said. "It works. Barely. Like everything else I own." He propped his door open with a foot. "Give me two minutes to turn that down and find the damn thing."

He came back with a corkscrew with a hinge held together by electrical tape, and they went into 4B, and that was how Wendy ended up sitting on her own floor, because she owned one armchair and one folding chair and she gave him the armchair, cross-legged on a rug she'd bought secondhand, drinking red wine out of coffee mugs at seven at night.

The talking went the way talking does when two people have both recently been through it and neither wants to say so right away. Small stuff first. The building. The radiator that clanked at three a.m. The grocery store on the corner that charged four dollars for eggs. Then it got real somewhere around mug number two, and neither of them could have said exactly where.

Trey told her about the West Coast in pieces. He'd come to Chicago two years ago, after a relationship ended, a partner who had said she loved him and then couldn't figure out what to call him in front of her family. He said it without drama, just facts laid on the table like cards he was tired of holding. Wendy found herself talking about her own string of nothing dates, the crying man at the Italian place, the one who had turned out to be married, the three years since the last real thing she'd had, with a coworker who was thirty-nine and kind and who had moved to Denver for a job and never asked her to come.

"It's not that I'm sad," she said at one point, and then heard how it sounded and laughed. "Okay, I'm a little sad. But mostly I'm just tired. Tired of the whole audition of it."

"Yeah," Trey said, looking into his mug. "I know tired."

The music next door stayed off. The corkscrew did its job, badly, and the wine was not good, and the mugs were chipped, and it was past eleven when Wendy noticed, and neither of them had moved to leave. Trey was sitting on the floor by then too, his back against the armchair, his long legs stretched out under her coffee table, and he was telling her a story about his first week in this building, when he'd gotten locked out in a bathrobe and had to walk past three nuns.

"You're lying," Wendy said.

"I swear on the corkscrew. Three nuns. One of them gave me her coat."

They were both laughing when the church bells down the block rang midnight, and Wendy looked at her empty mug and thought, well, here it is, the part where he checks the time and says he should go. She braced for it. She had done this part before.

Trey looked at the window, then at her, and didn't move. "So," he said. "The rug. I'm actually gonna get the rug. But in the meantime, if the music bothers you, you can just come bang on the wall. Or knock. I'm usually home."

"Usually home at midnight too, apparently."

"I'm freelance. My hours are a suggestion." He turned his mug in his hands. "Thanks for the keys thing. I mean it. I've been a little scattered lately and it's nice to know somebody's paying attention out there in the hallway."

"Anytime," Wendy said, and meant it, and that was as far as the night went, though neither of them knew yet how much of it was going to matter later. He gathered his corkscrew and went back through the wall, and Wendy stood in her kitchen washing two mugs at midnight, feeling something she hadn't felt in a long while, which was not quite hope but was somewhere in the same neighborhood.

It happened again the following Thursday, which neither of them planned. Wendy was carrying groceries up the stairs at six forty, a bag with the four dollar eggs and a bottle of wine she'd actually paid a decent price for, and Trey's door was open and he was standing in the hallway holding his keys, looking at them like they had personally wronged him.

"I did it again," he said.

"Left them in the door since noon?"

"Since noon." He shook his head. "You're gonna start charging me."

"First one's free. Second one costs a glass of wine." She said it as a joke, and then he took the bag out of her hand and carried it into 4B, so apparently it wasn't a joke anymore.

This time she had the folding chair and he had the armchair again, and the wine was better, and they skipped the small talk entirely because they'd already done the small talk. That was the nature of a second evening with a person. You could go straight down to the load bearing stuff, and they did.

Wendy talked more about her six months of dating, the three first dates and the two second dates and the math of that, how it had felt like homework by the end. Trey listened the way he listened, which was all the way, no checking his phone, no waiting for his turn. Then somewhere in the middle of her saying she'd sworn the whole thing off in March, he turned his mug around a few times and said, "Can I tell you something? It's not a big deal, but I'd rather you hear it from me than figure it out sideways."

"Sure."

"I'm a trans man. Have been for years. Been on T for six of them, had the surgeries, the whole thing. I don't lead with it, but I'm not hiding it either. It's just," he made a small motion with his hand, "relevant, sometimes."

Wendy thought about what to say, which took about two seconds, because what she actually thought was: okay. She'd been an office manager long enough to know that most of what people feared about telling the truth was the pause afterward, so she kept the pause short.

"Thank you for telling me," she said. "Can I ask stuff, or is that rude?"

"Ask stuff. I like questions better than assumptions."

So she asked. She asked how old he'd been when he knew, and he said twenty-one, properly knew, though there was a whole mess of years before that where he'd had the pieces and not the picture. She asked if his family was good about it, and he said his mother took a year and then came around hard, now she was his biggest fan, which was its own kind of funny. She asked what it had been like dating out here, and his face did something complicated.

"That's the one that costs a full glass," he said. "Short version, the woman I was with for three years, out west. When I told her, early on, she said it was fine, and it was fine for a while, and then it wasn't. She wanted me to be a secret at her sister's wedding. So I left." He shrugged. "Two years