The Noise Next Door

I was thirty-four years old, a night-shift nurse with a savings account, a cactus named Dennis, and no interest whatsoever in other people's sex lives. Or so I believed until the third Tuesday in September, when the wall between my bedroom and the new guy's bedroom started thumping like a man changing a tire on the other side of the plaster.

Let me back up. I moved into this building three years ago, right after I finished nursing school, and in that time the unit next to mine had turned over four times. I got used to neighbors the way you get used to weather. There was the couple who fought about a Roomba for six straight weeks. There was the guy who practiced trumpet. Then a quiet stretch of nothing, and then Rick, though I didn't know his name yet, and I mostly knew him first as a sound.

The sound was a rhythm, slow and steady, and under it a voice. A woman's voice, muffled, doing something between a whine and a moan, and a man's voice answering low enough that I only caught the shape of it, not the words. The bedframe had a loose joint somewhere and it found that joint every four seconds, bang, bang, bang, patient as a metronome.

I lay there in the dark with my arm over my eyes and tried to be annoyed. I was annoyed. I had a twelve-hour shift coming and this had been going on, by my count, forty minutes, which is a long time even by generous standards, and I resented every minute of it.

That was the story I told myself, anyway. The truer story was that I had stopped being bored. I lay there counting the rhythm and inventing details about the woman and the man, and somewhere around minute fifty I caught myself doing something I hadn't done in a while, which was feeling interested in another human being's private business. It was almost nostalgic. Three years in this city and I had trained myself out of curiosity the way you train yourself out of snacking. Now here it was, coming through drywall at two in the morning.

The thing that finally got me wasn't the volume. It was the quality. Whoever this woman was, she was loud not because she was performing but because she seemed to have simply forgotten anyone could hear her. That kind of noise you can't fake. I knew that, professionally adjacent as it were, from patients who moaned on the table and patients who performed moaning, and there is a difference, and the wall was giving me an education in it.

Bang, bang, bang. Then a pause, a laugh, hers, low and rough, and the rhythm starting up again at a different speed. I rolled over and put the pillow over my head and got maybe four hours of sleep, which would have been fine except the same thing happened Wednesday, and Thursday, and by Friday I was a creature with an opinion.

* * *

Saturday night at work, Justin clocked my mood before I'd even put my bag down. He's an orderly, thirty-one, worked with me two years, and his entire personality is gossip with a lanyard. He took one look at me across the med room and said, "Who died?"

"Nobody died."

"You've got the face. The face says somebody died or somebody's getting dumped." He leaned on the counter and waited. He's good at waiting. "Come on, Taggart. Give."

"My neighbor is keeping me up all night," I said, and then immediately wished I hadn't, because I watched the word all night land in his brain like a coin in a slot machine.

"All night," he repeated, delighted. "Doing what, bingo?"

"Thumping. Moaning. The walls in that building are paper."

"Thumping and moaning," he said, savoring it. "So some lucky lady next door is getting her spine rearranged and you're lying there in the dark taking attendance." He held up a hand before I could object. "How long has this been going on?"

"Four days."

"Four nights, she says." He shook his head at me with genuine pity. "You could wear earplugs, you know. That's what a normal person would do."

"I have earplugs. I can still hear it."

"Sure you can." He grinned at me the whole way down the hall and I spent the rest of the shift doing blood sugars and pretending I wasn't replaying the rhythm from Thursday, which had been slower, more deliberate, and had gone on so long I'd started to admire it. That's a strange thing to admit. In the interest of admitting it anyway, there were moments that week, lying awake at two a.m., when I wasn't sure whether I wanted it to stop or wanted to take notes.

* * *

Sunday I slept until noon and woke up angry in a fresh way, because when I'd come in off shift at seven that morning the woman had been loud enough that I caught actual words, and one of them was my neighbor's implied name via her yelling it, which sounded like Rick. I now had a name for the noise. That felt like an escalation.

I also did the math on myself. I've dated casually since nursing school, nothing serious, mostly because I like my solitude and because dating in this city feels like a part-time job with no benefits. But the wall had cracked something open. I wasn't jealous of the woman exactly. I was jealous of the volume of her life. She had gotten so absorbed in somebody that she'd forgotten there was a world outside the room, and I could not remember the last time I'd forgotten there was a world outside the room.

So Sunday afternoon I stood in my kitchen with a cup of coffee and built a plan, and the plan was stupid, and I knew it was stupid while I was building it. I would knock on his door and complain about the trash. There was no trash problem. There was a trash situation in the basement bins that everyone ignored and everyone had agreed to ignore, which made it perfect, because a complaint about the bins is a complaint that can't be checked and can't be solved, a complaint that exists purely as a door opener.

I changed my shirt twice, which I told myself was about laundry, then went next door at four in the afternoon, a civilized hour, an hour when nobody is thumping, and knocked.

Footsteps. A pause. The door opened and there he was, and I'll admit my plan wobbled at that point, because he was tall, somewhere in his thirties, with sawdust on his forearm and the general build of a man who lifts heavy things for a living, which he apparently does, since he answered the door in work boots and a gray t-shirt and looked at me with the open, unbothered face of someone who has never once lain awake counting another person's headboard.

"Hi," I said. "Sorry to bother you. Are you Rick?"

"That's me."

"I'm Alia, from next door." I held up the trash complaint like a ticket at a theater. "I hate to be that neighbor, but the bins in the basement have been a disaster lately, and management won't do anything unless more than one person reports it, so I'm going door to door."

He looked past me down the hall as if checking for the rest of the mob. "Door to door."

"Well, to one other door. Yours. You're the only neighbor I have."

He smiled at that, a slow one, and something about the smile made me realize he was the kind of man who was used to being looked at, and the kind who didn't mind it. "Yeah, the bins are a war zone," he said. "I'm in no position to complain, I've been dumping drywall mud in there since I moved in."

"Construction?"

"Foreman, over on Delancey." He leaned on the doorframe. "So you're the one who lives on the other side of my bedroom wall."

I had not prepared for that sentence. My face did something, I felt it do something, and he noticed, and he had the grace not to comment, though the smile changed shape slightly, into something that suggested he had been aware of the wall's properties all along.

"I mostly sleep like a rock," I said. "But thin walls, you know. You can hear everything."

"Everything," he said. Not a question. An echo, with a small pause in the middle where I could have retreated, and didn't, because by then some other plan had quietly replaced the trash plan, and it had no script at all.

I said something about thin walls again, he said something about beer, and somehow the sequence of events went like this: he stepped back from the doorframe, tilted his head toward the kitchen, and said, "Look, I owe you about four nights of sleep, I know it. Let me buy you a beer and you can lecture me about the bins properly." And I, a thirty-four-year-old woman with a plan that had already evaporated, said yes before my brain finished reviewing the terms.

For context, I had not been inside that apartment since it was Donna's, the retired teacher who kept fake plants in the windows. Rick had been there about a week and had already made it look different. A work jacket over a kitchen chair. A toolbox on the counter. Boxes half unpacked, in the honest way of a man who unpacks what he needs and walks around the rest. On the wall near the couch, hung slightly crooked, there was a framed photo of a crew in front of a half-built deck, and Rick in the middle of it, squinting in the sun.

He opened two bottles and handed me one, and then, because the kitchen chairs were still boxed somewhere, we sat on the couch, at opposite ends, like two people being interviewed about a very dull crime.

"So the bins," he said.

"The bins," I agreed. And then, because the bins were a lie with