The Sound Through the Wall

Elliot sat on the edge of his bathtub at 11 p.m. on a Thursday, brushing his teeth and glaring at the wall like it owed him money. The wall didn't care. It never did.

Through that wall came the sound of Jeanine's voice, the way it came almost every night. She was talking to somebody on the phone, pacing by the sound of it, her footsteps going back and forth across her study floor in that same nine-step pattern he'd memorized against his will.

"How's the thesis?" the friend voice asked, muffled but recognizable. Claudia, he'd figured out. She called on Wednesdays and Sundays, mostly. Tonight was an off-schedule call, which felt kind of rude, honestly. Some of them had to work in the morning.

"It's fine. It's the deadline that's broken," Jeanine said, and Elliot caught himself smiling around his toothbrush before he could stop it.

That was the problem, see. A couple months ago this had been pure annoyance. Her music at midnight, her pacing, her humming, her voice drifting through plaster like the building was made of cardboard and spite. He'd complained to the landlord twice. The landlord had done nothing, which was par for the course in a building attached to a small private college where half the tenants were students and the other half were people like Elliot, who just sort of ended up there because the rent was survivable.

But somewhere along the way the annoyance had curdled. Turned into something else. Fascination, maybe, if he wanted to be fancy about it. He'd started knowing her schedule better than his own. She made tea around 10:30, he could hear the kettle. She took a break at midnight and played the same Billie Holiday album, side one, every single time. She talked on the phone standing up, always, and she laughed with her whole chest, this big unguarded honk that had no business coming out of someone so apparently serious.

He rinsed his mouth and spat. His reflection in the mirror looked as if he'd lost an argument with himself.

"You're pathetic," he told the mirror. The mirror agreed.

Through the wall, Jeanine was still going. "No, I'm telling you, the section on load paths is killing me. I redrew the whole truss system twice and Claudia, it still looks like a scaffold in a cartoon."

Elliot leaned closer to the wall. He wasn't proud of it. Okay, he was a little proud of it, or at least he didn't stop himself, which amounted to the same thing.

The friend voice said something he couldn't make out, and Jeanine laughed. Then she said the thing.

"Whatever, it's fine, at least the hairdresser next door finally stopped slamming his cabinets at six in the morning."

Elliot froze, toothbrush in hand, water dripping.

"The hairdresser next door," the friend repeated, and there was a smile in it, a little curve of amusement, like the phrase was funny all by itself.

"Right? Like, what does he even do all day? He leaves at eight smelling like a barbershop and comes back at seven. It's sort of a mystery. A boring mystery." Jeanine's voice was light, teasing, and that was somehow worse than if she'd been mean about it. "Anyway. He's beneath my notice. I have a deadline."

Beneath her notice.

Elliot set the toothbrush down with more force than necessary. His face had gone hot. Not hurt, exactly, or not only hurt. There was a spike of something sharper underneath, pure spite, bright and ridiculous, and it went straight through him like a shot of cheap tequila.

"Beneath your notice, huh," he muttered at the wall. "Oh, that's gonna be a problem for you."

Because here was the thing he'd been failing to notice about himself for two months: he'd been brushing his teeth at 11 p.m. specifically to catch her voice. He'd been slamming his cabinets at six in the morning because once, early on, she'd banged on the shared wall with a ruler, and he'd decided the noise war was worth fighting. He'd stood in his yard pretending to water plants he didn't own, waiting for her to come out to her car, just to see the curtain of dark hair and the way she squinted at the sun like it had personally offended her.

That wasn't annoyance. That was a crush with a construction plan.

He walked out of the bathroom, down his narrow hallway, and yanked open his closet. His best shirt hung there, the slate-blue one he wore for weddings and the rare fancy dinner. He pulled it out and held it up.

"You've lost it," he told himself. "You know that, right?"

Maybe. But the spike of spite was still fizzing in his chest, and it felt a lot better than whatever the sad version of tonight had been going to be. He'd been planning a microwave burrito and a rerun. Now he was planning a campaign.

Here's what he knew about her, from the wall and the yard and the glimpses he'd collected like a weird little hobbyist: her name was Jeanine, because Claudia said it roughly forty times per call. She was a grad student in architecture. She was twenty-six, because once he'd overheard her answer the question out loud on her birthday, laughing about being closer to thirty than twenty. She finished her tea at exactly 11:15. She owned exactly three pairs of shoes that he could hear, one of which had a clicking heel she wore when she was nervous, and she'd been wearing it a lot this month. Thesis season, apparently.

And she thought he was beneath her notice.

"Well, we'll see about that," he said out loud, and then felt like a lunatic, because who was he talking to? The shirt? The wall?

The wall, mostly. The wall had become a character in his life. It had opinions. It carried gossip. It was, in its way, the most honest relationship he had, which said something depressing about his twenties so far.

He was twenty-eight, he'd been cutting hair since he was nineteen, and he liked his job, actually. He was good at it. He had regulars who'd followed him across two salons, old guys named Marty who trusted him with their bald spots and their life stories. So what if the woman on the other side of the plaster thought hairdresser was a punchline? Plenty of people thought that. It usually rolled off him.

It wasn't rolling off him tonight.

He hung the shirt back up, took it out again, and put it on. Slate blue brought out his eyes, his coworker Devon said so, and Devon was professionally honest about such things. Elliot looked at himself in the mirror. Pretty good, if he did say so.

"Okay," he said. "Plan."

The plan, as far as it existed, was this: he was going to be impossible to not notice. He was going to play his music at a reasonable hour, sure, but loudly enough to be identified. He was going to take his coffee out front in the morning instead of chugging it in the car. He was going to be so obviously, annoyingly present that the phrase "beneath my notice" would start to feel like a lie she'd told herself.

Through the wall, faintly, came Billie Holiday. Midnight break, right on schedule.

Elliot leaned his forehead against the plaster. "You're going to regret the hairdresser thing," he told her, quietly, like a promise. "Not tonight. But soon."

Billie sang something mournful. Somewhere in there, Jeanine said goodnight to Claudia, and the floor creaked as she stood, and her footsteps did their nine steps, and then the light under the shared wall went out.

He stood there a minute in his nice shirt, feeling both stupid and alive, which honestly wasn't a bad combination.

There was one more thing in his back pocket, a detail from the wall's gossip archive, from a call maybe three weeks back. Claudia had asked if Jeanine had met anyone, and Jeanine had said no, that she wasn't really in the market, that she had a thesis to finish and then a life to start. But her voice had done a funny little thing on the second sentence, a hitch, like the words were true but not the whole truth. Elliot had replayed that hitch a lot. More than a lot. He'd made it a whole album.

"Right," he said now, snapping his fingers at nobody. "Operation Notice Me starts tomorrow."

Tomorrow was Friday. He had four clients, two blowouts, a perm from hell, and his aunt for a trim, with her usual forty-minute speech about her neighbors. He'd be tired. He'd be standing on his feet till seven. And somewhere in between, he was going to figure out how a guy who'd never chased anybody in his life suddenly became a man with a campaign.

The kettle on her side of the wall was silent. Her apartment had gone quiet. His did too, except for him, humming Billie Holiday in the dark, in his good shirt, for absolutely no reason at all.

The note went under her door at 8:40 on Friday morning. Elliot knew the exact time because he stood there for ten minutes like a man deciding whether to defuse something, except the something was a folded piece of paper with his own handwriting on it, and the defusing was just sliding it across a floor mat.

The note said: I hear you through the wall. You think you know me. Come find out.

He'd rewritten it four times. The first draft said "beneath your notice, huh?" which was petty and he knew it. The second draft had a joke in it that didn't land even in his own head. The third draft was too long. The fourth was the one, short and kind of cocky, and he'd signed it with a little drawing of scissors because apparently he was twelve.

Then he went back to his apartment and waited.

Nothing happened Saturday. Nothing happened Sunday, except Claudia called at her usual time and Elliot pressed his ear to the wall like a creep, hoping for his name. It did not come up. Monday, nothing. Tuesday, nothing, and by then he was checking his own door twice a day like there might be mail for him, which there never was, because who writes letters anymore?

"She's ignoring me," he told Marty on Wednesday, snipping around his ears.

"Who is?" Marty asked, eyes closed, enjoying himself.

"Nobody. A neighbor."

"Ah, the neighbor." Marty said it like he knew everything, which he didn't, but his smug little smile annoyed Elliot anyway.

"Nobody," Elliot said firmly.

Thursday night he brushed his teeth at 11 p.m. like always, listening to her putter around her kitchen, and felt like an idiot. The great campaign, Operation Notice Me, and its entire output so far was one unanswered note and four days of him watering plants he didn't own in the shared yard at conspicuous hours. Even the plants looked embarrassed.

Friday, though. Friday she came out.

He was in the yard with his coffee at 8 a.m., which was a whole thing now, him standing there in the dew with a watering can, when her door opened and out she came. Jeanine, in person, three feet away, and not through a wall for once. She was in a big sweater with her hair pushed back, holding her own coffee, and she stopped dead when she saw him.

"Oh," she said. "You're the hairdresser."

"Elliot," he said. "Hi. Good morning. Nice sweater."

"You left a note under my door."

"I did, yeah." He set down the watering can with great dignity. The can was not even his. The plant it belonged to was not his either. Whatever.

She looked him over, and he let her, and she was amused, he could see that, amused in a specific way, like he was a small dog attempting stairs. "Look," she said, "I'm going to be straight with you, because you seem like a person who can take it. I'm not interested in games. I've got a thesis, a deadline, and a neighbor who complained about me to the landlord twice, and I don't have spare energy for mystery notes."

"Those complaints were a mistake," he said. "Both of them."

"Was the cabinet slamming at six in the morning also a mistake?"

"Yes," he admitted. "That one was petty and I own it."

Something shifted in her face, just a little, the amusement cracking toward something warmer. "You admit it. Huh. Most people would've blamed the building."

"The building has thin walls and no insulation and a yard where the property line is basically a rumor. But the slamming was me."

"So the note wasn't a game?"

"No games," he said. "I hear you through the wall. Your music, your phone calls, your nine steps back and forth when you're thinking. And I heard what you said about me, that night, to Claudia. 'Some hairdresser. Beneath my notice.'" He shrugged, going for casual and probably missing. "I didn't love it."

Her face did something complicated. She drank her coffee. "Claudia talks too loud on speakerphone," she said finally. "That was rude of me. But I was stressed, and people say things, and you've been collecting information about me through a wall for months, apparently, which is not exactly normal behavior either, Elliot the hairdresser."

"Fair. Totally fair." He hesitated. "For what it's worth, the nine steps thing isn't weird to me. It's kind of my favorite part of the day."

"That is objectively a weirder sentence than anything I said on the phone," she said, and she almost smiled. Then she went inside and closed the door, and Elliot stood in the yard with his stupid watering can feeling like he'd both lost and won a match he couldn't name.

Saturday morning there was a note under his door. His own note, returned, with something new written