The Wall Between Us

Sybil Castro was forty-six years old and had just spent eighty dollars on a dinner that ended with a man named Jefferson explaining, unprompted, that his ex-wife had ruined him for commitment. She paid the whole bill, tipped well anyway, because she was an accountant and tipping badly felt like fraud, and walked the six blocks home through the garment district wondering when exactly she had become a woman who gave second chances to men who didn't deserve first ones.

Her apartment was on the third floor of an old brick building on Delancey Street. The bridal boutique occupied the ground floor, and across the narrow alley Kassandra Ripley's catering kitchen ran loud all through wedding season, pots banging, someone always laughing. Sybil liked the noise, honestly. It made the building feel lived in. What she had never mentioned to anyone was the wall.

The wall between her apartment and 3B.

It was Saturday night when it happened again. She had kicked off her heels, poured a generous glass of the cheap red she pretended was good, and sat on the edge of her bed still in the dress she'd worn to disappoint Jefferson. And then she heard it. Not a noise. Not footsteps, not a TV, not the muffled sounds a person makes in their own life. A pulse. A slow, deep, rhythmic thing, a second heartbeat coming through the plaster, steady and patient and close.

She put her palm flat against the wall. It was warm. That was the part that got her, every time. Walls weren't supposed to be warm.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "Either I'm losing it or my neighbor has a subwoofer the size of a refrigerator."

The neighbor was 3B. She had passed him on the stairs maybe fifty times over the years and never once had a full conversation. A tall man, gray at the temples, with the kind of sad, patient eyes that made you want to ask if he was all right and then immediately want to take it back. Allan, she thought the name was. Someone had said it once. He was older, maybe fifty, hard to pin down, and he always nodded at her like he was glad to see her and sorry about it at the same time.

The pulse came again. Boom. Boom. Slower than a heart should go, but she could feel it in her own chest, like her body wanted to match it. She sat back down on the bed and did not match it, because she was forty-six years old and had learned some discipline, mostly from spreadsheets.

"Get a grip, Sybil," she told herself.

She didn't sleep well. That was nothing new.

* * *

Here is the thing she would never have admitted at a dinner table. Sybil had been dating for twenty years and loved exactly none of it. There had been a coworker, Cedric, four years ago, a brief and stupid affair that ended when he transferred offices and stopped calling, and since then it had been app dates and friend-of-friend dinners and one truly memorable evening with a man who cried about his boat. She wanted to be chosen for something. Something real. Something with a little danger in it, even, God help her, because safe and beige had stopped feeding her a long time ago.

So on Tuesday, standing in the dim hallway between 3A and 3B with her mail in one hand, she did something ridiculous. She took a receipt from her purse, flipped it over, and wrote on the back.

*Your wall is warm.*

She slid it under his door before she could talk herself out of it, and then she basically sprinted to the stairs like she was committing a crime, except she was a grown woman in accounting, so it was more of a brisk, mortified walk.

Nothing came back for three days. She checked her doormat like a fool every morning. Then on Friday there was an envelope, heavy cream paper, no stamp, tucked into the frame of her door. Inside, in handwriting so elegant it looked printed, a single line:

*"What the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose."*

No name. No answer to her question. Just that, in ink the color of dark honey.

Sybil read it four times standing in her doorway. "Okay, Allan," she murmured, "or whoever you are. Now I have to know."

She wrote back that night. A whole page this time, because she had no restraint. She told him about the sound she heard through the wall, the pulse, and asked, plainly, since he clearly wasn't going to deny the warm wall, what was over there on his side of the plaster. She signed it with a lopsided S.

The reply was under her door the next morning. One line again.

*"Do not be afraid of the deep. Some of us only live there because we were put there."*

"Well, that's dramatic," she said to her cat, who was unimpressed. "That's so dramatic. Why do I like it?"

She liked it a lot. That was the problem.

* * *

Saturday brought the fitting. The boutique downstairs did alterations on Saturdays, and the hallway filled with tulle and nervous mothers and at least one bridezilla crying about lace. Sybil hadn't planned on eavesdropping. She had planned on doing laundry. But the building's washer was in the basement, and the stairwell carries sound like a church, and the seamstress, a brisk woman named Odette who had hemmed two of Sybil's work skirts, was talking at full volume to a client in the shop doorway.

"No, the dress will be ready, Jerry, I promise. I've been doing this since before you were born, probably."

"Sorry, sorry, it's just, my cousin's wedding, the whole family flying in."

"Weddings, always the same panic. You know who never panics? Mr. Draper upstairs. Fifty years in this building, that man, and I have never seen him rush once."

Sybil stopped on the stairs with her laundry bag, halfway between floors, absolutely not pretending she wasn't listening.

"Fifty years?" the client said. "This building?"

"This building, this apartment. My mother hemmed gowns here before me, and she used to say the same thing. Mr. Draper, 3B, same face, same gray at the temples, same coat. My mother swore he hadn't aged a day between 1975 and 1990. She said he tipped well and kept to himself and that some men are just preserved, like fruit."

"That's weird, Odette."

"That's the garment district, Jerry. Everything down here is a little preserved."

Sybil continued down to the basement with her heart doing something unprofessional. Fifty years. The man she'd been passing on the stairs, the man she'd assumed was a slightly sad near-retiree, had lived above her, or below her, depending how you counted, since before she was born, and had not aged. And he wrote her poetry in honey-colored ink and never once answered a direct question.

She did her laundry. She thought about it the entire cycle. She thought about it during the rinse and the spin.

When she came back up, Odette was gone and the shop was quiet, and there, on the third-floor hallway floor in front of her door, was an envelope. He must have come out while she was downstairs. She looked both ways down the empty hall, which was silly, there was nobody, and picked it up.

*"You were listening on the stairs. I could hear your steps stop. I am sorry you had to learn it that way."*

Her mouth went dry. She read it twice, then knocked, before her brain could file an objection, on the door of 3B.

Nothing. She waited. Nothing.

"Allan?" she called softly. "I'm not scared. Well, I'm a little scared, but not of you, I don't think. I just want to know if you're okay over there."

Silence. Then, very faint, that pulse again, slower than ever, like something enormous turning over in its sleep. Boom. Boom.

"I leave notes," she said to the door. "Apparently that's how we talk now. I think that's insane and I'm going to keep doing it."

She went back to her apartment and sat with her back against the shared wall, and the warmth of it came through her shirt, and she stayed there a long time, longer than any date had ever held her attention.

* * *

Sunday she wrote the longest note yet. She told him her whole boring inventory, forty-six, accountant, twenty years of terrible dinners, one boat-crying incident she swore was true. Then, at the bottom, she wrote the only question that mattered.

*What are you? And do you ever get lonely over there? I ask because the wall is warm and I keep putting my hand on it and that's probably pathetic but here we are.*

The reply took three days. One line, of course. Always one line, like he was rationing himself, like every sentence cost him something.

*"I am a hunger that learned manners. And yes. Every hour of every year."*

Sybil read it in the hallway, and read it again, and pressed the paper flat against her chest like some heroine in a paperback, and then laughed at herself for doing it, and then did it again anyway.

"Hunger that learned manners," she repeated. "Sure. Okay. Why not. I've dated worse."

She hadn't, actually. But the point stood, and the pulse through the wall that night sounded, to her ears at least, a little less sad.

The next note she left was shorter, because at some point you have to stop writing novels through a door. *Come over for tea or I'll start knocking.*

She taped it to his handle and hurried into her own apartment like a prankster ding-dong-ditching, which was ridiculous, she was forty-six, she had a pension plan.

The answer came under her door by evening, in that honey ink again. *Tuesday, seven. You will not need to bring anything. Just yourself, if you can spare her. A.D.*

"Her," she said to the cat, who was unimpressed. "He said 'spare her.' Who talks like that? Nobody talks like that!"

Tuesday she changed outfits four times, which was insane, because it was tea with the mystery neighbor, not a date. Was it a date? Could a hunger that learned manners date? She settled on the blue dress and walked the few feet down the hall before she could talk herself out of it, and knocked.

The door opened before her knuckles landed the second time. There he was, tall as ever, gray at the temples, those patient sad eyes, wearing a dark sweater that looked older than her building.

"Miss Castro," he said, and stepped back. "Please. Come in!"

"Allan. Or do I call you Mr. Draper? I still don't actually know which name is real."

"Allan is real. Draper is old. Come in, come in, you're letting the hallway in."

His apartment stopped her in the doorway. After twenty years of dating she had seen a lot of apartments, and this was not like any of them. One room, mostly. A long table, two chairs, shelves of books with spines so cracked they looked asleep. A lamp with a warm yellow shade. No television, no dishes in a rack, nothing recent anywhere. And warm, so warm, the same warmth as the wall, the whole room breathing low and slow.

"It's like a library that somebody actually lives in," she said, turning around slowly. "Where's your everything? Where's the mail pile? Everybody has a mail pile."

"I deal with mail promptly."

"Nobody deals with mail promptly. That's not a human trait."

Something crossed his face at that, quick as a shadow under water, and she pretended she hadn't seen it. He poured tea from a brown pot into two cups that had no chips at all, which somehow felt stranger than the no-television thing.

"Sit, please. The chair by the wall is warmer."

"You know about the wall being warm."

"I know everything about the wall." He said it lightly, like a joke, and she let it pass.

She sat, and the tea was good, actually good, dark and a little sweet without anything added, and for a while they just talked like normal people, which was the most disorienting part. He asked about her work and listened to her complain about a client's receipts for longer than any date had ever listened to anything. He laughed twice, actual laughs, low ones, and each time the lamp seemed to brighten a little, which she decided was a trick of her eyes.

But the wall. She couldn't stop looking at it. Near the shared wall the air did something strange, a faint shimmer, like heat off summer pavement except it was October and this was indoors, a slow ripple in the light about a hand's width off the plaster. She stared at it over the rim of her cup until he noticed her noticing.

"Old houses do that," he said. "Settling. Light behaves strangely in old rooms."

"That's not light off a radiator, Allan. That's not anything off a radiator. It moves."

"Old houses settle in strange directions." He refilled her cup without her asking, and his hand never trembled, but he was definitely changing the subject, she could feel it the way you feel a date steering away from his ex-wife. She let him, this time. She drank her tea and watched the shimmer breathe and thought, well, either I run or I lean in, and I've been running for twenty years.

"Can I ask you something blunt?" she said.

"You may. I suspect you will regardless."

"Are you dangerous? To me, specifically. Not in general. Me."

He looked at her for a moment, and the room got very quiet, quiet enough she could hear that slow pulse through the wall, boom, boom, like a heart the size of the building.

"No," he said. "Not to you. That I can promise with my whole self, which is older than it looks."

"And the rest of it? The thing I'm not asking about?"

"That," he said softly, "you should ask me when you are sitting down. Or perhaps standing near a door."

"Soon?"

"Soon." And the shimmer near the wall pulsed once, like it agreed with him.

* * *

She should have gone straight home after that. Instead, Thursday, she crossed the alley to Kassandra Ripley's kitchen, because Kassandra did a lunch service for the law office upstairs from the bridal shop every week and always had leftovers and always waved Sybil over like a long-lost cousin. Kassandra was thirty-nine, brisk, kind, with flour on one cheekbone and a chef's knife she handled like a hairbrush.

"Sybil! Oh thank God, tell me you want the last of the chicken. The boys in that law office eat like I starve them."

"I will always want the last of the chicken, you know that." Sybil hopped up on a prep counter, which Kassandra tolerated the way she tolerated most things, with a sigh. "Can I ask you something kind of weird?"

"Nothing about this block counts as weird anymore. I once dated a man who claimed he could see spirits, and honestly the spirits sounded easier to deal with than he was."

"The man in 3B. Mr. Draper. Do you know him?"

And there it was. Kassandra's hands stopped chopping. Just for a second, but Sybil had spent twenty years watching people's faces across dinner tables and she knew a stop when she saw one.

"Why do you ask about him?" Kassandra said, carefully casual, meaning not casual at all.

"He's my neighbor. We've been leaving notes."

"Notes." Kassandra set the knife down. "Sybil, honey. Listen to me, and I'm not being dramatic, this is me being practical, this is me protecting my kitchen and my crew and apparently now you. There's something wrong around that man. Around his door, around his part of the