Thin Walls and Tea

The wall between Mollie's kitchen and Collette's kitchen was about as thick as a phone book, and on Tuesday nights it carried every word like a radio. Mollie sat at her little table with a bowl of leftover rice and listened to Collette and Quentin go at it about the dishwasher for the fourth time that month.

"You load it like a raccoon with no thumbs," Collette said.

"I load it the way the manual says!"

"The manual does not say face the bowls at the wall, Quentin."

Mollie was thirty-four, a grad student in urban planning, and she ate dinner alone most nights to a soundtrack like this. She had dated her way through half the decent people in her program and half the decent people on the apps, and every date felt the same. Two people talking through a wall. You heard the shape of them, not the person.

She rinsed her bowl and thought about how thin everything in her life was. The walls. The dates. The promises people made in the first hour of knowing each other, about travel and hiking and how they were really looking for something serious. All of it plaster board.

The fight next door ended the way their fights always ended, with Quentin's boots on the stairs and Collette slamming a cabinet. Then, a knock on Mollie's door.

"Mollie! Are you home? It's Collette."

Mollie opened it. Collette was thirty-five, in a bathrobe over her work clothes, holding a tin of tea as if offering peace.

"We woke the whole building, didn't we."

"Just the one wall," Mollie said. "It was a good one, though. The raccoon line."

"I've been saving it up." Collette held up the tin. "Come have tea. We've got a guest I want you to meet, and I need an excuse to stop yelling at my husband."

"It's ten at night."

"So? He's nice. Come on, or I'll start telling you about the dishwasher again."

The guest was in the small living room, sitting on the couch like a man at a job interview. He was tall, maybe thirty-seven, with dark hair going gray at the temples, and he stood up when Mollie came in, which almost nobody did anymore.

"This is Emile," Collette said. "Quentin's friend from way back. He's staying with us a few weeks until his place sorts itself out. Emile, this is Mollie, the neighbor I'm always talking about."

"The one with the thin walls," Emile said. His voice was quiet and even. "I heard your radio program tonight. Very dramatic."

Mollie laughed before she could stop herself. "That was us? I thought that was you two."

"No, we were the ones being yelled at about bowls."

Collette put the kettle on and talked enough for all three of them, which was her way. Mollie noticed that Emile watched her when she talked. Not in a creepy way. He just paid attention, the way you pay attention to a kettle you're waiting on. He asked her two questions the whole evening, both about the community garden, and both like the answers actually mattered.

"You're staring," Collette whispered to her in the kitchen, not quietly enough.

"I'm being polite," Mollie whispered back. "He's fine. He's just quiet."

"He's a bartender. He listens for a living. Don't read anything into it." Collette spooned leaves into the pot. "He's had a rough decade, honestly. Be nice to him."

When the tea came, Mollie took a sip and stopped. "What is this?"

"Emile brought it," Collette said. "He's fussy about tea. Understatement of the century."

"It's a keemun," Emile said, "with a little smoked lapsang in it. About one part to six. I blend it myself."

"You blend your own tea," Mollie said.

"Doesn't everybody?" He almost smiled. It was the first thing on his face that moved easily.

* * *

She ran into him the next Friday at the corner market on Dockside, the narrow one with the good produce and the bad lighting. He had a basket with nothing in it but four boxes of tea, all different.

"Emile, right?"

"Mollie. Hello." He looked, briefly, as if caught in the act, then settled. "I was just..."

"Tea shopping. Yes. I see that!"

"I'm out of the smoked one. And this brand changed their leaf, so I have to test it." He held up a box like it was evidence. "They cut it with more stem now. You can taste it. It brews muddy."

"That's a very strong opinion about a tea bag."

"Loose leaf," he said, looking mildly horrified. "Never bags. Bags are a punishment we agreed to stop questioning."

She laughed, and he looked pleased with himself in a small contained way. She asked what he was making next, and he told her, at length, about a blend he was working on with a green base and a smoked finish, and how the ratio had to be exact or it turned bitter around the second cup. He knew the numbers off the top of his head. He talked with his hands when it was about tea, and not at all when it was about himself.

"What do you do, anyway, when you're not blending?" she asked at the register.

"Bartend. Pour other people's drinks, mostly. It's less demanding."

"Collette said you just moved here."

"Three weeks ago, back from the coast. The apartment situation is taking a while." He said it lightly, but he said it fast, the way people skip past a door they don't want opened. She let it go. Everyone had a door.

* * *

The following Thursday she had a date with a man named Daryl, thirty-nine, who owned a motorcycle and wanted her to know everything about it. Everything.

"So then I swapped out the stock exhaust," he said, for the fourth time.

"Right, the exhaust."

"And the jets. You have to rejet when you do that. Most guys don't and they wonder why it runs rich." He tore a piece of bread in half and did not eat either half. "You ride?"

"No. I take the train."

"The train. Huh." He said it the way you'd say taxidermy. "Well, you'd like it. It's freedom, really. That's what it is."

Mollie got home at nine, heels in her hand, having promised to see his bike sometime. She was never seeing his bike. The street was loud the way it always was, a train going by two blocks over, someone's TV through a window, and she climbed the outside stairs to her door thinking that she was thirty-four years old and the best conversation of her week had been about tea ratios with a stranger in bad lighting.

That was when she saw the light. Emile was sitting on her fire escape. Not on hers, on Collette's, which was the same fire escape, one thin landing of railing between them. He had a book and a camping lantern and a mug, and he was reading with his shoes off.

He looked up. "Oh. Sorry. Is this your, ah."

"It's the fire escape," Mollie said. "Technically it belongs to the building, and the building never uses it."

"It's the only quiet place over there." He nodded toward Collette's window. "They're watching a movie Quentin picked. There was a disagreement about volume."

"There usually is."

"Want to sit? Or not. I don't want to keep you from..." He gestured at her shoes in her hand, at her whole evening.

Mollie looked at him, sitting there with his lantern like a lighthouse keeper, and thought, why not. "Yeah. Give me two minutes."

She came back out in sweats with a blanket and the last of a bottle of wine, and they sat on opposite ends of the landing with the railing between them like a neutral border.

"What are you reading?" she asked.

"A field guide to local birds. Don't laugh."

"I'm not laughing. It's nice. It's a nice thing to do."

"Collette lent it to me. She thought it would help me settle in." He turned a page. "I'm not very good at settling in."

"How long does it usually take?"

"A while," he said. "Longer than a few weeks."

They talked about nothing for a long time. The train schedule. Whether the park fountain was going to be fixed before summer. The correct order of operations for making rice. He was easy to talk to in a way that snuck up on her, because he never filled a silence, he just let one sit there until she realized she was comfortable in it. Nobody had ever done that on a date. Dates were all gas pedal.

"Can I ask you something?" Mollie said, somewhere past midnight. The lantern was low and the street noise had thinned out.

"Probably."

"You know how some people, you talk to them and it's like there's a wall, and you can hear them but you can't really reach them?"

"Yes," he said. Too fast, she thought.

"Collette says you listen for a living. But it's more than that. You watch people like you're taking notes. Like you're studying how to be one of us."

The lantern flickered. Emile set his book down on his knee, very carefully, face out, and for a second she thought he would get up and go inside and she'd never hear from him again. His hands were still. His face was not.

"And if I said that was true?" he asked. "What would you do?"

"I don't know yet," Mollie said honestly. "Ask you more questions, I guess. Over tea."

He looked at her then, really looked, the steady gaze from the first night but with something behind it now, like he was standing at the edge of a high dive. "You might want to be careful with that offer."

"I'm a grad student in urban planning. Caution is not my strong suit. Have you seen this neighborhood's zoning?"

* * *

Collette caught her in the hallway two days later, holding a bag of tomatoes she was clearly using as an excuse to stop.

"So. Emile."

"What about him," Mollie said, fishing for her keys.

"I saw you two out on the fire escape until one in the morning. The wall carries, you know."

"I know the wall carries. It carries your dishwasher fights, which I would like to return."

"You should give him a chance," Collette said. "He's different. And I don't mean different like flaky, I mean different different. He's been through something. Just give him a chance."

"He's only here a few weeks, Collette. What's the point of starting something with a man with an expiration date?"

"I didn't say start something. I said give him a chance."

"That's the same thing with extra steps."

Collette held out a tomato like it settled the argument. Mollie took it. Then she went inside and stood at her kitchen window, which faced the fire escape, and thought about how Emile's eyes had looked under the lantern. Gray, she'd have said the first night. But by midnight they'd gone green, or maybe that was the lantern, and by the time she went to bed they were gray again. Her kitchen light was terrible. It could do that to a color, she supposed.

* * *

Quentin's birthday was the last Saturday of the month, and Collette threw it in their apartment because Quentin loved parties and their apartment was the size of a shoe. Mollie showed up at seven with a store-bought cake and a bottle of wine and immediately lost the hallway.

There were maybe twenty-five people in a space meant for four. Music from a speaker someone had balanced on the bookshelf. A man named Gus from Quentin's work explaining something about pickleball to two women who were not listening. Emile was behind the little kitchen counter, having apparently appointed himself bartender, mixing drinks with the calm of a man at the eye of a hurricane.

"Gin and tonic?" he asked Mollie.

"You remembered."

"You told me Tuesday. The wall carries."

"The wall carries everything," she said, and took the drink.

She ended up near the counter for most of the night, partly because the party was unbearable anywhere else and partly because Emile was easy to watch. He made drinks for a line of people without writing anything down. He remembered that Gus took no bitters. He remembered the tall woman's name was Dara even though nobody had introduced them in his hearing, as far as Mollie knew.

And then the thing happened.

Somebody jostled past the counter, a whole chain reaction of elbows and someone laughing too loud, and a full glass went sliding toward the edge, toward the floor, toward the cake. Emile's hand just moved. Not fast, exactly. It was more that the glass arrived at his hand the way a ball arrives in a glove, and his wrist had turned to exactly the right angle so nothing spilled, and his fingers were long for a half second, longer than they'd been, and then they weren't.

Mollie stood there with her drink.