Through These Walls

I came through the apartment door with both hands full of groceries and my elbow trying to work the deadbolt behind me, which is a skill I have never actually mastered. The bags hit the counter with a thud and a jar of salsa rolled out onto the floor, and that's when Finn's voice came from the bedroom, flat and a little apologetic.

"Christine? That was Angus from next door. He just knocked."

"Angus who?" I yelled back, mostly because I'd forgotten the kid's name was Angus and not Aaron. I do that. I have a whole filing system in my head for names and it fails me constantly.

"The guy in 4B. The night shift one. He says the walls are thin and we were... loud. Last night. He was very polite about it, which somehow made it worse."

I stood there in the kitchen holding a leek like a sword and felt my face go warm. We had been loud. Finn had me up against the dresser and I had not exactly been quiet about it, and now a twenty-seven-year-old security guard with sad eyes knew more about my sex life than my sister does. Finn came out pulling his shirt on, fifty-one years old and gray at the temples and still the best thing I ever found in a bookstore, and he gave me the look of a man bracing for a storm.

"He wasn't rude," he said. "He said he works nights and sleeps days, and he just wanted to give us a heads up."

"A heads up," I repeated. "So he hears us and gives us a heads up. Wonderful. Great. I'm going to go lie down in traffic now."

Finn laughed and went to start the shower, which is his answer to everything, hot water and twenty minutes of quiet. I put away the groceries in a bad mood. The apartment is a one bedroom in a pre-war walk-up on East 7th and every sound travels. I can hear Mrs. Santos's radio on the ground floor if the wind is right. I can hear the guy below us watching game shows at six-thirty. I've known this for two years and I've adapted, mostly by burying my face in a pillow and biting it, and now some kid fresh out of somewhere had heard me anyway.

Here's the part I probably shouldn't admit. It bothered me less that he heard and more that he heard and was polite about it. Polite. Like I was a noise complaint and not a woman. I'm forty-seven and I work as a nanny for a family uptown and I spend my days negotiating with a six year old about broccoli, and I guess some dumb little competitive switch in me flipped. He heard us. Fine. But he heard us and felt sorry for us, I could feel it, that gentle apologetic tone, oh these poor tired old people.

I was still stewing when I went down to check the mail, which I do out of habit even though nothing good ever comes. Nothing good had come. But on my way back up, on the landing outside 4B, there was a box sitting on the mat. A decent sized box, shipping label up, and the label said Christine Fuller, apartment 4C. Our address. Our box, sitting outside Angus's door, presumably delivered there by a mailman who cannot read numbers.

I looked at the box and I knew exactly what it was. I'd ordered it Tuesday night after Finn fell asleep, a little black set from a shop I will not name here because Tina reads these, lace and straps and entirely too expensive for a woman who buys store brand coffee. I'd been half embarrassed about it for three days. Now it was sitting there in the hallway like a sign from God, and Finn was in the shower with maybe fifteen minutes left, and the temptation was enormous.

I will be honest that I did not think it through. I looked left, looked right like a cartoon burglar, picked up my own package off my neighbor's mat, and carried it upstairs like contraband.

Of course that is the exact moment Tina's door opened across the hall from ours.

"Well, well, well," she said. She's thirty-four, a nurse on days, and she has never once in three years let me get away with anything. She was holding a mug and leaning on her doorframe with the smugness of a woman who has caught a shoplifter. "Whatcha got there, Christine?"

"Nothing. Groceries. Mail."

"That's mail?"

"It's a package."

"A package you're carrying like it's ticking." She came down the hall and peered at the label and I just let her, because at that point hiding it was worse. "Ooh," she said, seeing the shop name, and her eyebrows went up to her hairline. "Fancy. Very fancy. Who's it for? You? It's for you, isn't it. For Finn."

"Maybe."

"Christine. You ordered fancy underwear and then snuck it out of Angus's apartment like it was a bomb. This is the best thing that's happened to me all month."

"It was not in his apartment, it was on his mat, there's a difference, it's practically public property." I hugged the box to my chest, which was stupid, because Tina had already seen everything she needed. "Also he complained about us. To Finn. About noise."

Tina's whole face changed. Not shocked, delighted. "About noise noise?"

"About noise noise."

"Wow. Okay. Good for you, honestly, I thought you two had gone quiet and settled, no offense, but you've been together two years and it happens." She took a sip from her mug and looked at me over the rim. "So what are you gonna do about it?"

"About what?"

"About any of it. The complaint. The underwear. The fact that a twenty-seven year old basically told you to keep it down." She said it lightly but it landed right where I didn't want it to land, in that sore competitive spot I've had since I lost a spelling bee in fourth grade and never forgave the world. "I'm just saying. If I got a noise complaint I'd take it as a challenge."

"You would."

"I would. But I'm younger than you."

She said it with a grin, teasing, the way she does, but it stuck in me like a splinter. Younger than you. Not by much, she's thirty-four, but the words sat there anyway. I've spent two years with Finn being happy and comfortable and I forgot that I have a motor in me that runs on exactly this kind of garbage, someone implying I might be past it, someone feeling sorry for me, some kid on night shift with sad apologetic eyes hearing me through a wall and thinking, well, good for them, I guess.

I said something breezy to Tina, went inside, and put the box on the bed. The shower was still running. I stood there looking at it, the black tissue paper, the little logo, and I thought about Finn coming out of that bathroom with wet hair and finding me in it, and I thought about the wall, and Angus on the other side of it trying to sleep at noon, and I felt something I hadn't felt in a while, that hot little flare in the chest, the one that says yes, actually, we can do better than last night, we can do a lot better.

Finn turned off the water. I started opening the box.

The box had that tissue paper shops put in so you feel like you spent even more than you did. I got the thing out and held it up and thought, well, that is barely anything. Lace, a few straps, a level of see-through that made store brand coffee seem like a reasonable purchase after all. But I'd bought it, so I was going to wear it.

I didn't put it on before Finn came out. I don't know why, some instinct about saving it, or maybe just stage fright. Instead I waited until he was in boxers and a t-shirt, sitting on the bed with his hair still damp, reading the back of a vitamin bottle like he does, and I said I'd be right back and went into the bathroom.

Putting it on was a project. Straps go places straps don't seem to need to go. I adjusted, twisted, pulled, adjusted again. The mirror in that bathroom is not kind, it's one of those slightly warped old ones, but even it couldn't ruin the effect. I'm forty-seven, I've had forty-seven years, and I looked in the glass and thought, okay. Okay, actually.

I opened the door and walked out and Finn put down the vitamin bottle.

He didn't say anything at first. He made this sound, low in his chest, like a groan with a thank you inside it, and I felt that go through me like a current. Two years with a man and he can still make me feel like the floor tilted.

"Well," he said, finally. "Come here."

I came there. He stood up and put his hands on my waist, careful, like the straps were strings that might snap, and he looked at me the way he looks at one of his drawings when he's checking a line. "You bought this," he said. "For me."

"For me, technically. You benefit."

He laughed and kissed my shoulder, and then my neck, and I thought about the wall. I actually thought about it, mid-kiss, which tells you where my head was that day. Angus was asleep on the other side of that wall, or trying to be. He'd complained once. One time. And here I was in forty dollars of lace thinking about decibels.

So we tried to be quiet. That was the game, sort of, accidental at first and then deliberate. Finn laid me back on the bed and peeled the thing off me with a patience that nearly killed me, and I bit my lip, and he went down between my legs and I grabbed the pillow and put it over my own face like a lunatic. His mouth on my clit, slow at first, then that rhythm he knows, and every time I got close I made a noise into the pillow and muffled it and he would pause, waiting, the bastard, until I lifted the pillow enough to nod.

I came with the pillow pressed down and I still made a sound. Not loud, I didn't think. A sound like a hiccup with feeling. Finn crawled up me and put on a condom, because we're old and sensible even when we're being ridiculous, and he pushed into me and we moved together and I kept my mouth against his shoulder and he kept his breathing in these controlled little bursts through his nose like a man lifting furniture.

We failed. Completely. Because the thing about trying to be quiet is you can hear everything else, the bed creaking on every stroke, the headboard tapping the wall in a soft stupid rhythm like a metronome, Finn's breath going ragged no matter how he tried to hold it. When he came he buried his face in my neck and groaned, low and long, and I felt it in my own chest, and afterward we lay there listening to the pipes clank and I started laughing and couldn't stop.

"That was quieter," Finn said.

"That was not quieter."

"It was somewhat quieter."

"Finn. I used a pillow. The bed sounds like a rowboat."

He was quiet a second, doing the math like I was. "He's off Wednesdays," he said. "He was home. But we tried."

"Maybe." But I was already turning something over in my head, and the something had a shape and the shape was a challenge.

Here's what I figured out that night, lying there while Finn dozed off. The complaint had stung because it made me feel managed, handled, like a couple past its prime being politely asked to use inside voices. But there was another way to take it. The wall was thin. That meant the wall was a door, sort of. It meant that on the other side of a half inch of plaster, someone could hear me and know exactly what was happening in 4C, know that Christine Fuller, forty-seven years old, nanny to a six-year-old who fights her about broccoli, was having the kind of evening that gets complaints filed.

I didn't decide anything that night. I want that understood. It just sort of arranged itself in me overnight, the way these things do.

The next evening Finn got home around seven with Thai food and we ate it out of the containers and watched the guy below us lose at his game show through the floor, the audience groaning right on schedule at six. Normal night. Finn washed the containers out, because he's that kind of person, and I went and took a shower and came out and stood in the bedroom doorway in a robe and he looked up from his laptop and I watched him understand, slowly, that the laptop was closing.

"Christine," he said, careful.

"I have an idea," I said. "And you're going to think it's ridiculous."

"Those are usually your best ideas."

So I told him. Angus works nights, Thursday through Monday, and I'd heard his door lock behind him at a quarter to nine every one of those nights for two years without thinking about it. It was Thursday. It was nine. I told Finn I wanted to do it on the wall side of the bed and I wanted us loud. Deliberately loud. Loud the way we would be if nobody had ever knocked, with 4B empty till seven and the plaster all ours for once.

Finn stared at me. Then he started grinning, this slow grin I hadn't seen in a while, and he said, "You're serious."

"Dead serious."