Watching the Wall

*This story came from wanting to write something blunt about wanting and the way desire can crack open a life that's gone quiet. The wall felt like the right metaphor, what we let through, what we keep out. Hope you feel that dust and brick and ache right along with Nina.*

My name is Nina. I'm twenty eight and I shoot fashion for a living, which sounds more glamorous than it is. Mostly it means standing on a milk crate at seven in the morning, begging a nineteen year old model to look alive.

The studio is the attic of our house. Our house is a Victorian in Portland that we bought cheap because it was falling down. Fletcher found it. Fletcher finds things. He's a mason, twenty nine, arms like dock rope, and he can look at a wall and tell you what year it was laid and whether it's angry.

We've been married two years, together three. Met at a gallery opening when I was twenty five. He'd come for the free beer. I'd come for the free wine. We both got what we came for.

Here's the part I'd only admit to a stranger on the internet. Nothing has happened in our bed in a long time. I mean nothing happens. We sleep, we wake, I make coffee, he goes to work. There's love in it. There's just no fire in it. Months now. I've stopped counting because counting made me feel like a creep keeping score against my own husband.

You want to know the stupid part? You're reading this, so you'll get it. It's not Fletcher's fault. He's good. He's kind. He fixes things without being asked. The problem is we got comfortable. Comfortable is just another word for quiet.

Anyway. The house.

The house is half renovation. Lionel's crew took the back half. Lionel is the general contractor, forty seven, divorced, no kids, been doing this since before I owned a real camera. He's got a laugh you can hear through concrete and a truck that idles like a bear with a chest cold.

The wall between my attic studio and the construction zone is thin. Drafty. Original plaster, I'd guess. Every morning at seven fifteen the noises start, and they bleed through that wall like it's tissue paper.

Saw blades. Nail guns. Radio on a country station that I have never once asked for and now hum in the shower.

Then there are the other noises. The ones I noticed before I understood I was noticing them.

Grunt. Lift. Drop. Repeat.

I need to explain what that does to a woman who hasn't felt anything below the waist in months. It does things. That's all I'll say for now. (That's a lie. I'll say plenty. Keep reading.)

Tuesday. Raining, obviously. Portland in October is one long apology for summer.

Fletcher was in the kitchen making eggs. I was on the sofa with my laptop, pretending to edit a set of photos I'd already edited twice.

"You're doing the sigh again," he said. He didn't look up from the pan.

"What sigh."

"That one. The one where you breathe out through your nose like a kettle."

"I don't do a kettle sigh."

"You've done it four times since I got the eggs on." He flipped something. "Talk to me. Is it money? The Johnson job?"

"It's not money."

"Is it me?"

And there it was. The trapdoor. Open right in the middle of the kitchen floor.

"It's not you," I said. "It's the house. It's the noise. I can't work with Lionel's crew hammering through my wall."

That was technically true and completely dishonest, and I knew it while I said it, and Fletcher probably knew it too, because he knows me better than I'd like sometimes.

"I can ask him to keep it down in the mornings," he offered.

"No. Don't. It's his job. It's fine."

He shrugged and went back to the eggs. I went upstairs to the attic with my camera bag, because that's what I do when I'm avoiding something. I work.

The noise started at seven fifteen, like it always does.

Thud. Scrape. Thud.

The rhythm of it got into my hands somehow. I was supposed to be culling a lookbook from a shoot I did in a hotel ballroom two weeks ago. Every model in it looked bored. I'd shot them bored because I'd been bored. There's a whole set of forty frames where not one person looks like they've ever wanted anything.

Meanwhile, through the wall: lift. Drop. Breathe. Lift.

I put the laptop down.

There's a crack in that wall. It's been there since before we bought the place, a seam in the plaster near the old chimney breast, about a foot long. With the lens cap off and one eye shut and everything else forgiven, you can see through it. Barely. A sliver of the room next door.

I'd never looked. I want that noted. I'd never looked, not once, in all the months Lionel's been working over there. It didn't even occur to me as a thing a person could do.

Tuesday it occurred to me.

I stood up from the desk. I walked over to the wall like I was going to inspect the crack for insurance purposes. Very professional. Then I put my eye to it.

And there he was.

Lionel, in the half finished room next door, alone. The rest of the crew was somewhere below, because I could hear hammering under the floor. He was moving sheets of plywood, one at a time, off a stack and onto sawhorses.

I should describe him. Give me a second, because my description at the time was less words and more a general system failure.

Big. Not gym big. Work big. Forearms with a map of veins on them. Grey stubble. Forty seven years old and built like the house he was fixing, old bones, new strength. He was wearing work boots and jeans and nothing else, because the crew had the kerosene heaters going and the room next door was a furnace.

He bent. Grabbed the top sheet of plywood. Lifted it, and I watched every muscle across his back go tight at once, a whole landscape pulling taut. His shoulders bunched. His arms shook a little under the weight. He turned, slow, careful, and set it on the sawhorses with a flat slap of sound that I felt in my sternum through the wall.

Then he rolled his neck, both directions, and wiped his forehead with his forearm, and said something to himself I couldn't catch, and I was still standing there with my eye pressed to a crack in my own wall like a Peeping Tom with a mortgage.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough that my eye went dry. Long enough that he stacked six sheets, one after another, and I watched the same lift six times and it did not get old once.

Then my phone buzzed in my back pocket and I nearly died of fright.

It was Fletcher. A text. "Getting sandwiches at lunch, want your usual?"

I typed back "yes" and put the phone face down and felt like the worst person in the state of Oregon.

Because I do want my usual. That is the whole problem, in one text exchange. A man offering me a sandwich, and a woman who can't stop thinking about a stranger's shoulders through a wall. Neither of those sentences should be true at the same time. Both of them were.

Here's what I told myself. I told myself: you're a photographer. This is light and shadow and a human form and it's your job to look. That is called professionalism, Nina.

I also told myself: that's a load of garbage and you know it.

Both things got said. Only one of them was true.

I picked up my camera. That part was almost an accident, the way your hand finds the gear before your brain signs off. I fitted the fifty millimetre lens. I set the ISO for the bad light in the room. And then I did something I couldn't take back.

I put the lens up to the crack.

Focus is a nightmare through a seam in old plaster. I got maybe an inch of him in frame at a time. A forearm. The edge of a shoulder. Grey stubble, out of focus. Each frame looked like nothing, like evidence, like a photo of a rumor.

I took thirty of them anyway.

And on frame thirty one, through the crack, Lionel turned toward the wall. Toward my wall. He looked straight at the plaster where my lens was, and for one heartbeat I believed, fully, that he could see me.

He was only checking his chalk line. He went back to work.

I sat down on the floor of my studio with my camera in my lap and my heart doing something unprofessional, and I thought, well.

Well, Nina. Now what.

Here is what happened next, and I want it noted that I am not proud.

I wrote a note. A note. On the back of a contact sheet from a shoe campaign, because apparently my subconscious wanted the evidence to look like work.

The crack runs about a foot up the wall, near the chimney breast. It's wide enough at the bottom for a folded piece of paper. I know this because I tested it with the note, which went through, first try, like it had been waiting years for a letter.

The note said: "The brick you're laying in the corner. Is it reclaimed? The texture looks different than the rest."

That's it. That is the whole note. A genuine question, if you ignore everything surrounding it. A woman alone in her attic, whispering through a hole in her wall to a man she has said four words to in three months. But the brick genuinely did look different. So it wasn't even a lie. That's my defense and I'm standing on it.

Then I sat at my desk and pretended to edit the shoe campaign and listened to the rain and hated myself at a moderate simmer for about forty minutes.

At 11:40 there was a scrape at the wall.

Not a loud scrape. A small one. Paper on plaster. I was across the room before I decided to be, which is a sentence I don't love about myself. The note had come back through the crack, folded the same way, plus something extra.

It was a drawing.

A crude, gorgeous, terrible drawing of a brick. Someone had drawn it with the kind of confidence you only get from forty years of doodling on lumber. It had little motion lines around it. Underneath, in pencil, block letters:

"RECLAIMED. 1908. SMELLS FUNNY. LOTS OF OLD BRICKS HAVE ATTITUDES."

I laughed out loud, alone, in my attic, at a drawing of a brick. Then I photographed it. That part I did on purpose, camera up, one frame, my heart pounding as if I were photographing something classified. Which, emotionally, I was.

Here is the thing about the drawing. Fletcher can look at a wall and tell you what year it was laid. Lionel drew a brick with motion lines. Two men, two completely different relationships to masonry, and one of them made me laugh until my eyes hurt.

I wrote back. I mean to say I hesitated. I did not hesitate. The second note said: "Attitudes? Explain. Also who taught you to draw, a forensic artist?"

Fold. Through the crack. Sit down. Pretend to work. Simmer.

The reply came at 12:15. "SELF TAUGHT. YOU SHOULD SEE MY HORSES. EVERYONE SAYS NO." Under that, a horse. The horse had teeth like a venetian blind and legs coming out of places legs should not come from. It was the worst horse in the Pacific Northwest and I loved it.

I photographed that one too. Two frames, because the first was soft.

"So the bricks have attitudes," I wrote back. "Which one is the difficult one?"

By now I had a system. Fold, lean, post, retreat. I felt like a kid passing notes in class except the classroom was my house and the other student was forty seven and shirtless in the next room.

"THE ONE OVER THE WINDOW. CROOKED. WON'T SIT FLAT. BEEN FIGHTING IT ALL MORNING." Then, after a gap, like he'd thought about it: "WHY, WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT BRICKS?"

Fair question. I know what Fletcher has absorbed into me over three years, which is that soft lime mortar means the wall can breathe, and that a wall can be angry. I wrote exactly that. "My husband says a wall can be angry. He's a mason."

Long pause on his side. Long enough that I got up and made tea I did not want.

The answer came back: "HE'S RIGHT. MOST OF THESE WALLS ARE FURIOUS. THIS HOUSE HAS BEEN THROUGH SOME THINGS."

I liked that so much I photographed it too. At this point my camera roll looked like a ransom note.

Then, because apparently I had no brakes at all, I wrote: "Can I photograph you working? For the reno record. Before and after stuff."

I want to be truthful about the "for the reno record" part. It was a lie wearing a lanyard. There is no reno record. There has never been a reno record. Fletcher keeps the reno spreadsheet. But it sounded professional, and professional is the costume I'd picked, so I put it on and posted the note and stood there