Won’t you be my neighbor?
January 31, 2007
It’s 11:20 pm and I’m crouched on the floor, ass in the air, kneeling toward Mecca.
“You don’t answer the fucking phone anymore?” I hear through the floorboards. I hold my breath to focus my attention. And cut out some white noise. The acoustics rival those of the Ford theater in LA if you suction your ear just right to the open spaces on the floor.
She says something back to him, which I can’t hear and I wonder if she’s left the room. I think she’s explaining her position.
From what I can gather, he’s called her several times on her cell phone. She didn’t answer and now he’s demanding to know why. It’s hard to get a clear gauge of just how many times he actually tried her phone because his count keeps changing. At first it was three times. He upped it to six over the course of about ten minutes. Now he was holding steady at eight.
“I called you eight fucking times!”
She shouts his name as if there is a combination colon/question mark at the end implying that there is something grand about to follow it. I raise my eyebrows and exhale. The voice trails down the hall.
“Shit,” I say and pick myself and my wine glass up and tip toe down the hall in my Rainbow Brite socks, quiet as I can, not wanting even an ephemeral suspicion of my eavesdropping to interfere with the show in progress.
“Asshole!” I hear without the benefit of my ear to the floor and I drop down to catch the full confrontation.
“I’m an asshole?” he says. I lay down fully this time, belly flat to the floor. It hurts my neck less.
“No, you’re an asshole,” he says with a sharp Boston accent and I think my first impression (Boston Meat head) was an apt one and I am proud of my instincts. This moment of self congratulation is followed by the thought that if my husband ever spoke to me that way I would cry for a week and then head straight to the law offices of He Said, She Said.
This time the whining tea kettle voice comes from him, “ I was gonna come back here and tell you, tell you that, tell you how much I care about you, how lucky, fuck! how fucking lucky I am to be your–then he starts a word that I swear starts with a “g” and corrects himself–boyfriend!,” he finishes.
“Oh, God,” I whisper into the floor. “Two words: ‘Queen’ and ‘Drama’, and not necessarily in the order.”
Then all tenderness and sincerity that might have been gleaned in the moment is lost. “Fucking asshole, I hate you.” His voice trails down the hall.
Now I’m torn. Do I relocate? I decide to wait it out and kneel up to sip my wine, which has been neglected in deference to what I would later refer to as Dramady Central.
“You don’t care about me, you never cared about me and you are never gonna care about me,” he says. This from a guy that, only moments before, I was ready to accuse of some kind of Alpha Dog Machismo. Good Grief, I almost liked him better before.
I hear a bit of stomping but can’t place where it’s coming from so I lean against the kitchen island and wonder how long it will be until they have sex. I am genuinely curious as to whether overhearing it would be creepy, erotic or just dramatically interesting. I’ve never really considered voyeurism. But I have always had a “try anything once” policy.
Silence. Damn. Finally, impatience gets the better of me and I pick myself up again and rub my ear, which is hot from being pressed against the floor, and rub it, imagining it pink, flushed with blood.
I go outside for a cigarette and hear what promises to be crying through the open window below and so I cut it short and go back inside. Ah, they are in the bedroom now. I hear something different than stomping this time. A kind of muffled banging and I wonder if something– or someone– is being hit. This thought doesn’t irk me as much as I would have thought. She’s a big girl and this isn’t exactly a first date. Hey, we all make mistakes and there just aint no accounting for taste.
“I don’t want to talk! I just want to got to bed!” She says.
“So go to bed!”
I have a good idea it isn’t going to end this easily. More stomping. More silence. Then he’s on again about the calling. He hasn’t budged from eight times, and I don’t think he will. Even in what I can now safely assume is a drunken state, he won’t quite dare dance that far into the realm of absurdity.
I stretch my neck one way then the other, giving it a moments respite, then plant my ear to the floor again.
“Relationships are brutality,”I whisper to myself, like I am some kind of external observer, a civilized foreigner documenting the savage mating habits of an isolated and bestial tribe into my dictaphone. It might make a good bumper sticker. Sardonic, but catchy.
“Get off me!” She yells and I do have a moment of actual concern that disturbing shit is about to go down. Before I can even process the thought there is laughing and a gleeful “that fucking hurt!” this time from him.
I sit up to take a I sip of my wine and I think I miss something because then he yells “you dominate this relationship!” And blind confusion staggers me and I wish I could see the scene. What the hell are they doing? “You totally fucking dominate this relationship!” He whines.
“How the fuck have I dominated this relationship?” She shouts back and then without missing a beat, “GET! OFF! ME!”
I blink in the darkness.
“I’m not rolling over!”
I wonder if she means away from him or against him but let it go thinking they have at the very least nestled into a drunken (or drama) induced sleep and I practically hear the national anthem playing.
“You crushed my nuts!” He doesn’t sound mad just shocked and bewildered. “Aw, Jesus!”
I give up on the scene at this point. Let the kids work it out. Checking the gate, that’s a wrap. I get up and stretch my spine, which protests.
Sometime I wonder why I’m single. Other times, I know.
