The New Neighbors

Someone told me today that what you're doing ten minutes prior to midnight is what you'll spend the coming year doing. As Andrew is working at the restaurant again, and I've opted out of any New Year's Eve activities, I hope to be writing. It seems, though, that my new upstairs neighbors will be fighting and/or moving.

They moved in a few weeks ago, maybe a month now, and pretty much all they've done is fight. At first Andrew and I said, "Well moving is stressful". We gave them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they were just having growing pains. Andrew and I moved in together three months or so after we got serious. When we had settled in a few days after our move I set the table and prepared a lovely dinner, and he came home from a long day at work and we sat down to eat at our dining room table for the first time. The house was still and quiet, and we giggled awkwardly at each other. We likened our feelings in that moment to kids in summer running to the water, eagerly ripping their clothes off to swim, and then once they'd reached the waters edge, put their toes in to find that the water was uncomfortably cold. So we're familiar with the strangeness of existing in a space where things becomes ours. Our fork. Our candlesticks. Rather than mine. We thought, perhaps, they were having some of that discomfort in their own way.

It's now a month later, and as I write this their pleading tones serenade me, along with thunderous tumult up and down the stairs. It sounds like someone is moving out, and my guess is that it's her.

They're Danielle and Scott. I know these things about them: She's a schoolteacher from Long Beach, and her parents live about ten minutes away. He's sort of career-less, but does have a job. That job is in Westchester where he used to live, and it's about an hour and a half away from here. They've been together for five years, and they're just now moving in together for the first time.

Their fights have gone like this: they battle. They interact in pleading tones, loudly. They curse and say fuck you. He calls her a bitch and she responds with disdain. She says fuck you and shut up and he says a lot of words that sound like he's making a case. I can't hear all the words. They're muffled through the ceiling. My guess, though, is that he's trying to make her see the things he finds objectionable in her character or actions. The tone of her response is indifferent, although aggressive, and her side of the argument sounds a lot like, "Oh what does it even matter any more [you asshole]."

I'm partial to him. This could be because I've spoken with him alone, and I never have with her. He said things are worse between them than they ever have been, and he looked sad when he said it. He was vulnerable, and I value it when people are vulnerable.

In a recent episode, they had their usual pleading attack and counter attack. It escalated. Their tones grew hostile. Then some furniture was turned over. There was a scuffle that sounded like a struggle. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs. The door slammed. A car was turned on, and then sped away. It was her. He spent the next half hour sobbing while he picked up furniture and slid it back into place. About an hour after that I rang his bell and invited him down for tea. He declined.

She hasn't been sleeping over lately, but she does turn up around 4am drunk with an entourage. She and her dumb Long Beach girlfriends clomp around in their cheap heels (I can't tell if they're cheap by the sound, but one can only assume), they argue, and she and her girlfriends leave. The stairway up to their apartment is separated by one slab of sheetrock from our heads while Andrew and I sleep. So the 1, 4 and 6am encounters are particularly aggravating for me. The most frustrating part of the whole thing is that Andrew sleeps through it. Just snores away. Wouldn't even notice save for the fact that I wake him up pointing to the ceiling. He murmurs some indication that he's able to hear them, and goes back to sleep. Ha. I lay awake till it's ceased.

The business hour fights, though, are my favorite. I stooped to a new low today and climbed onto the island in the kitchen to try to get my head as close as possible to the ceiling. Unfortunately the fight ended as soon as I ascended, and I returned to my station at the dining room table. The current battle has been raging since shortly before I began writing and is still going on, and I haven't climbed the island again, so I think I'm getting better. Although I am still trying to decipher actual phrases and details from the hollow throb of their inflection. Now it sounds like three voices, one male and two female, although I can't be sure. The front door was just slammed though, so I can't be sure if someone was coming or going.

Details aside, it's just so dreadful, and so very Italian. I've had plenty of fights with plenty of men, but none have had the blitzkrieg enthusiasm of Danielle and Scott. And if they have, and I just don't remember - which is a possibility - they certainly didn't occur day after day with both parties returning for more of the same.

I suppose five years is a long relationship to let go of. It's just so not my style to stay in something that gives me that sort of discomfort. I can barely stick to things that make me happy, but that's another story entirely.

Well, back to the island with me.