I went to bed early on Friday night. I felt guilty for not doing more to inaugurate the weekend with something social, but I was exhausted. Thursday was our office holiday party and I was out too late, up too early the next morning, and bleary eyed by sundown. As I was brushing my teeth I heard some moaning coming through the walls of my apartment. I was immediately curious because my neighbor is an older woman, near seventy, and lives alone. The idea of her having sex at 10:30 on a Friday night immediately tickled at my curiosity.
In the year that I've lived in my apartment I almost never hear anything from my neighbor. She cranks the TV up when Dancing with the Stars is on, and I've listened to some of her rambling diatribes on the subject when she's caught me on the balcony some nights. She gets visits from her son, who is the super for our building, and baby-sits her new grandson every now and then. Otherwise her social life is entirely comprised of television and her overfed cat.
The idea that she had suddenly had enough, decided to put on some lipstick, walked out to the smoky jazz bar on Twenty-Fifth Street and brought home some spot-bellied gentleman caller to listen to her vinyl collection was exciting. It's easy to take for granted the more basic physical needs of those around us. There is a fundamental shame about body function and nakedness that sits in perilous opposition to the idea of close-quarters living in an apartment building.
I feel an embarrassment some mornings when I walk to my dresser after showering and realize I'm naked and in plain view of anyone on the sidewalk or in the building across the way. I was looking at some porn clips in between bouts of writers block the other night without realizing that the volume on my computer was turned all the way up. As the trumpeting cries of the actors came blaring from my speakers I literally jumped out of my seat.
My neighbor on the other side is a young and attractive woman who just moved to the city. I hear her talking on the phone some nights or talking to her small terrier when he's acting up. I was certain that this blast of truck-stop porn was coming through loud and clear on her side of the wall. What would she think of me the next morning as we passed each other in the hallway, me late for work and her on her way out to walk the dog? She would see me as the anti-social porno monster with a Jenna Jameson screen saver and a weekly email updates from AVN.
When I lived in Madagascar people used to shit on the periphery of my yard every few days. I would look up from my desk and see some mischievous twelve year-old or a woman headed back out to the countryside after market day, squatting in the long yellow grass where a curb might have been had the scene been moved to America. If they would catch me staring at them emptying their bowels, they would say hello as if they had just stopped to tie a shoelace or pick up some dropped papers.
Sex was also conducted without much thought to the immediate surroundings. Families of six or eight lived in single-room huts, and when husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend wanted to have sex, it necessarily happened with a room full of relatives dozing right next to the lovers. Confronting those most basic physical functions was unavoidable, and it became meaningless.
Living in an apartment building in a big city should, theoretically, be similar. When I lie down to sleep at night, my head is probably four feet away from my older neighbors head. Two sheets of dry wall and some fuzzy pink insulation is all that separates us. When I snore, I'm sure it reverberates through the walls, when I share my bed with a woman I'm sure the sounds of sex are unavoidable.
When the only sounds I hear from her apartment are the announcer building up drama for the big finale on Dancing with the Stars it makes me sad. Is that how things end up? Thinking of her body, swollen with age, slack and speckled, still writhing on her bed, twisting the sheets, mixing her sweat with someone else's made me smile. I want to think of her in that way. I want that experience to be something she still seeks out.
After a few more minutes of teeth-brushing I realized it wasn't my elder neighbor, but the Guatemalan couple directly above me having sex. The moaning and the dull thud against the mattress sounding like a loop, two people perpetually falling, grappling with each other against the rush of air and unavoidable gravity pulling on their naked bodies. Maybe I should start looking more closely at some of those bored old men in fedoras sitting in the park on sunny afternoons, watching pigeons circle the garbage cans. One of them might wind up being a fan of Dancing with the Stars. Maybe they could use a date too.
Previous Posts:
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog
Date Machine: Rate My Politics
High School Machine: Ten-Year Reunion Fantasies
Date Machine: Setting Up Your Friends
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings Redux
Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN
Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For
Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings
Love Machine: What Work Is
Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked
Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message
Date Night: The F U Date
Sex Machine: Shave My Bush
Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating
Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble
Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy
Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't
Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy
Sex Machine: My First STD
Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV
Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn