Second Person Plural A man lives in an old house converted to apartments. There is still a servants' staircase, but now it leads to a blank wall. And the walls are paper, the ceilings must be crepe paper: every night the man hears his upstairs neighbor getting it from somebody, hears her gasping, even hears her bed squeaking. Midnight, 2 a.m., he gapes at the ceiling, he almost expects to see their fluids come suffusing down through the crepe paper, enough to put out the cigarette he's smoking. How they go at it, and how he admires them: they must realize he can hear, because they must have heard him cursing when he barked his shin on the bedpost, they must have heard him practice his bass. He's even thought of serenading them, up through the old ceiling of the old house, but finally decides not to complicate matters. And soon his upstairs neighbor moves to another state, another woman replaces her. This new woman has no lover, all that comes through the ceiling now is her footsteps and her old delta blues, but every so often at night he hears her cough, not a smoker's hack like his own, but a quick bark, almost as if embarrassed. Well, he thinks, who can blame her with all that old sex drifting around up there? He imagines her bolstered up with pillows reading a novel with the word love in the title. Again he believes he should play, really shake the old place so she‛ll feel it at the base of her spine, but knows it will only turn out he won't be able to say good morning to her when they meet picking up the morning paper. Every night he lies in bed thinking about these women, the one loud with her lover, the other holding her loose fist to her mouth to cough. Which one makes him feel sadder? It is impossible to say. He wishes them well, he is embarrassed by both of them, by himself. In fact, the only things he can think of that aren't embarrassing are the people who built the now ramshackle house, the mild pranks the children must have played on the servants. Maybe the ghosts of children share his room, maybe the children grew up and moved away, or they may be together still, down at the rich man‛s cemetery. The servants ascend the staircase, up through the paper wall. |