The Other Woman

When I move in they show me the other apartment too. It is right above mine and entirely identical. I don´t know what makes me choose the one below. Perhaps it is the striped wallpaper.

It does not matter which apartment I choose at the time, I just need an apartment. As you do, when you´ve just graduated from art school and they refuse to let you hover around campus for another semester, the way the fragile teenager that still lives in some back corner of your body – the eighth rib, perhaps, or the left ankle – would prefer. And then your former professor puts you in contact with his daughter, who is uncomfortably close to your own age and you stumble your way through an uncomfortable telephone call in which you somehow have to explain the nature of your acquaintance. But when that is over you have a place to live. Alone.

I install a telephone, green bed sheet curtains, a coffee grinder on the wall. My mother comes to the new apartment at the end of my first week there. She totes a large cardboard box of all those things I chose to store at her place over the years.

“I dislike your curtain situation,” my mother says with pursed and wrinkled lips.

“Okay,” I say.

She shuffles through the two rooms and the kitchen, shuffles back at a loss of what to say. She feels as though her only option is criticism and even she knows that that is useless. I open the box.

“Are you still seeing that professor of yours?” she asks finally.

At the top of the box lies a hastily folded T-shirt that is not mine. It is made of soft blue cotton and printed on the chest in white are the words: I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Georgia´s shirt. “What?”

“That professor,” my mother repeats. “Are you still seeing him?”

I stare at the T-shirt. It´s a sick joke, her asking me that when she´s put the T-shirt at the top of the box.

It was the open exhibition of the senior projects from the previous year, just before I started my final year, and Georgia held my hand as we walked past the canvasses and sculptures. I was there for the sculptures and she wanted to stop at every collage, and we yanked each other in different directions but we never let go. This is how I met Bram, with my hand in hers. How we met Bram. He laughed at the slogan on Georgia´s shirt, put his hands up in mock surrender, and told me he would be teaching a class next year. On the way back to my dorm, Georgia and I talked about how he seemed like a cool guy. We wondered what class he would be teaching. Several weeks later I found out it was a course on anatomical drawing and signed up. Three months after that Georgia commented coldly on the irony of sleeping with your anatomy professor, and threw a coffee mug at my forehead, which cracked. It was her favorite mug, gray-glazed ceramic clay shaped like an elephant, and I had made it in a high school pottery class. My forehead bled and I deserved it. “No,” I tell my mother. “I´m not seeing him anymore.”

My mother nods. “That´s the only good choice you´ve made in a while,” she mutters under her breath.

“Well, they´re my choices, not yours,” I say. “And I happen to be happy with them.”

“I just don´t see why you had to give up dancing,” she wheedles and I realize my old point shoes will be somewhere in that box.

“Are you really happy?”

“Yes,” I say.

After she is gone, I spend some time crying on my mattress in the corner. Then I pick up the phone I installed and dial Bram´s number.

“Hi, babe,” he says. “I haven´t heard from you in a while, are you alright? How´s the new apartment?”

Something thuds hard on the ceiling above. Somebody has moved in. “It´s good,” I tell him. “Listen. You won´t see me again.”

“What?” I can hear his facial expression in his voice. Lips slightly parted and deep frown lines between his brows. “We´re over,” I say impatiently.

There is a silence. “You´re doing this over the phone? Seriously, Keiran, that is so immature.”

“Well, I am,” I say. It stings a bit. “Nobody asked you to date a twenty-three-year-old.” I hang up. Footsteps traverse the floorboards of the other apartment.

I stare at my rubber mixing bowls. My coils of wire and bags of plaster. My blocks of sandstone and clay. I wonder why I haven´t felt like sculpting since I graduated. It never seemed like a chore while I had assignments. I go out to the supermarket and the air is humid and sweet. I can see wildflowers pushing their way out of the grass as I pass the park. I shop without a plan and realize on the way home that none of what I have bought comes together to form a single proper meal. I drag my groceries up the six flights of stairs. Somebody walks softly two flights ahead of me, always just around the bend. I set my bag down by the door to extract my keys. The subtlest trace of cigarette smoke and apple wood opium shimmers on the air. I breathe it in until it´s gone. The worst thing about perfumes is that smells are the most direct bridge to memory, and yet anyone can buy them, anyone can wear them, unaware of the memories they might be inflicting on their passers-by. I almost feel the paintbrush texture of Georgia´s hair on my fingertips.

I sort my groceries into the fridge and open up a pack of crackers. I grind some coffee. The old grinder that I purchased at a flea market two years ago screws into the wall and has a small, removable cup beneath the crank that is wrapped in faded purple paper. The thing makes an awful noise that reverberates in the wall. Now I am not sculpting, time stretches. In the summer between semesters, the last time I had no classes, I would not be home yet at this time. I worked in the set department at the opera, painting curtains and paper machée rocks and wooden pillars to look genuine. I would go out to dinner with my co-workers, and a couple of nights a week, we would get ourselves snuck into performances by ushers we knew. I lost contact with all those people somehow. It was a different set every summer. It was not an environment that made it easy to stick together. Nice people, interesting people, party people. Always something happening. I find it hard to imagine that I ever fit in with them.

Evening falls and somewhere above me, a halting grinding noise starts up. The footsteps, it seems to me, have multiplied. How is everything so loud down here? All sounds from above are magnified. I cannot possibly be this audible to my downstairs neighbors.

Outside, the square of light from my window appears on the stripped brick backside of the next apartment building. I wander to lean on the sill and my shadow appears in the square. From here I can see a number of lit squares on the opposite wall. The one right above mine glows just as brightly. A shadow passes across it. Another shadow appears from the same side. This shadow stays. The square warps slightly as the second shadow extends a hand. I suppose the window is opening. The shadow remains seated in it. I consider opening the window to look up, but I don´t. I don not want to hear the shadows. I don´t want to listen to the unknown tenant upstairs have company.

For weeks, I watch the shadow in the evening, often joined by a second shadow. I wonder if the second shadow is really different people or a single, regular visitor. Sometimes the second shadow´s appearance is followed by sleepless nights when I hear wordless voices and the tired groan of bed springs. But the other apartment does not confine its haunting to the nights. In the mornings, the tinkle of piano music trickles through the plaster ceiling, and thuds and scrapes on the floorboards sound at irregular intervals. Muffled wood on wood noises that make me think of the point shoes that are no doubt still at the bottom of the box that my mother brought by and that I still have not finished unpacking because of the shirt that sits at the top of it. I lie motionless on my bed and imagine that the noises are growing louder. I clamp my hands over my ears but it never helps. In my dreams, on the nights that sleep finds me, the noises seem to be happening all at once: thuds and swishes, muffled moans and laughter, harsh grinding mingling with piano and typing on a chunky old computer keyboard. Noises of an entire life that seems in exact opposition to mine and painfully familiar all at once.

It is Saturday night and things are worse than ever. The footsteps upstairs have tripled, quadrupled, multiplied by ten. Music filters down, not soft piano, but heavy bass, synth, and drums. The murmur of voices has grown into a crowd and I toss on my mattress as the alarm clock by my side ticks on and on through the night.

I imagine the other apartment. Party guests fill the hall, congregate in the kitchen. The other woman who lives above is like my twisted mirror image. Where my rooms are a bubble that isolates me from the world, hers are an open space that people gravitate towards. Where I lie alone, she loves. Where I stare down my materials and fail to create, she simply dances and lives. We are opposites, but everything that she is is something that I could have been, every choice she made is a choice I had, and every time I chose the other path. I hate her. I hate her with all my might, her and her terrible, invasive life-noises that echo down into my rooms to haunt me. Twice in the night, I am nearly at the door. I will go upstairs and pound on the door and tell her to shut the hell up, that she robs me of my rest, that I have hardly slept in weeks. And all the guests´ faces will turn towards me and hate me as I hate them and I will feel like the one reprimanded. So I stay put. And I wait for the guests to leave. And when things finally quiet around six in the morning, I rise from my mattress and enter the stairwell. I will talk to her now that she is alone. And maybe she will listen. Maybe she will realize the terrible noise she has inflicted on me. Maybe she will understand. And if not I will threaten her with the police. I am too sleep-deprived to care what she thinks of me for it.

Her door is the same olive green color as mine, but the little brass numbers on it read 79 and not 69. I ring her bell and it sounds just as shrill and jangling as mine. There is movement behind the door.

It opens. We stand there looking at each other. Her hair is tied on top of her head in a bird´s nest bun and deep shadows encircle her eyes. She is me. I am her. We stare.

After a long time, I say “I came to complain about the noise,” and the other Keiran says “I´m sorry.”

“You still dance... I hear it,” I say because I cannot think of anything else.

The other Keiran nods. She casts a look behind her and pulls the door closed at her back. We face each other in the stairwell, me and the other Keiran. “You don´t dance?” She asks.

“Not anymore,” I say. “I sculpt. I went to art school. Did you go to art school?”

She shakes her head wonderingly. “I dance in the corps at the opera.”

“Oh,” I say. “I painted set pieces there for a while.”

“I´ve always wanted to sculpt,” She says. She casts another glance over her shoulder. The apartment is silent. “Your life, what is it like?”

“Isolated,” I say. “I don´t have people around me anymore, not like you. I wanted to give myself a clean slate.”

“A clean slate,” she whispers, “I´d like that. I´d like to have another go at things.”

I shake my head. “It´s no good. Trust me. I envy what you have.” It is hard to say it out loud. But the other Keiran smiles. “I envy what you have.”

A painful lump rises in my throat. “What´s to envy?”

“A fresh start,” she shrugs. “I trapped myself in my choices.”

“No,” I say, “That´s what I did.”

“Okay, then.” She nods, as though we have come to an agreement. She pulls her top off and hands it to me. For a moment, she stands half-naked in the stairwell and I don´t understand. Then I slowly pull my shirt off too and hand it over. I am still not sure I understand. She pulls out her scrunchy and ties my hair up deftly. She knows my hair. It´s her hair too. She gives me a hug, turning us around as she does so until I am standing with my back against her door. I open my mouth to speak. “It´s okay.” She smiles. “Go inside.” And she descends the stairs.

I walk into the other apartment. The wallpaper is floral. Two pairs of point shoes sit unceremoniously on the shoe rack beside boots and sneakers. In the kitchen, the coffee grinder begins to grind. I slow in the doorway.

With her short, dark hair falling into her face and her bracelets jangling on her freckled wrists, Georgia bends over the stove as she makes coffee. She looks up. Tired blue eyes, so warm it makes me dizzy. “Who was that?” She asks. I cannot speak, cannot move. Her voice is as low and melodious as I remember it, but its tone is neither cold nor hostile. Even though I broke us, even though I should not be forgiven. But she doesn´t know this. And I realize it doesn´t have to be true. The other Keiran did not do those things. The other Keiran never went to art school, never broke a promise, never got carried away and selfish. The other Keiran is me now. And I am her.

And there is Georgia, making coffee.

“No one,” I say. “Just a noise complaint.” And she hands me a gray-glazed coffee mug in the shape of an elephant.