Free The Affairs of Others: A Novel by Amy Grace Loyd

ate tuna from the can. I let dark come in the apartment, bend its lines and cool my face.
    How long did it take me to form the sounds I began to hear above me into a scenario? First there was a table scudding across tile, tile I had installed in George’s kitchen. Then the table, George’s exquisite cherry table, finally meeting the wall, hitting it again and again, being made part of a rhythm. Hope’s utterances, high and loud enough to reach me, giving volume and consequence to the rhythm; and a man’s voice shaping and directing all the noises. What was he saying? I couldn’t say, though it was two words. One syllable each. They didn’t have to have meaning up there or down here—what they advertised was his control and the pride in it. Her voice went off at longer intervals. Then I heard what seemed like a squeal. I stood. I could remember her son’s eyes on mine, the blooming color in his lips and along the edges of his nostrils. I opened the kitchen window for air, without thinking. Doing so brought them closer, with my kitchen right below George’s. The same alert night air reaching for them, reached me now. I could hear “please” from her, then the intelligible commentary that spoke of pain and pleasure, and from him, “That’s right.” Then loud, “Say it.” Not a yell exactly but delight in volume, in his freedom with it, with her. “Stay with me, damn it!” Hope falling wholesale into a place where words had no place. The table rocked and then seemed to lift; it barked against the surface and was held there: “Say it or we start all over again. The whole thing.”
    “Pleeeaaase.”
    The wall took blows again. And a hand clapped on skin—hers. What else could it be?
    Sex could fragment into clichés. But in the acting out of them they weren’t anymore; those familiar positions, roles, words—they became sensation, feeling. A shock of feeling: a slap given was particular to the shape of his hand, its strength, and to where on her body she took the flat of his palm, how welcome it was or wasn’t, how much it stung. I had almost forgotten this as I mapped them in my mind—her beneath him, the table digging into her stomach as she gave him the full of her backside and took his weight and its concussions. It hurt, because it always did when you wanted to be no better, no worse, than animals.
    I couldn’t leave the window when the phone rang, though I imagined yanking it from the wall. Could they hear it? And didn’t they imagine I could hear them?
    She’d given me a glorious display of her maternal self on Sunday. It seemed to matter I saw it, her fine management of the afternoon, her children: “Mumma’s here.” That thin scarf around her neck tied so jauntily. And now the colors of Les’s voice, dark blues and browns, all hewn marble, and its pace, never hasty. Was it him making me party to this? Or was I simply beside the point? Here, in my own home. They did not know that sound carried so, that the floor that was my ceiling was old and every day more permeable? I shut the window as the telephone stopped ringing, poured myself a tall whiskey in semi-dark that wore too dark suddenly, and turned on all my lights. I left the kitchen but so did they. As I dialed my voice mail to find out who called, thudding followed me. If someone were with me, my husband, we might have laughed at something showier than that gardenia’s scent. We might have been able to package all this into commonplace. I would not have worried for her neck or where else he might leave his mark. But alone the noise was everywhere. It was the liveliest thing in my apartment. I had no place to put it. Uh-uh-uh . That’s what I thought I heard bearing down as Mr. Coughlan’s daughter told my voice mail, “He’s not answering his phone or the bell. I was there. I tried your bell too. You didn’t answer. Have you seen him?” Something fell overhead. A lamp? George’s elegant lamp? “Can you tell me if you’ve seen