The Guy Next Door, Part 3

Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune
by Jenny Offill, Elissa Schappell

(Page 3 of 3)

More mindful now of John's existence, I suddenly realized that, like me, he almost never had anyone to his apartment. His one friend was a lady named Loretta, who, accompanied by her yippy little shih tzu, would sidle up to the intercom at our building's entrance, buzz John, and then broadcast screamingly loud conversations with him.

"John!" I heard her yell one afternoon. "I have some meat for you!"

"What?!"

"MEAT!"

"Okay."

"Come and get it. I'm not coming up."

"For what?"

"The meat! I have meat!"

I could sense that there was a lot of love in this relationship, but I could also sense that this love had congealed or hardened over the years, perhaps as a result of a misunderstanding or a too-long car trip.

The chief noise by which John and I could detect each other's presence was the opening and closing of our front doors. If I was getting ready to go outside and suddenly heard John's door open, I would sometimes wait thirty seconds so I wouldn't have to talk to him in the hallway; this landlord figured that the more relaxed my tenant felt around me, the more he might start lodging complaints about his heating or plumbing.

But actually John had very few gripes at the beginning, and our encounters in the hallway were mostly charmed. One day, trailing him down the stairs by a floor, I saw him suddenly reverse direction and come back up the stairs. Just as he passed me, he smiled tightly and said, "Forgot my teeth."

We weren't sure, though, whether to acknowledge each other when we passed on the street. The first three or four times, we betrayed no recognition of each other. Then, one balmy August afternoon, I saw him - turned out in his usual plaid pants, porkpie hat, and cardigan sweater, with a rolled-up New York Post under his arm - walking Loretta's dog down West Fourth Street. Sensing an easy opportunity for conversation, I walked over to them. Beholding the dog's pink barrette and rhinestone-studded collar, I asked John what her name was. He looked down at the sidewalk in embarrassment and told me: "Muffin."

About five months after the auction, water from the apartment above John's started dripping through his bathroom ceiling. John was incensed. He knocked on my door one afternoon and hustled me over to his apartment to show me how the rust-colored water was oozing into his bathroom lighting fixture; in showing it to me, he called Roberta, the woman upstairs, "that bitch" four times.

"Thirty-seven years I'm living here, and nothing like this ever happened to me!" he said. I realized then that when he'd told me before that he'd been living in the building for fifty years, he'd probably been trying to scare me off. I called Roberta, who promised to fix the leak. All seemed well until the following week, when it started again and John called her at 4:00 a.m. and yelled at her.

"John, you should probably let me handle those kinds of calls," I told him.

"I can talk for myself!"

"Right. But calling at 4:00 a.m.?"

"That bitch is gonna electrocute me!"

I apologized to him and promised to get a handyman in; John thanked me.

Time passed. John's next problem was a much less troublesome one concerning his bathtub, whose handles leaked water. This time, softly knocking on my door with a knock that was as much a scratch as a knock, he asked me to come over and take a look. I went. As I stood in his tiny kitchen, John smiled and reached for my right hand; holding it, he guided me into the bathroom. I watched, my hand still in his, as he turned on the water and showed me how it burbled through the handles.

There was absolutely nothing sexual about the way John touched me, and yet I was surprised he'd do it because I was fairly certain that he knew I was gay. No, the hand-holding felt avuncular. And, somehow, like something more, too. I imagined that John knew how few people there were in my life, so maybe the hand-holding was like a concentrated dose of friendliness, a kind of bodily hello meant to rebuff our mutual isolation. That we hadn't exactly paved the way to this moment didn't seem to matter. Sometimes you reach into the dark and hold the hand you find there.

I noticed something with the bathtub leak, as well as with a subsequent leak from the kitchen sink: I actually enjoyed dealing with these problems on John's behalf. It had started when I followed him up the four flights of stairs one day. John, out of breath, stopped and told me to pass him. "These stairs are getting to be too much for me," he said. Uncertain how to react to the rawness of this confession, I wondered if John was hinting that he'd like me to try to buy him out of his apartment. But then remembering that he'd once told me, "I'm not going anywhere," I rejected this idea. "Yeah, they're getting to me, too," I said.

Seconds later I entered my apartment feeling like an asshole for having been so glib; the man, after all, had had two heart attacks. The only antidote, I quickly decided, was to take action. I called a plumber to look at John's kitchen sink leak, as I had promised to do three days earlier.

I needed to make a cake for a friend's birthday that day, so while I waited for the plumber to come, I pulled out some supplies and started baking. Just as I began whipping some eggs, it occurred to me that having the power - and, yes, perhaps the money - to bring a plumber-shaped ray of sunshine into John's life felt really good. Maybe I didn't HAVE to be an evil yuppie who relished the sight of his neighbor's deterioration, abetting it by letting the leak from a kitchen sink turn into a juggernaut of Chinese water torture. I could be something else - a take-charge relief worker; Mother Hale with a whisk.

Copyright © 2007 by Jenny Offill.

About the Author

Jenny Offill was born in Massachusetts and raised in California and North Carolina. Her stories have appeared in Story, Gettysburg Review, The Black Warrior Review, and Boulevard. Jenny is the author of the novel Last Things. She teaches in the M.F.A. writing program at Brooklyn College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a cofounder of Tin House.