He stood in the hall, dressed only in his scuffed bedroom slippers, white T-shirt stained down the front, and tartan pyjama bottoms with the frayed cuffs. Muffin-top isn’t how he would’ve described the way his gut hung over the slack elastic waistband, but Elaine was given to using the term and he’d never come up with decent rebuttal. His only hope for self-respect lay in the possibility that his T-shirt would obscure the girth.
He stood in front of the adjacent neighbour’s door—#2307—and listened to the sounds of a party raging from the other side: an indistinct thrum of voices and music punctuated at random by a piercing laughter or the bark of a dog. Elaine had sent him next door to tell them to tone things down since tomorrow was a work day and she needed to get a decent night’s sleep if she wanted to be on her game. It was a matter of consideration. If the neighbours didn’t quiet down, then Elaine said they’d have no choice but to speak to the concierge and, from there, maybe the police.
He’d never met the neighbours. They were new. He’d seen them only from a distance and so had formed no impression. But Elaine thought she had a good idea what they were like: young, she said, barely more than teenagers, recently let loose in the world and still a little wild. It was like parenting, she said, draw clear lines and then demonstrate that you mean to enforce those lines. He thought Elaine’s parenting comment ironic given the way their own children had turned out. And now she wanted him to inflict his prodigious parenting skills on neighbours he’d never met, who may or may not be young, who may or may not be straight, who may or may not be sober, who may or may not be in a hostile mood, who may or may not be skilled when it comes to wielding baseball bats. So went his thoughts, skittering off to the very worst corner of the mental room where he organized his vast collection of horrible outcomes.
He’d knock on the door and after some yelling from the other side, a muscled man in a wife beater would pull the door back and laugh at the pathetic figure in shambling bedclothes. He’d stutter his way through a badly prepared speech after which the new neighbour with the giant biceps would tell him to go fuck himself and then slam the door. He held his fist poised at eye level, readying himself to rap on the door, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter.
Fuck it, he thought, and he returned to his own apartment. He held his fist poised at the level of his muffin-top, readying himself to turn his own door knob, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter. But he paused, and in that instant, however brief, he discovered that he had no idea which confrontation he dreaded more: the one with a neighbour he’d never met, or the one with a woman he’d called his wife for 35 years.
The building had a common terrace on the 4th floor, so he rode the elevator down in his bedroom slippers, gazing at his shabby reflection in the elevator’s mirrors. It was dark on the terrace and he was alone. He settled onto a lounge chair, tilting it back so he could gaze at the few stars still visible through the city’s light pollution. But that meager collection of stars was enough to set his mind adrift to far worlds and alternate realities, places where men could wear fresh up-to-date clothes and knock on a stranger’s door in a way that sounded confident.
