Residents

Derrick Lennox

“Walter!” she yelled, slamming her fists on the door. “I need you Walter!”
“Just wait, Alex,” he shouted from inside. She stood there panting in the humid Connecticut dusk. When he opened the door, her hair was tangled and she was crying.
“What happened?” He left the door open but shut the screen door behind her and had her sit at the kitchen table.
“We were upstairs,” she said, “upstairs and we were fighting. He got all upset like he always does but this time he hit me. He finally did it.” Walter saw that her face was damp from the tears and below her left eye was a gash no bigger than a paper cut, but he could tell it was deep.
“Why were you fighting?” he asked. From within her swollen eyes she gave him a look.
“It started at dinner,” she said, “and he asked why it wasn’t ready when he got home. He told me I had all day to get it done. I told him that I have things to do during the day, that it’s not all about him. I work too, Walter—”
“I know. What happened next?”
“This!” she pointed to her cheek, which was no longer bleeding. “It was the worst I’ve seen him – I mean it, the worst!”
She grabbed his hand on the table and curled it towards her. With her other hand – pale, and fit with long, thin fingers – she smeared the makeup around her sopping eyes. He didn’t know what to say.
“Is John still upstairs?”
“No, he’s gone for a drive, I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
She pulled his hand against her cotton T-shirt, beneath her breast. Her body felt warm against his knuckles.
“Alex,” he said in a soft voice, “would you like some water? Something to drink?”
She slowed her panting and eased the grip on his hand.
“Vodka.”
“Vodka?” he asked. She gave him a look and he wondered if he had misunderstood her.
“Maybe, with some cranberry juice.”
Walter walked into his kitchen and took a glass from the pantry. He heard her push her chair back and walk to the bathroom. She shut the door and the water was running. He did not make the drink too strong and when she came back, she sat in the same chair. He put the glass in front of her and noticed how dark it was on his floor of the duplex: the only lights on were in the kitchen, the dining room and on the front porch. He turned on two in the living room and sat down across from Alex.
“How is it?” he asked.
“I’m feeling better.” When he looked at her face in the light he noticed that all of the makeup around her eyes had been wiped away and the cut didn’t look so bad. Under the pallid light, her high cheekbones and deep, inset eyes could not hide how sad the girl seemed. He felt betrayed that it took him all these months to realize his neighbor was not as pretty as he thought she was. In fact, she was ugly.
“You ought to finish that and just go on up to bed,” he told her. She stared at the table thinking about it and then she nodded. “I’ll see if I can catch John on his way up when he gets back.” She nodded again. “Good. I’ll be on the porch for now.”
Walter made himself a glass of ice water and walked out onto the front porch of the duplex, which was below his neighbor’s windows. He looked up and saw the white curtains hanging behind each of the three windows. The only light outside came from inside his windows and from a meager bulb hanging from the far corner of the porch. He sat in a worn wooden chair and turned on the clock radio sitting on the edge of a wood table that matched the chair. A jazz station played faintly. He couldn’t believe that it was still so humid after the sun had set. And for some reason, the porch light made everything look strange—an effervescent jaundice surrounded him and he could not see past the railing or into the driveway. In front of the porch light a mosquito, moth, and some other brown insects danced erratically in fitful circles. He watched them in their orbit and every so often heard a faint howl through the screen door. It was quiet at this time of night. These were Walter’s favorite hours.

According to the rent, he shared the porch with Alex and John, who lived on the upstairs level of the duplex—but he was the only one who used the area. Only occasionally did Walter hear them cross it to walk to the stairs that lead to their floor. When they did, he tried not to listen to their conversations too much. He always figured that when he used the porch in the evening to listen to his radio, he wouldn’t like it if they were watching in on him, even though he’d be able to hear them coming down the outside stairs or see their shadows from the upstairs windows. But in a word, Walter preferred that everybody kept to their own affairs.
He had moved into the Farmington place by himself almost two years ago. After his leg was badly injured in an automobile accident, he left the city and the things that came along with it, for cheaper living. By the time he entered physical therapy, he was barely able to limp from the bedroom to the kitchen. Still, he felt it was better to go it alone than make himself dependent on others. At one time, he knew the feeling of being dependent. Before signing the lease, he made a silent resolution that he would be deaf and blind before relying on another human.
That’s when John and Alex had moved in. When they first arrived, he could hear them upstairs walking around, dropping boxes and then going to pick them up and move them somewhere else. And sometimes it sounded like they were dancing. They would run up and down the outdoor stairs by the porch laughing to each other. But to his surprise, until that day, he did not realize that the upstairs was vacant. Since then he could hear their dull, muted voices repeating themselves every night.

After what sounded like a few songs on the radio had passed, Walter realized that the warm outdoor air had put him to sleep. The sides of his cold glass had become obscured by cloudy drops of water. He examined the surface of the glass where he noticed that each droplet clutched frailly the side of the cup, and every so often, a drop would fall and sketch a watery schism all the way down to the table. The screen door unfastened itself with a scrape and Alex walked out, looking defeated.
“I’m better now,” she said. She sat down on the broad arm of Walter’s chair and relaxed her hip into his arm. Her elbow leaned on his shoulder and she looked down on the top of his hair. “Thanks, Walt. You’ve been a good friend.” He stared at the porch railing and listened to the music, but he could smell the alcohol on her breath. She had made herself more drinks while his eyes were shut.
“You should go now,” he said.
“What if John comes home?”
“I’m sure he won’t. But if he does, I’ll talk with him for a while and make sure he’s level-headed about it all.”
“It won’t matter,” she said, “goddamn drunk – that’s probably where he is now, at that bar. Since we moved in, God knows he’s spent more time there than at home.”
Walter felt tired and watched nervously as a car passed by and around the corner.
“You know that right? He may look like a real stand-up guy, but he’s just another moralistic jerk who judges everybody he meets. Why can’t he just realize that he’s the one who works and drinks too much. That’s what I told him tonight. In fact, I’ll bet that he drinks at work. How can you work at a construction site and drink? Maybe you should ask him once he gets here.”
She eased her weight into the arm of the chair and he could feel her bare foot against leg.
“Did you hear it tonight?” she asked. “It was pretty bad, huh?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Don’t lie to me, Walt. I know you could hear. I can hear your TV at night.”
“I try not to listen, Alex.”
“You’re no different than anybody else. I know you listen.”
She walked over to the railing in front of him and leaned on it, facing him, with both arms behind her. The clouds had moved in and it was a dark night behind her. The radio began to lose reception because of the clouds so he turned it off.
“Look at me,” she said, and he lifted his face towards her. “ When I walk to my car and you’re out on the porch, do you watch me?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“John does not care whether I’m skinny or fat, or whether I work or not. Sometimes I feel like he doesn’t love me anymore.” She began swaying to a music that was not there. Through her T-shirt he could see the outline of her bra and the top of her hips. For a moment he wanted to stand up and kiss her, pushing her hard against the railing. But when the pallid yellow light cast shadows across her features, he was immediately disgusted with it all. When she looked up at him again, he told her to go. At first she looked angry. Then she walked towards the stairs and a quiet, postponed bereavement overcame her frail face.

Beneath the sore glow of a street lamp John paced along the driveway with his hands behind his head. He stared at the scuffed toes of his work boots as he walked. Walter walked onto the porch and called for him and John sat with him at the wooden table.
“What have you been up to?” Walter asked.
“I’ve been at Ray Kelly’s.”
“How was it?”
“Lousy. It was crowded. You couldn’t even stretch your arms if you wanted to. But I’m okay now – these summer nights are nice.” John relaxed deep into his seat with his elbows on the armrests of the chair. His shoulders and head were slumped slightly forward and Walter could see that John was balding on the top of his head. He was wearing a black sweater over a white collared shirt so that the white collar appeared over the neck of the sweater. He had on a pair of blue jeans and of course, his work boots.
Walter tried to make small-talk.
“How’s business, John?”
“Good. It’s summer and everybody wants new patios and landscaping.”
“If somebody wants to buy a patio do you have designs for them to choose, or do you make each one personally?”
“Everybody’s is unique. I design the layout with the client, and the team and I build the thing.”
“You’ve been working pretty late,” Walter said.
“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
The two men gazed out past the streetlamp into the darkness. Walter knew there was a small park beyond a split rail fence across the road, but he could not see it. To his left, he knew there was a row of pine trees separating the house from a farm, but he could not see it. The streetlamp dyed the black road yellow but did not illuminate much farther than that. In the shadows of the roadside, Walter saw a dead raccoon, mutilated by multiple automobiles. He wondered how he didn’t notice it earlier in the evening, but now that he had, he could smell its glossy, rotting entrails in the warm wind. He finished his melted ice water and lit a cigarette to mask the smell.
“I suppose you heard what happened tonight,” John said.
“Actually, I have no idea what happened,” Walter lied. “I know we don’t talk very much, but we’re not just neighbors, we’re friends too. You can talk to me about things.”
John was nodding to himself. He said, “my mother was a very beautiful woman when she was young. But she was also very tough. In those days you could reprimand children in the ways she did and it wasn’t looked down upon. But I hated that goddamn yardstick and by the time I was sixteen I was six feet tall, and one day I grabbed it from her hands and broke it across the kitchen counter. She cleaned it up and I never saw it again. I hated her for a long time, Walt. I don’t know if you know what it’s like– what it’s like to feel that pain in you, pulsating for years at a time. Have you felt that before, Walt?”
Walter thought to himself and engaged certain sensibilities that had been dulled for a long time. The more he thought about it, the more he began to see the faces, hear the names, and feel the disappointment, which he had never shared with anybody else. He crossed his arms and remembered all the reasons why he was so numb, why he couldn’t rely on anybody.
“Trapped.”
“What’s that, Walt?”
“I said, that pain, it’s the feeling of being trapped. When the world around you can move and speed around, but you can’t because you’re too immersed in it all.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What were you thinking?”
“It’s just hard, Walt, I work all day, and I can’t watch over her every hour. I try to live a good life but I always sense that in the midst of doing good, she’s off somewhere else.” He thought about it for a moment, “I’m not sure how to say it.”
“Have you considered that you don’t need to be watching over the people you’re talking about? People like Alex?”
John gave it some thought. “When I was ten years old,” he said while playing with keys to his truck, “I came home from baseball practice and I went looking for my father because I saw that he had bought a new car. I checked the downstairs rooms and he wasn’t there, so I called around the house and when I thought I heard him, I ran up the stairs. But when I got to the upper landing, my mother opened her door and led me down to the kitchen. She turned on the radio and started making me lunch.”
Walter’s numbness was waning with each second he spent thinking about what it must have been like. Or maybe the sudden onset of flushing emotions was set off by the jarring night altogether. The faces he remembered flashed brightly again and again, each one bringing a synesthetic sense with it: in one quick burst there passed years, and he saw the images of his first four loves, but only the moments when they parted; next he smelled the crisp November air wherein he met the girl he decided to give everything to; the clumsy red sheets of their first time, in a bed that was suddenly too small; the hot embarrassment of when he told her what secrets he had told nobody in his life; the anger when she left him, when he became him a stranger in his own world; the work he buried himself in when he decided never to be hurt again; and the move to escape it all, which left him trapped in a Farmington duplex with an abusive alcoholic and a woman who has probably never heard the word “fidelity” except on the afternoon of her own wedding.
It was at this point that Walter knew he could be no help in consoling either John or Alex. He was useless.
“Goddamn it,” he said, “you shouldn’t have hit her, John. It’s not right.”
Walter felt warm all over and was having trouble thinking of what he wanted to say next. In his mind he saw Alex’s body as she was when she stood across from him earlier. He also saw her face, with its split cheek, and thought of her upstairs, sleeping, drunk.
The two men looked at each other once more, stood up, and said goodnight. Walter walked inside and shut his doors.

As John walked up the stairs to his door on the second floor, he put in his key but did not turn the doorknob. He stopped on the upper landing of the dark stairway, fell down slowly, and leaned his back against the door jamb. He began to cry. With each tear, foreign emotions tapered out of his eyes and down his cheek. He clutched frailly to his knees. Unable to bring himself to open the door, he finally felt it give way. Alex stood over him. She had cleaned up and been asleep until she heard him against the door. She reached down, pulled him up, and brought him in from the outside.