The Staircase Between Us

I moved in first. As if that should matter. Maybe the thought has to do with dominance, a way to wrest control over my existence with Nadine. Our apartments are boxes, stacked--can you see us moving through our cloned floor plans in sync? We stand slumped in front of refrigerators, reach up to microwaves that beep together, and at 11 p.m., stretch out in our bunk bed, me on top.

Nadine was in my apartment just once. I saw her pear-shaped calves muscle up the stairs, which are as steep and out-of-code as they could make them in 1913. I had a boyfriend then, Clark, and we watched her bird head jut through the arched doorway. She had come up for no reason, and four years ago was still slender and hadn’t yet become a semi-recluse. She hadn’t fallen into--all I can call it is a hole, the dark place people sometimes go in their 40s and 50s when life seems devoid of promise. The Berkshire Apartments in Los Feliz are full of hole people.

“O-ooooooh Daniel, just look what you’ve done to your place!” Nadine was halfway into my living room, so I gave her a tour, Clark standing by like the big Boy Scout he was, awkward, smiling, loyal. Nadine’s cartoon face stretched into a dozen characters as she squawked in exaggerated delight. Her arms stretched to the leaded glass windows I had collected and hung from the ceiling, and made into coffee and side tables; the 1942 Italian oil I paid $100 for at a swap meet and had restored; the Peruvian throws; the giant black-and-white cutout of a coffee cup I purloined from a Hillhurst Avenue coffeehouse and hung above my stove.

“It’s all just, just, so . . . amazing what you’ve done!” As if she had never been in a gay man’s apartment. She confessed that she had snuck up the stairs once before to look through my window. “Just a peek!” she said, and then she was gone, her body scaling down the stairs, arms out for balance. “These stairs!” she said--the same words everyone uses when they come, when they leave.

I had described Nadine to Clark, done wicked impersonations of “the aging, plump ex-actress,” a description I’ve used during the five years Nadine and I have lived together. Because sound in my 86-year-old building travels mysteriously down with great clarity, but never up, Nadine knew all about my relationship with Clark: the way his voice rose to a bark in response to my growing distance; his languid version of “I Can See Clearly Now” sung in the shower; the smell of his game hens basting in my oven; the enormous statue of Shiva hauled up my precipitous stairs on Christmas Eve. Shiva--the Hindu god who heals, who destroys.

That January, Nadine slipped a note in my mailbox. “Daniel, I hear things that I think you’d rather not have me hear.” As if she were the Queen of England forced to address the matter. I laid the note out on my kitchen table and cut those words into thumbnail pieces. I was all detective, scrutinizing one of the few clues I had ever gleaned about Nadine, save that she donates to the Stray Cat Rescue Mission and banks at Wells Fargo, information garnered from misplaced mail.

I took the middle part--that I think you’d--and placed it front and center. That was the piece I was looking for. It wasn’t so much that Nadine would rather not hear “things,” but that she thinks I would rather not have her hear them. Her own projection, to be sure, but I felt again what has often flooded me while living above her: the guilt of existing. My presence, my life, is someone else’s bother. It’s like a really bad marriage.

I stared at the word, things, so implicative. And the further subtext, Daniel, I know things that I think you’d rather not have me know.

I sense Nadine has constructed a whole life for me, and I wonder what it is. I get glimpses. During brief conversations in the courtyard, her inflection cants, her head tilts in faux concern. “Daniel, you’re looking soooo good these days.” I know she thinks I have AIDS. And then her widened eyes blink in metronome time and her smile spreads to a winced overbite, signaling her anticipation, as if I will then set down my gym bag and relay an improved T-cell count.

Living below me, so omniscient, Nadine is a kind of Apartment God. She hovers not above, but below. It is the hearer who has the power in this relationship, not the heard. There is passivity, even helplessness in being known, watched.

I have to know if she is there. When I come home, I glance out my kitchen window to see if Nadine’s maroon Thunderbird is in the carport. It’s an obsession, really. I need to know if she’s down there unconsciously systematizing my life, adding another layer to what I imagine is her vast knowledge. On rare occasions I’ve spotted a patch of oily concrete and felt my heart sink. It’s as if a therapist forgot to show up for an appointment. Nadine is like that, so versed in my neuroses without having to detail her own life for me. And like a therapist, I imagine, she sinks into one of her matching Ethan Allen French Provincial wing chairs, flips open her steno and writes: Rented “My Dinner With Andre” last night, for the fourth time.

There are times when I feel guilty that I exist, and there are times when I have to let Nadine know that I do exist. On a Sunday afternoon when I’ve been reading for hours in my Morris chair, I will lift the ottoman and let it drop. Then again. Hello Nadine. Maybe that’s why I throw poker parties. I warn her, of course, via a note in her mailbox, a poker chip taped to it in an attempt at humor. We usually play until 1 or 2 a.m., and when the pot fattens to $50 or more, the stories get louder, with the requisite crudity, swearing and spilling of beer. Between hands I go into the kitchen for more Corona and nachos. I throw a quick glance out the window to spot the Thunderbird. I feel like a teenager.

The ordeal tests our relationship, and I want Nadine to attempt my stairs for the second time in her life, demanding some sort of tenant divorce. Instead, there is a new round of polite note-making, and my heart sinks again. There is a part of me, you see, that wants to push Nadine over her personal edge, if only I could find it. I want her to send a return note taped with my poker chip, after she’s held it over her gas range for a solid minute. And with the note, her further subtext: Daniel, I realize things about you that I think you’d rather not have me realize.

Here is a deeper truth: I fear growing old with Nadine. Through windows, I see her and the other tenants in their reading chairs, bifocals perched, whenever I come home before midnight, which is seldom. I wonder at their lives, so stale they seem compared to mine. My life is lived everywhere else, at my studio office in Silver Lake where I write, in friends’ and lovers’ homes, and on the road, traveling. There is a part of me that refuses to live at Berkshire Apartments, that is afraid to find myself in a reading chair growing old, so slowly, with Nadine, who catalogs only the steps I’ll take from the Morris chair to the toilet, to the refrigerator, to the bed. I think it would be like staying with a therapist who has long ago lost interest.

I have a recurring dream. Nadine and I live together in the same apartment. It’s a finely choreographed existence. When I open the door at night, there is a slight blur and sounds of shuffling. It is Nadine disappearing for the duration of my stay. She does not leave through the door. She simply fades, ceases to exist. And when I leave in the morning or go out to dinner, there is another blur and more sounds. It is Nadine arriving.

In the dream, I sometimes slow my actions down, turn the doorknob, achingly slow, open the door a crack and peek through, or bound into the living room as if I’m the police. And when I leave, I do a quick double take from the staircase’s second step. But I never see her. I stop on those stairs, so pitched that I have to grab the handrail with both hands, and wonder if I too am a blur. I wonder if she will ever see me, if we will ever exist in the same space.