Betsy Burke - Hardly Working

When I was little, I was convinced that I too was a member of the animal kingdom and that all those pets were my brothers and sisters. To get my mother’s attention, I would get down on all fours and eat out of the dog’s dish. My mother didn’t even blink. Maybe I really was just another vertebrate in all her animalia, an experiment, a scientific accident. But whenever I brought this up with Thomas, he’d tell me that I probably wasn’t seeing the whole picture. Maybe he was right. And maybe not.

I knew what I wanted for my thirtieth birthday.

At twenty-five minutes to midnight, there was a knocking at my door. When I opened up, Joey barged past me brandishing a bottle of Asti Spumante. Cleo followed, holding a bottle of chardonnay. Both of them looked as though they’d run a marathon.

I followed them both to the living room, then Joey did an about-face, said, “Glasses,” and went straight back into the kitchen to look for some.

Cleo flapped her long burgundy fingernails at me. “I know, Dinah, I know, we’re so late and you’re going to kill us.”

“I don’t turn into a pumpkin until midnight,” I said. “That gives us twenty-two minutes to get toxic and sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. How was the conference?”

“Shitty, Dinah.”

“Really?”

“No, literally. It was all about what we’re going to do or not going to do with the planet’s crap. Excrement. I feel like I need a bath. You know who the biggest culprits are?”

I shook my head.

“Cattle. The methane emissions from all the cow flop on this planet are going to blow us from here to kingdom come.”

“Imagine it, Dinah,” shouted Joey from the kitchen, “all the way home in the car, I get to listen to a lecture about cow farts.”

“It must have been a gas,” I said.

“Har, har,” he bellowed. I could hear him crashing around in my kitchen cupboards. “Dinah. You’ve got no glasses. Where are all your Waterford crystal wineglasses?”

“They were Wal-Mart, not Waterford and they got broken,” I said.

It was a little embarrassing.

“All of them? Should I guess? Accidentally on purpose?” asked Joey.

“Thomas said it was okay to break things as long as nobody got hurt. Mike bought them years ago and I finally got around to breaking every last one. It felt great.”

“Okey-dokey. We’ll drink out of the Nutella jars. Who wants Minnie Mouse and who wants Donald Duck? I get Dumbo.”

We poured the drinks and toasted my thirtieth.

Cleo sauntered over to my west-facing side window and gazed out. “Ooo. Your neighbor’s awake. Very, very awake.”

I panicked. “Close the curtains, Cleo. If you’re going to be a peeping Tom, try to be subtle about it.”

She whipped the curtains back across the glass and continued to spy through the crack in the middle. “God, what’s that he’s got with him? A black cat? Ooo. Hey. He’s taking off his shirt. Look at that bod. Fantastic. So toned. That man is so buff. This is better than Survivor. Take off the rest of it, honey, we’re waiting.” Cleo’s hot breath steamed up the window glass.

Joey raced over to the window and tried to elbow Cleo out of the way. “Shove over. Let me see.”

“You gu-uuys,” I protested.

Cleo’s face was flushed. “I don’t see how you can stay away from this window, Dinah? Does he always leave his blinds open? He is one hot hunk of man.”

“How would I know? He just moved in. And I try not to spend all my time glued to the window spying on my neighbors.”

It was a lie.

The new neighbor had moved in that summer. From the side window in my living room, I could look straight down into my neighbor’s ground-floor living room. His was a nineties house with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that filled the lower north and east side of the house. A tiny L-shaped patio had been created outside the sliding doors, and beyond that, a row of bamboo had been planted to shield the windows from the street. Except that from my second-story side window, I could see everything. It was like looking into a fishbowl, perfectly situated for anonymous viewing of his living room as long as I kept the lights turned off and the curtains closed. It was an exercise in futility though because my neighbor was gay.

The neighbor’s partner would show up sporadically, sometimes for the weekend, sometimes for a couple of days during midweek, and there would be small moments, never anything overt, but a hand on a hand, an occasional woeful hug, long intense talks in the living room, wild uncontrolled laughter bubbling up, the both of them so easy with each other, so completely relaxed, that there was no doubting how well matched they were. They were perfect soul mates. I envied and admired them. From my window, their relationship appeared to have everything. Then the partner, who was small and dark in contrast to my heavier brown-haired neighbor, would disappear for a week or more, and my neighbor, obviously at a loss, would pull out his home gym and work out.

During those hot evenings in late August, I was behind that curtain watching him move his half-naked sweat-shined body. And I swear, if Russell Crowe had come along and hip-checked my neighbor out of the way, and taken his place there at the bench press, and let the last shafts of light catch the muscular ripple of his arms and torso, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the two of them.

August flowed into September and September into October and I still went to the window to catch a glimpse from time to time. My voyeurism told me that I’d been hanging on too long. How could I criticize the Tsadziki Pervert when I too was becoming an urban weirdo? I told myself that it was because I needed time before getting burned again. But now the years were beginning to speed up. I’d reached thirty without even realizing it.

“You can get your mind off his éclair, Cleo. It’s not earmarked for you. Take my word for it,” said Joey, “Dinah and I have been surveying him for a while and we are happy to inform you that he is of the religion Pas de Femme. Where information gathering is concerned, we make the CIA look like a bunch of wussies.” Joey’s expression was triumphant.

“He’s not gay,” wailed Cleo. “He can’t be, can’t be, can’t be.”

“He is, he is, he is,” said Joey, stamping his foot in imitation.

She clumped over to the table to pour herself another larger slug of wine. “The best ones. Always the best ones. And anyway, Joey, how do you know?”

Joey said, “I’ve seen him around. In the clubs.”

“Which clubs?”

“Well. I’ve seen him at Luce and Numbers and Lotus Sound Lounge. And he always has his arm around the same guy. The guy that comes over sometimes. Small, dark French-looking man with zero pecs. I’m telling you, he’s so monogamous he’s dreary.”

I took one last peep. The neighbor stood motionless now, looking out at the sky and the luminous gray clouds that threatened to burst. It was odd that we’d never met, never crossed paths. Just bad timing, I supposed. He only lived next door, but his world and mine could have been a million light years apart.

“Oh shit,” said Joey, “he’s turned the light off.”

“Probably tired of his voyeur neighbors,” I said.

Cleo had turned away from the side window to face my big front French doors. She shrieked and pointed. Outside the windowpane, hanging in midair above the little balcony, dangling from a cord, was a shadowy man.

The man-shaped silhouette waved.

I ran over and opened up the French doors, then stepped out on the balcony to help the guy down.

“Simon. You’re back. Come inside before somebody calls the police.”