When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  Really living the dream here, bud.

  My body hurts as I stretch, the ache of too much booze, too much salt, and the crushing stress of my life falling apart. The beer can tumbles to the floor, but I hold the photo album to my chest protectively. After a few seconds of letting the bleariness fade, I lean it back to see what page it’s open to—a picture of “the grandparents,” an elderly couple with dark skin. He’s bald, and her hair is silver-white and close-cropped. In this photo, developed on heavy stock paper and with a white frame around it, they’re dressed in their Sunday finest outside a big church that looks like the one a few streets over.

  The pictures are mostly from this neighborhood. My neighborhood, I guess—mine and Kim’s—even though I mostly feel the way I do with this photo album: like a creep looking in at other people’s lives from the outside.

  The pictures are old—most spanning the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. The people are Black, like most of my neighbors, and they wear neatly hemmed dresses and stylish suits, with their hair flat and shiny in some photos and puffed out in Afros in the later pages. A wedding photo showing the grandparents before they were grandparents. Young grandpa going off to war. Laughing with young grandma upon his return. Babies upon babies. Friends and family. Beach trips.

  It’s kind of weird, how often I flip through this album of other people’s memories I found atop a pile of trash while walking the streets in the middle of the night, but the people in these photos look perfect, happy, and full of love. It’s the closest I’ve gotten to any of those things in a long time, maybe ever, but it was so unremarkable to someone on this street that they left it out on garbage night.

  The hammering that awakened me starts up again—absurdly relentless, as if a Looney Tunes character broke in and is banging a mallet against a wall for the chaotic joy of it. It’s a homing beacon giving the location of the person I once thought would bring me perfection, happiness, and love. I press my palms against my ears, trying to drown out what’s become my millennial version of “The Tell-Tale Heart”—“The Renovation-Crazed Girlfriend.”

  Or ex-girlfriend?

  It’s complicated.

  The idea that Kim and I once thought we liked each other enough to buy a home together makes me cringe. The fact that I thought she’d never figure out I was the kind of item to be left out on garbage night, something no one should pick up, bands shame across my shoulder blades.

  I climb out of bed and take a few heavy steps over to the window. One good thing about being stuck in this shitty apartment? It gives me a great view of half the street—the whole street if I shove my head out. I can see who comes and goes, what patterns people fall into without realizing it, and when I’m really bored, what my neighbors do in the privacy of their own homes.

  Mr. Perkins, the nice old guy from across the street, shuffles past a window in his living room. He’s one of my favorite people on the street to watch: he’s out there every day, reliable and friendly. Consistent. It’s around the dog’s feeding time, and in a few minutes Mr. Perkins will take him out for the first of many walks. I admire his ability to stick to a strict schedule while also seeming to be puttering around at his leisure. He always chats when our paths cross, even inviting me to local events that I never attend because it would be awkward to go without Kim.

  My gaze drops down to the whir of motion I’ve been saving for last—she’s sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house. The woman from the brownstone tour. The Interrupter.

  Until a few weeks ago, she’d leave her house in business casual every morning, and then return in the afternoon. Now she has a cup of coffee on her stoop before heading to the community garden down the street with gardening supplies—maybe she’s out of a job, too. Because her curtains are so sheer when she turns on her lights that they’re basically useless, I know she often enjoys a glass of wine and, sometimes, twerking in front of the mirror in her living room.

  After a few glasses of wine, the twerking sometimes dissolves into tears. I avert my gaze more often than not when that happens, but I’ve raised my beer bottle in silent solidarity, too.

  I’ve made up countless backstories for her. She’s taking online classes, since she’s often tapping away studiously at her laptop, and once she graduates she’ll find a job that makes her happy, if such a thing exists. She’s a dedicated gardener because she’s the kind of person who loves making things grow—a nurturer.

  I make up things about the future, too, like what might happen if I ring her bell the next time she starts to twerk—or to cry. Concocting a fantasy where I save a beautiful damsel in distress, or have sex with her, is way more satisfying than dealing with reality.

  Outside the window, three neighborhood kids speed past on their bikes and she calls out greetings to them, followed by a warning to watch out for cars in the intersection as they continue on.

  Terry, the shithead who lives next door to the Interrupter, walks out of his house with his shithead dog. It bounds down the stairs while barking at the kids on bikes and gets caught short by its leash because the Interrupter is bending over to pick something up and Terry’s busy ogling her ass.

  The hammering restarts in earnest downstairs.

  Sweat beads on my temples, my chest, my back, and when it rolls into my ass crack, I sigh deeply and peel my arm from the chipped paint of the window frame. I’m pretty sure whoever owned this house in the past cooked meals up here in the summer because this apartment also functions as an oven.

  And you’re the turkey that voluntarily stepped into it.

  I leave the apartment with a change of clothes and three-in-one body wash, shampoo, and conditioner rolled up in a towel, then trudge through the wallpaper-stripped hallways and down two flights of yet-to-be-varnished hardwood stairs.

  My shower hasn’t worked for weeks. My first Brooklyn summer has mostly been spent sweltering in this attic apartment, marinating in beer fumes and hangover funk until I’m grody enough to slink downstairs for a shower.

  I could try repairing it, for the tenth time, but somehow each time I do, a new problem appears. I was the man of the house growing up, in between Mom’s boyfriends, and I’ve worked construction jobs between more lucrative gigs. And yet . . .

  “Must be gremlins,” Kim had shouted over her shoulder a week ago as she took a power sander to a brand-new table to make it look old. “Or maybe you’re actually fucking things up when you think you’re fixing them?”

  Story of my life.

  The path to the bathroom on the main floor is clear since Kim is currently busy with her demented hammering, so I slide into the shower and wash quickly, efficiently, like I’m in a prison shower and can’t drop my guard.

  Afterward, no longer smelling like stale IPA and flop sweat, I steel myself and walk into the kitchen.

  Half the cabinet doors are off their hinges and a thin layer of sawdust covers the floor and the other flat surfaces. Kim is wearing a ratty but expensive tank top and yoga pants with cat paws all over them, even though she thinks cats are parasites; her hair is up in a messy bun on top of her head, and her expression is solemn and focused. For a second, it feels like a year ago, before things had gone bad, when I found her “concentration” face so damn sexy she had to shut the door on me while scrolling through real estate listings.

  A lot can change in a year. Not the door shutting in my face, though now it’s more like three doors and two stories.

  She has her iPad holder with the extensible neck clamped to the counter, and she’s squinting at the screen, scrubbing her finger up and up and up over the smooth glass, leaving trails in the sawdust.

  I can guess what she’s looking at. Two apps were clocking the most usage on her devices last time I was privy to that info: OurHood, a kind of virtual neighborhood watch that’s fascinating in its ability to turn any activity into something sinister, and Boomtown, the home renovation and decoration app for people like us—or like her, rather. Wealthy millennials who buy and DIY for fun and prof
it because they plan to sell the houses they buy on the cheap in “emerging communities.”

  When we’d scored an advanced viewing for this place, I told her I liked the vintage feel of the kitchen, with its dark wood cabinets and stained-glass windows. Apparently, what I thought was cool, she considered gauche.

  This is the third time she’s repainted the cabinets, the last attempt a hideous peach color buffed with rose gold. Half the house is in various stages of “work in process,” and I’m no longer consulted on projects.

  Her interest in me dropped drastically over the course of the home-buying process, though she kept insisting things were fine. Me losing my job shortly after the move was the cherry on the shit cake that’s our relationship now. That she doesn’t know the real reason for my unemployment? I guess that’s the decorative icing; it spells out At least you tried.

  I should be glad things didn’t turn out worse than my relationship foundering on the rocks, but I’ve never been one to focus on the brighter side.

  “Good morning.” I try to sound pleasant, not like someone who’s considered gathering up all her expensive gold jewelry and touring pawnshops in the tri-state area.

  We’re linked by the house, after all; separating would be a clusterfuck. I’d lose thousands of dollars and have to scramble to figure out where to go and what to do. Plus, we did care for each other once, not even that long ago.

  When Kim doesn’t respond to my greeting I say, “Wow. HGTV city in here, huh?”

  She glances up from her screen and the mild contempt in her gaze is like her fancy ceramic knife slashing across my gut. She perks up a moment too late and gestures to the mess scattered across the kitchen. “Sorry about the noise. I couldn’t sleep and figured I should be productive instead of lazing around.”

  The way the corners of her mouth turn up into something like a smile pours salt along the gut wound.

  This house was a bad idea.

  Everything between me and Kim over the last year was a bad idea.

  Band-Aids over Band-Aids over Band-Aids, so we didn’t even know what pus-filled wounds they covered, or if there was even anything left beneath the scab.

  “How did you sleep?” she asks, her attention back on her iPad. She doesn’t care how I slept. The question is just noise to fill the silence between us, like the drilling and the hammering and the power sanding.

  “Okay,” I say cautiously—her question was benign but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to another pointless argument. “It’s getting way too hot up on the top floor, though. I need to upgrade from the box fan to an AC.”

  “Summer’s almost over. You really can’t ride out a few more weeks?” There’s that expression again—not so much a sneer as the absence of the ability to pretend to care. “Besides, I saw you with a new camera. Maybe you should’ve spent that money more wisely.”

  I grunt, ruffling my hair with one hand.

  Kim has a top-of-the-line AC unit in her bedroom, where she sleeps on the three-thousand-dollar mattress she purchased shortly before banishing me upstairs.

  She sleeps in comfort on the first floor while I sweat in the attic, with all of her reasons for our separation-in-deed-but-not-name populating the two floors between us:

  She was scared I’d cheat on her, and that hurt her.

  She still had feelings for David, whom she’d actually fucking cheated on me with, and that hurt her.

  She couldn’t be sure I wasn’t using her for her money.

  She couldn’t rely on me.

  She needed time to figure things out.

  I’d swallowed my frustration as I carried my stuff upstairs, almost breaking my neck three times and unsure if she’d care if I did.

  I hadn’t pointed out that she’d been the one who pushed for homeownership to begin with—who’d talked about the house as an investment for both of us, as a way to reconnect and reaffirm her commitment after the David situation. She’d insisted that we were going to get married anyway, despite everything, and also pressed that prices wouldn’t stay low in this neighborhood for long.

  I’d stayed with her and gone along with the house purchase in part because, hell, no one had ever pursued me like that, and in part because she was the one from a wealthy family and she was going to take care of all the hard money stuff.

  God, it all seems so stupid when I lay it out like that. She didn’t trap me; I was just an idiot with something to prove. I had no fucking idea what buying a house entailed—Mom and I had moved from apartment to apartment, outrunning evictions and the fists attached to her bad decisions.

  I had no idea what a good relationship was supposed to look like, either. Mine and Kim’s seemed so normal, like in sitcoms where the wife nitpicks and the husband is slightly dismayed with the state of his life and that’s fine. That’s just how things are.

  Now, as I look at her, there’s a challenge in her eyes. One that says she knows she’s hurting me with her late-night and early-morning renovations, with her jabs about my unemployment, and she enjoys it.

  Maybe this is normal.

  There are worse things. Black eyes and bruises and holes in walls made by fists instead of hammers, for instance.

  I walk over to the coffee maker sitting on a barstool and rest my knuckles against the carafe to see if it’s still warm.

  “There might be some paint dust in there,” she says in that tone between playfulness and contempt.

  “You didn’t use lead paint, right?” I joke.

  She rolls her eyes and it’s almost like old times, which makes me wonder whether the old times were ever really that good.

  I brew a new pot.

  AN HOUR LATER, I’ve wrangled the kitchen into some semblance of order while she’s painted cabinet doors in the backyard. It feels a little bit like when we used to do things as a couple, without the hair-trigger contempt that led to our upstairs/downstairs living arrangement.

  When she steps back inside, her face flushed and her expression serene, I get hit with the sudden, naive belief that we can get back to how we were before.

  I think we can.

  Maybe?

  I don’t know. But some part of me, probably the self-destructive hopefulness that I inherited from my mother, drives me to say, “There’s a new brunch place three blocks down, where that Dominican restaurant used to be. I heard they make this amazing vegan steak and eggs scramble. Wanna try it?”

  Her shoulders draw closer to her ears as she tenses in annoyance. “Look, Theo—”

  “It’s just food,” I say, then wave toward the space where the oven is supposed to be. “You have to order out anyway.”

  “You need me to pay or something?” she asks coolly, as if me demanding to pay for things wasn’t one of our longest-running petty fights.

  “My treat,” I say, not rising to the bait. “Or we can just go to the corner store. They have vegetarian options.”

  She nods, but there’s no excitement or interest in her eyes. She grabs her phone, unlocking it and scrolling as we head out of the house.

  We used to go for long walks together all the time, just because. Kim used to go on runs. Now? She has a treadmill in what was supposed to be my game room and she Ubers everywhere.

  It started a few weeks after we moved in. She came home with tears in her eyes, saying a group of teenagers had followed her out of the train station, harassing her, after she’d told them to stop laughing so loud in the train car. I’d wondered why she hadn’t just put on her sound-canceling headphones, but she’d been shaking when she walked in, so it hadn’t been the right time to ask.

  “It was terrifying! And I looked around and realized everyone was . . . I don’t know if anyone would have helped me,” she said. “There’s just so few of us here.”

  I was confused. “Us?”

  She pulled her head back to look at me and I realized that she wasn’t shaking with fear. She was furious.

  “You know what I mean,” she snapped. “The neighborhood better change a
s fast as the realtor said it’s going to, because I’m not gonna put up with a bunch of—”

  She sucked in a breath.

  “I was perfectly within my rights. And their response showed that they were dangerous.”

  “Yeah.” I’d rubbed her back, a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  She’d stared into my eyes, still angry. “You would have done something, right? If you were there and they tried anything?”

  “Like what?” I’d asked.

  She’d pulled away from me and stormed off.

  Kim has a framed portrait of Michelle Obama in our living room, so she’s not . . . you know. She was shaken up, that was all, and at that point our relationship was held together by dollar-store glue. I didn’t want to push. Maybe I didn’t want to know what she would’ve answered.

  Now, as we walk to the corner store, there’s a foot of humid air between us. It’s already super hot, and the sun hasn’t even reached the highest point in the sky. Air conditioners drone in every window we pass under, the sound mocking me, but I find it hard to be annoyed when I’m walking down our street.

  Maybe it’s because I grew up in shitty small towns filled with falling apart single-wides, but the rich pigment of the brownstones, the slate gray of the sidewalks, the brick and concrete and flora that thrives in the minutest speck of dirt . . . of course I went along with moving to this place.

  Our house feels like a prison, but our neighborhood is like something out of a movie. When I walk around Gifford Place, or even just watch from my window, I don’t feel crushed by the multi-car pileup of stupid decisions I’ve made. I feel like maybe this is a place I can belong, eventually. If I’m honest, that’s why I’m walking with Kim to the store, why I’m even trying—I don’t want to move. I guess the fact that I love our house more than I love her at the moment makes me kind of an asshole.

  I look over at her; her fingers are tapping at the screen of her huge smartphone as she texts someone. I see the words roach-infested corner store and look away, my gaze landing on a high-end Range Rover I haven’t seen in the neighborhood before.