House Rules

by Ruby Lang

  Oh God, he really hadn’t changed.

  She was still talking. “I’d come in late at night, but I know how to be quiet. I don’t want to have parties, and besides I don’t have that many friends left here. We’d hardly have to see each other at all. I know I can trust you and, well, you know me.”

  She didn’t, he noticed, say he could trust her.

  “For all my faults, you know I’m mostly not so difficult for you to live with.”

  That was true, too. She’d barely taken any room in the tiny space they’d shared. When she left, he’d noticed she didn’t have many belongings. In fact, if anything, in those last months, she seemed to shrink into herself, sleeping more and more.

  He frowned at the memory.

  But she’d taken up space in his brain, that much was true. She still occupied it. “Then there’s the fact I used to be in love with you,” Simon finally said.

  He heard her breath catch.

  When she answered again, he was glad—oh, it was terrible of him—he was glad her voice sounded strained. “Well, you’re past it now, aren’t you?”

  “That’s not the point. We shouldn’t. That’s all. There’s too much in the past. It’ll confuse things. No good could possibly come of it now. I’m surprised you even thought it was a good idea to ask.”

  A pause.

  Then Lana said, “I told myself after—after we separated I would always ask for what I needed, no matter how hard it was, no matter how long it took to work up to it, no matter how afraid I was of the answer. I’m still trying to do that.”

  She said goodbye quickly and hung up.

  Simon put down his phone.

  It was unsettling. How could she ask him after all they’d been through? But at the same time, he couldn’t help the pure shaft of joy at the knowledge she’d thought of him first, couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  Living together was a bad idea, though. A terrible one. But the worst thing? He could picture it. A clean, white-walled apartment. The sunlight streaming in through the wide windows making the strands in Lana’s black hair glow with red and brown as she opened her sleepy eyes and—

  Stop.

  He did need to move. He knew it. Everyone else did, too.

  But to live with Lana again, to know she was in the same apartment as him, it would be too difficult. It wasn’t simply about the fact he might still yearn for her physically, because, yes, if he were honest, he still did. He didn’t want to mistake his memories for feelings.

  But Lana was right about a few things. His present setup wasn’t working for him.

  The neighbor’s contractor thumped in agreement.

  He went into his office early.

  It was hard to work there, too. Too many people who wanted to gossip about who was going to be the new department head, or complain about the upcoming renovations to the offices. Too many people asking about the non-progress of his book. At least later he got to oversee practice. The chorus had holiday events to gear up for: they were leading carols at Marcus Garvey Park, singing the national anthem at a hockey game, and they had a lighting ceremony for the trees on the West Side.

  He liked to run the kids through their warm-ups himself. The chorus was open for anyone ages ten to eighteen without audition. He’d never excluded people who really wanted to sing, and the really dedicated ones tended to stay in once they got to high school. Once warm-ups were done, he let his interns take over the practice, while he played accompaniment, supervised, and occasionally helped lead smaller groups.

  The hour always seemed too short, though, and they’d be starting their performance season in two weeks. When the last kid was out the door, he turned to his staff. “We’re going to need to give extra attention to rehearsing ‘Gaudete’ next time.”

  Abena agreed, “The harmonies aren’t really meshing.”

  “They need to learn the parts better and maybe sectionals will help. They sound tentative and the song really needs to ring out. The soloists need some support.”

  Abena and Dion had this well in hand. He half listened as they hashed out a plan for the chorus’s practice pages and next week’s rehearsal.

  It was so much quieter here in the practice room, even with the two of them talking. He shook his head.

  “You okay, Simon?” asked Abena.

  “The noise in my apartment is really getting to me. Who knew I prized silence so much?”

  He tried to laugh it off and started straightening the stands and picking up stray pieces of sheet music, but his interns were exchanging amused but concerned glances.

  Dion laughed. “We all compromise living in such an expensive town.”

  “I feel like I do that enough already. This new noise is rattling my old bones. Maybe I should take up the offer someone made me to live in their apartment.”

  “A sublet?” Abena asked.

  “More like a roommate. Can you imagine?”

  Both of the interns shrugged, and he winced. The chorus’s grant paid them for their internship, but it still wasn’t as much as he would’ve liked considering how much work they took on. They were in graduate school, young. They both had roommates.

  “Especially at my age,” he said, trying to take away the sting. “And the person offering would be my ex-wife.”

  Now they were interested. He didn’t usually talk about his personal life, not that there was much to say.

  “Your ex?” Abena said. “Do tell.”

  Dion pulled up a chair and theatrically put their chin in hand.

  “I was married a long time ago. We’re fine with each other now.” Because they hadn’t lived in the same city for years.

  Abena was shaking her head. “Living with a former partner is bad news. What if you want to, you know, have someone over? Can you imagine explaining it to your date? Think of the introductions.”

  This was why Simon had never brought up his personal life at work before.

  Dion was saying, “My brother lived with his ex for three months. It was awkward. But real estate in this city...”

  “Yeah, you do end up putting up with some wild stuff to hang on to reasonable rent.”

  Well, that was what Simon was doing now.

  Abena asked, “You’re okay with your apartment, aren’t you?”

  Simon started to tell her yes, but he couldn’t really.

  “Aside from the endless drilling,” Dion said as they finished their last sweep of the room.

  “And hammering. The demolition was the worst part, but I think that’s mostly over now.”

  Abena shuddered. “I hate that kind of noise more than anything. The sounds of the city—fine. A garbage truck or some sirens don’t bother me. But construction? I’d have to wear earplugs and a set of noise-canceling headphones.”

  “And wrap those in a scarf,” Dion said.

  “More like a blanket,” Abena countered, shrugging herself into her heavy coat.

  Simon looked back and forth between them. “Noise-canceling headphones?”

  He wasn’t the most technologically advanced person, but by the end of the night, he’d purchased a handsome, heavy set from a store Dion recommended. He pulled them on when he sat down to work the next morning and listened expectantly.

  The neighbor’s contractors started their thumping and drilling again. And Simon, in his headphones, could barely hear them.

  It wasn’t perfect. He didn’t love how ponderously they rested on his head. And he could swear he felt vibrations. But he could live with that.

  Maybe he’d been going about this all wrong, trying to find drastic solutions for small problems. He could ask around for help about what to do with windows, and his tub and tile. He might spring for some renovations himself. Better yet, he could watch YouTube, learn how to regrout...whatever it was people regrouted. He could put in new cabinets, mayb
e build some bookshelves. Why move into a beautiful, sunny apartment with his ex-wife when he could make what he already had acceptable?

  What a funny story he could tell if he ever had a party again: Real estate in Manhattan so bananas that exes considered living together.

  The high whine of the drill was barely audible.

  But just as Simon leaned back in his desk chair to look fondly around his old apartment, he saw a thin crack splinter his wall, starting right above his most prized possession, his Steinway upright.

  More fissures spider-webbed out.

  Simon jumped up, and his new expensive headphones clattered to the floor. A shard of plaster fell onto the piano’s top board. Simon watched the drill head spin through his wall and then disappear back.

  Silence.

  Simon cautiously approached the hole. He put his eye close to it to find another eye gazing right back at him.

  The eye winked.

  Or blinked.

  It was probably not the time to try to figure it out.

  He backed away, still staring at this new, messy complication, and fumbled for the phone to call his ex-wife.

  Chapter Four

  Simon didn’t want to like the apartment. But he was afraid he might love it.

  It was on the top floor of a handsome brownstone on a quiet street off Malcolm X Boulevard. Bricks and trees and a fine stone stoop weren’t going to impress him. The owner, a gregarious Black man, met him downstairs in the worn foyer and told Adam a little about the neighborhood as he led him up the gloomy stairs. “You’re a musician, your roommate told me,” Raoul said.

  Potential roommate, Simon thought grimly. Not-really roommate. Bad idea roommate. “I teach music.”

  “Cool. Cool. Lot of great places to hear stuff around here. You like a jazz brunch?”

  “Two of my favorite things.”

  Raoul laughed. “My kind of man.”

  He opened the door. “Well, here it is.”

  And Simon stepped in and turned to his left and he immediately was drawn toward the light.

  “Excuse the mess. Who knew it would be hard to pack up your life and move halfway around the world?”

  Simon hardly noticed the boxes and Bubble Wrap and packing tape. He’d started walking forward.

  “I put French doors between the front room and the living room to let in some sun,” Raoul said. “I think Lana said you might like that one for yourself. She said she could picture you there.”

  He could imagine himself here easily, waking up in the mornings, fixing coffee at the counter, running down to Central Park.

  But no, that must be another person, another life.

  He could be that other person.

  He stepped into the bedroom, then left it again. He closed his eyes, but the brightness still filtered through his eyelids.

  “There’s also a washer-dryer in the bathroom,” Raoul called from the kitchen.

  Simon let out a muffled moan.

  Raoul came back and handed Simon a bottle of water. “Feel free to explore more. Open the closets, you know. I already took all the important stuff out of the medicine cabinet.”

  Simon accepted the water and squared his shoulders. He was not going to weaken. This was a bad idea. He was here because he had to be a responsible piano owner and at least contemplate a safe place for his beloved Steinway...which would look perfect right in the corner of Raoul’s living room beside the white painted fireplace.

  He took a deep breath, marched himself down the hall, and opened the next door.

  He turned on the light.

  Never in his life had he known he cared so much about bathrooms.

  It was so clean. The deep lapis tile had to be new. The whole space sparkled.

  Simon wanted to weep. And if he did, he could always splash his face with cold water from the gleaming pedestal sink.

  From the other room, he heard the door buzzer. Maybe it was a sign, a warning.

  In a moment, Raoul was greeting someone. Simon supposed he should probably leave the bathroom but he didn’t want to move. He sat on the edge of the polished white tub and let his fingers caress the smooth surface.

  His own was pockmarked and peeling.

  Raoul was laughing at something the other person said, and as the voices came nearer, he realized it was Lana.

  Damn. Damn. Damn.

  If he came out of the bathroom looking like he wanted to live here, she’d see it. She knew him too well. She could use it.

  At the same time...

  Well, he did want to live here. It was like Abena said, people put up with a lot for reasonable rent. And this was more than reasonable rent; this was beautiful, sunlit, and clean, and in a gorgeous old neighborhood.

  After a long-short time, someone knocked on the bathroom door, which Simon had left slightly ajar.

  He said, “Come in,” which he knew was a weird response when one was sitting on the lip of a tub in a stranger’s bathroom. But weird was how his life seemed right now.

  Lana poked her head in, and when she spotted him, half-hidden by the shower curtain, her face seemed to soften.

  He didn’t know how that made him feel.

  “Hey,” she said, cautiously. “You’ve been in here a while. Are you okay?”

  He nodded.

  She glanced out the door and back in at him. “Raoul’s on a phone call. Would it be all right if I sat there?”

  She indicated the spot beside him.

  “Pull up a tub,” he said.

  They sat side by side, both still in their winter coats, hands in their pockets, staring at the pattern of blue on white in front of them. Raoul hadn’t packed up his towels yet. They matched the tile. Dammit, even his towels were perfect.

  “I realize maybe I put you in a tight spot and it was unfair to ask you to do this.”

  “This apartment isn’t fair,” he said, perhaps a bit petulantly. He took a breath and tried to sound like a grown-up. “And as for asking me, it’s not a question of fair or unfair. You’re right. You should ask for what you need. And... I can understand why you did. In a lot of ways, this is a really logical solution to both our problems. We’re both mature adults now, and surely we can figure it out, you’d think. But it’s not the logical part of me that’s worried.”

  “Yeah. I totally understand.”

  “Do you? Do you really? Because I don’t know how to feel myself. Because for the last seventeen years, it hasn’t been perfect, but my existence was mostly fine. I have work that fulfills me, and I have a place to sleep, and I got over you. I—I had a life. A routine. And then you come along again—and you show me this thing, this other possibility that seems brighter and sunnier, but you have to be in it. I know it probably hurts you for me to say I don’t want you in my life again, even in a different, limited way. This hurts me, too.”

  For a while, there was silence.

  “You know what, I’m not sorry, Simon. I’m not going to apologize about your hurt feelings. You’re a success. Congratulations! You’re solvent. Your apartment was crap and is crap, but you can afford to fix this part of your life. You don’t need me. You don’t need this place. I do. I want to live here so much, and after seeing it, I bet you understand why. If you don’t want this, you don’t have to take it. And you certainly don’t have to try to make me feel guilty again.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She crossed her arms and pulled back to look at him.

  He cleared his throat. “Maybe a little.”

  She stood up. She went to the sink, ran the water, and washed her hands.

  “Is this really so easy for you, Lana?” he asked.

  She seemed to study herself in the mirror. “No, of course it’s not. But I have limited choices, and I have to pick the things I think will wo
rk out best for me in the long run.”

  “And you think this—us—is a good idea?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He flinched slightly. But at the same time, he felt a little surprised. Lana of seventeen years ago had not been so blunt.

  “But I don’t have many friends left in the city, and the ones that I do are past the roommate stage of life and don’t know anyone to recommend to me. Before and after we talked last time, I tried putting up an ad online, and both times all the people who answered either tried to pick me up or, when they heard how reasonable the rent was, attempted to poach the lease. And this was before they’d even seen the place or me. I have limited options. Believe it or not, you were the best I could come up with. If you have a better idea, you should go for it.”

  “How do you know I won’t try to steal this place from under you?”

  “You wouldn’t do that to me. Because you’re honest, even kind of noble in your own way, Simon. I trust you. And that’s why I ended up thinking of you. Not that you weren’t in my mind before. But that’s why I supposed I could share a space with you.”

  They stared at each other. Simon couldn’t help it. He drank her up, and she seemed to do the same with him.

  It was strange, and maybe too intimate being in a bathroom with her. He stood up. They both walked out.

  Raoul grinned at them. Lana had probably told him their history.

  “I... Do you mind if I go make a call?” Simon asked.

  He needed a moment. He couldn’t quite deal with it, deal with himself.

  He went to the front room, the beautiful room with all the light, while Lana and Raoul talked quietly at the other end of the apartment. When Simon finally finished arguing with himself, Lana was gone.

  Raoul slid a contract over the counter. “She signed the lease and left with a set of keys. There’s a space for you here on the agreement, but she said you still weren’t sure.”

  Simon glanced at the pen. He took the keys. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I guess I can’t let it stop me.”

  * * *

  Moving took place over Thanksgiving weekend. Luckily, Lana didn’t have much stuff. She bought a new bed, which Julia helped her set up. Her cousin even stuck around to put fresh sheets on it. Lana suspected her baby cousin was hanging out in hopes she might run into Simon, who Julia had never met but who she’d probably heard much about through the extended family’s grapevine.