A Man Alone, Naked
Steven Varni
Ellen was expected to be a moderating influence on G. This was the implicit but unmistakably central clause of the otherwise vague and merely verbal lease she'd agreed upon with her landlord, G's father, who'd raised G by himself after his wife left him. For the first two quarters of her undistinguished career at the University of California Irvine, G (whose given, repudiated name was Gwendolyn) had lived with a classmate friend—with disastrous academic and domestic results. So David Harmon had insisted that his daughter find a studious, quiet grad student roommate, or else find a new apartment and a job to pay for it. Ellen was not a grad student. She was, in the opinion of G's father, even better: a low-key—a more perspicacious observer would have said depressed—29-year-old “professional girl.” A receptionist in a Newport Beach dental office and the ex-girlfriend of a grad student. After Ellen's brief interview with him, Harmon beamed as if he couldn't have hoped for a more thoroughly sodden blanket to drop upon the daily life of his daughter.
But Ellen never felt qualified to offer herself as either role model or chaperone to her 19-year-old roommate. She made no objection to underage drinking or the scrawny pot plant outside the kitchen's glass doors, on the fenced-in coffin-narrow cement slab hyperbolically called a “patio,” and it was entirely G's own choice that her only visitors after Ellen moved in were her boyfriend, Jason, and her best friend and deposed roommate, Heat. Jason was tall and thick, with the silent, abstracted, dreamy manner of one listening intently to the just-audible whir of a small flywheel within his own chest cavity. “Heat” was G's version of Heather—a name G considered only slightly less antiquated than her own (“So 80s-in-a-bad-way!”). G and Heat, especially after they'd been smoking pot, could be very clingy with each other and G clearly would have liked Ellen to suspect something sexual between them. But Ellen never did. For Ellen had seen G with Jason, had heard her talk to him and about him, and Ellen recognized in G what her own recent experience made her think of as the obsessive and doomed solicitude of the irredeemably straight woman.
A little more than two years before the night this story properly begins in the autumn of 2000, Ellen had put off attending a Bay Area nursing program to move from San Francisco to Orange County with her boyfriend of 20 months, Bryce. Ellen's deferral and move were the first in a string of sacrifices that she and Bryce agreed would allow them to stay together during his two years in the graduate fiction writing program at UC Irvine. They were to be answered, in turn, upon his graduation, by sacrifices of Bryce's own, which would allow Ellen to return to the Bay Area and her three-year course of geriatrics. At least this was the plan they nurtured together on countless damp San Francisco nights, all through the spring and summer prior to Bryce's matriculation, talking it into a delicate well-proportioned fullness by the day they moved south—where in almost no time it wilted in the shadow of Bryce's ego.
Bryce, anointed the Golden Boy of his class, flourished in the program; Ellen basically disappeared. She’d never been so busy—working full-time, doing all the housework and cooking, paying all the bills, reading each of Bryce's drafts—and never felt so completely insignificant. Late at night, hours after his weekly writing workshop had ended, Bryce would walk in the door of their Balboa Island bungalow overflowing with boozy plans: a place in New York, fame, travel…. “What about my nursing program?” Ellen finally asked him one night, and he stared at her with wide, hurt eyes. Another night after workshop, late in the first term of his second year—when this same oft-repeated question had come to elicit only a narrowed accusatory stare—he did not come home at all.
But Bryce's good-bye was not final. Even before he broke with the woman writer he'd ditched Ellen for, he'd show up at Ellen and G's door in Westminster “needing to talk” (and pushing for a little sex). And now, ten months after he'd first abandoned her, four months since he'd graduated and moved east, two months since he'd started calling her again—now that his novel remained without an agent and Fame remained as incognizant of him as of Ellen; when the extent of his Travel consisted of subway rides between his Astoria apartment and temp jobs in Manhattan—now he had invited Ellen to come 3,000 miles to him with an arrogance that managed to knock right out of her the scant volume of air on which she'd long subsisted. She'd hardly been able to respond at all—which he seemed to take as a good sign—but had freed herself from the telephone as swiftly as possible and retreated to her favorite supine position on the couch, in front of the television, letting hours of network unreality flood over her in the hope of being drowned.
She was pulled up to the surface, as she'd often been, by G, wandering out of her bedroom in ridiculously oversized men's basketball shorts and announcing her boredom with each meaty barefooted step. “This 'Icons of 20th-century Sexuality' class sucks!” she announced. “I thought it would be fun.” When this got no response, she walked into the kitchen, asking, “What's our neighbor up to?”
“I wouldn't know,” Ellen said. It had been three nights since they'd inadvertently happened upon their neighbor getting out of his shower and, completely forgetting that they themselves were liable to be seen, diverted themselves for some minutes with the sight of him drying himself—until he unexpectedly turned his eyes in their direction and sent them both flopping in a panic to the floor. Though they'd ultimately laughed off his apparent discovery of them that night—crawling out of the kitchen and into the living room where they wore themselves out with teasing (G) and fretting (Ellen) and exclamations (both)—neither had ventured another look.
Now G called softly, “Hey, Ellen, get in here, the show's gonna start.”
“I'm waiting for the late weather.”
“Oh, come on,” G said, standing at the lip of the carpeting that distinguished living room from kitchen in what was otherwise a continuous low-ceilinged rectangle. “Every day's the same in October. Come on.”
“Why? You need my moral support? You can't watch by yourself?”
G walked up to her. “I need your immoral support,” she said. “Besides, you're merging with that couch. I wish you'd just go out and get laid, but no! You won't even look at a guy!”
She got Ellen up. On the way to the already darkened kitchen, Ellen turned off all the lights in the living room.
“I knew you couldn't stay away,” G said.
“I just want to make sure you don't let him see you this time.”
“Sure. Very nice of you.”
They leaned side by side on their elbows on the sink, keeping their heads just high enough above the kitchen sill to glimpse, through the broad window of their neighbor's darkened bedroom, a brightly lit portion of his steamy bathroom. When the shower curtain slid out of sight and he stepped toward the frame of the bathroom doorway, reaching for a towel on a wall rack, he seemed to be looking right at them. They both flinched and ducked.
“Damn! He can't see us, can he?” G asked.
“How? It's impossible.”
But everything about his manner betrayed a suspicion that he was being watched. The rough, careless vigor they'd remarked upon the first time they saw him drying off was gone. Every movement now seemed considered, self-conscious, as G observed repeatedly with unbridled annoyance.
“And why's he keep looking over here?” she asked. “He can't see us! No way!”
“Why doesn't he close the blinds if he thinks he's being watched?”
“He obviously likes it. Check his dick.”
Ellen was aghast. “What?”
“It's longer than before,” G said.
“Bull!”
“It is! Not a boner, but—um—stretched.”
“God! You are really looking, G!”
“Like you're not.”
“Not—” Ellen was flustered, she laughed. “Not like that!” But she continued to look. After another minute of consideration, she said, “It's so weird. How long can he possibly take to dry himself?”
“He's doing it on purpose.”
“He already dried that leg!”
“Look at him now,” G said. He dropped the towel and walked naked into the bedroom, lingered in front of the bathroom door, then, after a long last look in their direction, exited stage right.
Later, in the living room, Ellen insisted, “He can't know we're watching.”
“Maybe he's psychic,” G said.
“After seeing us that night you think he just assumes?”
“Aw, he's just hoping. He wants to be seen. No way he knows, but he's doin' it just in case. It gives ‘em a thrill.”
“What about his wife? Or whatever? Girlfriend?”
“Well, she just had that new baby,” G said. “Would you wanna fuck again if you ended up with that screamer? And, by the way, they're married. They act so married. Just the way they get in their car. And this showing off thing… Definitely married.”
Then G sat at the foot of the television and punched impatiently through the channels. After she had given up and turned it off, she lay down on her back on the living room carpet, one bent knee peaked and swaying slowly from side to side, a metronome of restlessness, and Ellen told her a story she'd once overheard her oldest brother tell his friend about a young woman in a college dorm who used to shower each weekday afternoon at the same hour and dry off and dress in front of an open window. “My brother went to a Catholic college, so the dorms were segregated. Girls in one high-rise, boys across the way in another. At first, my brother said, just a few guys lucky enough to have windows across from this girl's place knew about it. They'd invite a few friends over to watch. But pretty soon the whole dorm knew. So every day, at a certain time, all the windows up and down one side of this high-rise would be filled with guys, with binoculars and telescopes. Watching this girl get out of the shower and get dressed.”
“That is so pathetic!” G said.
“Does that mean we're pathetic for watching our neighbor?”
“It's totally different. It's not like we're in here havin' a circle jerk.”
“I don't think my brother mentioned that.”
“No offense. Besides, he knows we're watching.”
“He does not! He's assuming.”
“Correctly.”
“Not if he assumes it every night. We've only done it twice.”
“But if he assumed it tonight, when we were…” G said.
“He still doesn't know.”
“But he might as well.”
“It's not the same thing,” Ellen said.
G thought a few moments. “Ah, who the fuck cares!” she exclaimed finally, getting to her feet. “You're makin' my head spin. Fuck him! If that lame-ass thirty-something Dockers-wearing doof wants to imagine he's got two horny neighbors all hot for him, let him! What's it matter to me?”
“I don't like the way he was looking over here,” Ellen said. “Like he could see us.”
“What's it matter if he could?” G asked, waving off Ellen's worries.
* * *
The next time Ellen saw her neighbor, at the curb where their cars were parked one behind the other, he was with his wife, or girlfriend, and their baby. A Sunday morning: all three of them as dressed up as anyone ever got in Southern California, where a single button on a shirt signified semi-formal. The neighbor and his woman both glanced briefly in Ellen’s direction, the baby’s head lolled. On their Ford Taurus's rear bumper shone an iridescent fish icon—a simple elongated sideways loop. As they pulled away Ellen murmured to herself, “Off to church.” She felt reassured.
Two days later, when she came home from work, her neighbor sat in his small front yard in an aluminum-framed lawn chair, a pink nodding sunbonnet in his lap—the infant. It wasn’tt the kind of neighborhood where people spent time in their front yards, which were meager and bare and as dry as the sidewalk intersecting them, and the sight of him without his wife made Ellen anxious. She was cruising for a parking spot along the curb in front of their one-storey triplex but found none, and so drove around the block and parked around the corner, beneath the cartoon eyes of a blue-and-white lamp post sign warning, “THIS IS A NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH COMMUNITY.” When next Ellen turned on to her street, on foot now, she noticed her neighbor rise from his seat. The walk from the corner to her front door was long. She kept her eyes on the sidewalk but she felt his gaze, and when she glanced up he was meandering toward the short plank fence between his small lot and her own, dandling the pink sunbonnet as he walked. By the time Ellen reached her door he stood at the fence, with no pretense of doing anything but waiting. Then for the first time in the eight months she'd lived next door, he spoke to her. “Hey,” he said, “how's it going?”
“Oh. Okay,” Ellen answered, acting as if she'd only just noticed him and hurrying to unlock her front door.
“Nice night, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah. See ya,” she said, and closed the door quickly behind her.
“He talked to me!” Ellen exclaimed as soon as G came home an hour later. G dropped her head to one side, squinted quizzically, said, “Uhhh, yeah…?”
“Our neighbor!”
G exhaled through her lips—a vexed motorboat. “So? Who cares?”
“He made a point of it. He's never talked to me before.”
“I've talked to him before,” G said.
“Lately?”
“No. But who cares? He's just a fuckin' dickwad.”
But now Ellen was convinced he knew they were watching him.
“I already told you he knew,” G said.
“But we're not! Anymore,” Ellen clarified. “Unless you are.”
“No. But, Ellen, who cares?”
“He does!” Ellen exclaimed.
G shrugged.
“He really does. Know what I mean? Really. He thinks we're into it.”
“Oh, puh-leeez, don't make me puke.”
“We've got to let him know we're not watching.”
“He just said hello to you!” G objected.
“More than that. He was waiting for me.”
G looked skeptical.
“Anyway,” Ellen said, “I've got a plan. If we leave the kitchen blinds down all the time—or at least at night—he'll know we're not watching.”
“Isn't that what we'd do if we were? We’d peek between the slats.”
Ellen considered. “Okay—uh—what if we keep them open all the time?—”
“Which we already do.”
“But also keep the kitchen light on! At night. How about that? We wouldn't do that if we wanted to sneak a peek.”
G rolled her eyes.
“He'll see and he'll know,” Ellen assured her. “Then he'll leave us alone.”
So the kitchen light stayed on each night for the next week. Until Ellen spent a rare evening off the couch, and out of the house, with her friend Sara.
Sara had been the only person in the Literature Department who did not recoil from the appellation of “Girlfriend” that seemed to be slung around Ellen's neck at the door of every grad student party she attended with Bryce. Sara's husband was mired in the English PhD program while Sara, in rare breaks from tending their two sons, wrote her dissertation on The Fragmented Modernist Body. Ellen and she cooked dinner together in Sara's grad village apartment once a month when Sara's husband was out. This was the highlight of Ellen's social calendar, even though—in spite of sweet requests and stern admonitions, of infinite appeals of every conceivable kind—Sara's two boys never ceased to demand her attention, and it was only after the little monsters had unwillingly succumbed to sleep that the women could really talk.
When Ellen arrived home that night at nearly eleven thirty the laughter she heard as she unlocked her triplex's door made her uneasy. The ruckus that greeted her from the dark kitchen as soon as she'd opened it made her panic. She ran to the kitchen doorway.
“What are you doing?” she asked G—on the floor, pinned back against a kitchen cupboard by laughter—and Heat, who heaved with it, bent forward, head and arms on the sink.
“Oh God oh God!” G gasped. “Look, Ellen! Look at him! Look!”
Ellen ducked down, stepped into the kitchen, and did as she was told.
Her neighbor, nude as usual at this time of night, stood in the middle of his bedroom, at the foot of his large bed. Lit not only by the bright bathroom behind him, but from a dim source offstage, with his eyes on their window and both hands low and together just before him—positioned as if for a tug-of-war in which the rope passed dangerously high between his legs—he repeated a short rapid motion.
“Oh no!” Ellen exclaimed when the image registered. She collapsed straight to the floor.
A new surge of laughter came from G and her friend.
“What's he doing now?” G asked, and scrambled up into a hunched position for a look.
“Two hands!” Heat cried.
“Shhhh!” G warned. But then she was laughing again. “I never imagined! The fuckin’ variety!”
“I feel sick,” Ellen said, sitting with her forehead on her bent knees. For the first time she noticed the pervasive smell of pot. “This is bad,” she repeated hopelessly into her thighs.
“Don't be such a Catholic,” G said.
Ellen burst angrily from her fetal position to swat G on her calf. She said, “It's not about being Catholic, dumbass! He'll never leave us alone now.”
“Bullshit,” G muttered.
“It was working,” Ellen said, “he knew we weren't watching…. Then he saw the kitchen light off—”
“Backhanded!” G announced.
“Look at him go,” Heat said with dopey appreciation.
Ellen continued, insistently, “—after all those nights with it on—tonight he saw it off and—started doing that.”
“He may’ve seen me, too,” Heat said with a laugh.
“Shut up, Heat!” G said.
“What?” Ellen scooted toward her.
“He was looking right at me when he got out of the shower,” Heat said, “and maybe I kinda stood—”
“You did not!” G interrupted.
“And with our living room light on!” Ellen cried.
“He didn't see her!” G insisted. “She fuckin’ with you. She's stoned outta her gourd.”
Ellen grabbed Heat's leg; Heat screamed.
“He saw you?” Ellen asked.
Heat laughed.
G, still leaning forward against the counter, pushed softly at Ellen with one bare foot, saying, “Get lost, will ya, Ellen?” Then: “Oh!—wait! No! Ellen! Get up here! The money shot!”
“Hot dog!” Heat exclaimed.
Then both teens were screeching with laughter, bumping hips, wobbly-legged, hunched and peering, and Ellen was fleeing the kitchen as quickly as she could.
She practically dove onto the couch, then lay facing its back cushions, both hands over her eyes, while the hilarity in the kitchen peaked—”OHHH! GROSS!”—and subsided.
G and Heather came into the den, sat on the floor not far from her. “You missed quite an ending,” G said to Ellen.
Heat giggled, Ellen did not move.
G sighed impatiently, said, “Don’t worry, Ellen. We'll put the kitchen light on again tomorrow night.”
When Ellen still did not respond, G insisted, “It’s o—kay! Stop freakin.’ It’s no big deal! We were just sittin’ around, gettin’ high… and Heat didn't believe me! It’s Heat’s fault!”
“Nuh-uh,” Heat objected, “I believed you—but it was homework!” She started laughing.
“Yeah,” G agreed, “homework, Ellen. Research. Our 'Icons' prof assigned it.”
Both girls cracked up. Ellen rolled onto her back, said in all seriousness from beneath her still-covered eyes, “I don't think he qualifies as an icon of 20th-century sexuality.”
Renewed shrieks from the two girls on the floor at this. Ellen turned her head and peeked through her fingers to see them rocking on their butts with laughter.
When they finally quieted, Ellen announced, “You'll see. I warned you.”
Heat giggled.
The light was back on in the kitchen the next night, and for the next few days G was apologetic—which didn't suit her at all. “Knock it off!” Ellen would demand whenever she noticed a certain pathetic beat-dog-look coming over G.
Saturday afternoon G was more like herself. Ellen was in her bedroom, slumped in front of her computer, scrolling through but not rereading an e-mail Bryce had sent two days before, detailing his further New York travails. He recounted his recent past for her in exhausting detail—she wondered when he had time to write anything else—then ended with “I can't tell you how much it means to me to know you're there for me. Or how much more I wish you were here.” Ellen was tempted to e-mail him back: “I'm not here for you. I'm not anywhere. I've vanished.” But she didn't respond at all.
G slammed the front door when she came home and made a lot of noise in the kitchen. Then she came and leaned against the doorjam of Ellen's room, a plastic bottle of fruit juice in her hand. “You're right,” she said, “he's a total asshole.”
Ellen knew immediately whom she meant, but stubbornly asked, “Who?”
“Our neighbor. Russell.”
“He introduced himself?” Ellen swiveled her desk chair toward G and leaned forward.
“Oh yeah.”
“In his yard?”
“No, no, you kidding? That would be too normal. He just happened to come wash his car while I was at that place on Beach Boulevard.”
“He followed you!”
“No, God, calm down—it's right off the road. Drive by and you can see everything. And how many custom polka-dot Mini Coopers you seen around here?” she asked with pride.
“So he's driving home to his wife and baby and he sees your car…”
“And he pulls right into the stall next to me and is, like, Oh, hey, hi, how's it goin’? Trying to be smooth. And he drives that gross old Ford! But he doesn't have any quarters, and the change machine’s all fucked, like usual. So he asks if I've got extras. And I'm all, Nope, sorry, darn! But does he leave to get quarters? No. He leans against the wall and watches me wash my car! I wanna say, Um, don't you have anything to do? Instead I just try to finish as fast as I can. But try not to be too obvious. So I'm washin’ away, missin’ spots like fuckin’ crazy—” She interrupted herself, shaking her head: “I did a really shitty job. I gotta go back—”
“And our neighbor?” Ellen prompted.
“He's staring at me the whole time! I can't even bend over—he's lookin’ down my top. Laserbeam eyes, right on my boobs!”
“I told you he's trouble.”
“Yeah, but wait. Then he says, My name's Russell. Russell! And he's like, What's yours? And then, We've been living side by side so long… And—get this!—I feel like I know you, though we've never really talked! Knows me! I mean, what the fuck! And all trying to be so smooth. Arrogant, even. Like I do know him—and really fucking dig him. Leaning against the wall, his arms folded, and I just wanna retch. I'm thinkin’, Whyn't you go jack off? Get the fuck outta my face!”
“You didn't tell him your name?” Ellen asked.
“What difference does that make? It's on my fucking license plate.”
“Yeah, but ‘G’S MINI’ could stand for anything.”
“Ellen, rise and shine!” she sang. “He lives next door! It's not like he needs a phone book to find me.”
Ellen rose from her chair and started smoothing the covers of the monastic single bed she'd resolutely bought after Bryce, saying, “This is bad. I told you this is bad.”
“Fuck it, he's just an asshole. It's no big deal. I knew I shouldn't have told you.”
Ellen stopped her work on the bed and straightened up to face G. “Me? You're the one who's freaked out.”
“Bull. I'm just telling you, the light thing’s a good idea and we'll leave it on and he'll stop. Or if he keeps bugging us, we'll tell his wife.”
“Oh, that'll be great.”
“Or we'll put up a sign in the kitchen window—” she raised her open palms above her shoulders to indicate the placement of each word on an imaginary marquee— “Stop. Jacking. Off. You. Perv!”
“We can call the cops,” Ellen suggested.
“Yeah, sure, they'll really care.”
“He's stalking us!” Ellen said.
“Uh-huh. Listen, he's just a total asshole. He'll stop,” G insisted. “Okay? Give it some time.” Then as she was leaving, she turned back in the hallway to say, “And if he doesn't, I'll sic Jason on him.”
* * *
For the next week, for the first time since she'd moved in with G, Ellen began to entertain vague fantasies of escape. She imagined a new address completely free of both her neighbor and Bryce.
One evening she asked G how much notice she'd have to give G's father if she decided to move out.
“You're not moving out,” G answered. She wore a wife-beater, sporting the words EAT ME in ornate black chulo font stretched between her breasts.
“I'm not? Thanks for letting me know.”
“Well, you're not,” G insisted.
“No, actually I'm not—just wondering,” Ellen conceded, to reassure her and try to move the conversation forward. But G did not look reassured and Ellen hastened to an explanation she didn't take seriously until the words were out of her mouth: “In case I apply to some grad schools.”
“Apply around here.”
“Yeah, I will—if I do at all,” Ellen said, again trying not to upset G. “But I should still know what your father expects.”
G shooed the topic away with one hand, said, “It doesn't matter. I'm sure he doesn't care.”
“He doesn't, or you don't? Most landlords require advance notification.”
“He doesn't. He deposits the checks in my account anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I never told you that? I'm legally co-owner of this dump.”
“You get half the rent from these three units?”
“No, just yours. It's a total rip. But, really, I'm your landlord. And I say, I don't care about notice, cuz I won't let you leave.”
“I'm still going to ask your father next time he calls.”
G shrugged. “Whatever. But you're not going anywhere.”
The next evening when Ellen got home, G came out of her bedroom to smugly announce “I saw him today and he didn't say anything.”
Ellen didn't even pretend not to know whom she meant. “Where?” she asked.
“Out front. Walking to his car.”
“With his wife, right?” Ellen asked.
“Well, yeah.”
“What could he say, G? That doesn't prove a thing.”
“He could have given me a look.” She lowered her head, stared at Ellen from beneath her eyebrows, took a few slow swaying steps across the room, more in the manner of a rapper than their neighbor. “You know how guys do.”
Ellen shook her head. “Not with his wife right there.”
“He beats off with her in the next room!”
“Yeah. In the next room.”
“I think it means something,” G said weakly.
“Fine. But it doesn't.”
“You're over-reacting. It's no big deal anyway,” G said.
“No big deal? It's all we talk about, G! We don't even know that dork, but we have to worry about whether he's following us to the carwash!”
“He didn't follow me.”
“No? Let's debate it! Let's spend more time talking about that guy!”
“I'm not talking about him,” G said, and she huffed off to her bedroom and slammed the door.
Two evenings later Ellen answered a knock at the peepholeless door of their triplex to find their neighbor himself in a purple bowling-style shirt, a trademark swoosh on the pocket.
“Hey,” he said, with a little smile and nod. Then, with the nonchalance of a renegade TV detective who knows his authority has nothing to do with the badge he's obliged to flash, he held out to her a single red flyer.
Ellen automatically took it, glanced at its large heading—NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH MEETING!!!—then pushed the door almost shut again, leaving only one eye and just a bit of her face exposed to him.
Her neighbor took a half-step back from the door, chuckled awkwardly with surprise, and then came closer again, clearing his throat. “I'm just going around the neighborhood,” he said, “making sure everyone knows about the meeting coming up.”
Ellen's pulse beat in her ears; G was not home. “Yes, we already got a notice,” she said and began to close the door.
“Wait!” he cried, then quickly added, “I mean, you think you and your housemate can make it? I'm supposed to get a count. For drinks, and stuff,” he said feebly.
“We'll try,” Ellen said. Again she pushed against the door and was just able to stop herself from closing it on the hand he suddenly thrust out toward her for a shake, announcing, “Russell! I live next door.”
Ellen merely nodded.
“But you know that,” he said, gazing at her now with an earnest last-ditch appeal in his eyes. He took a deep breath, never taking his eyes from hers, then pushed on: “My wife's staying at her folks' tonight. With the baby. So, well, if you and your housemate wanna stop by—”
“I don't think so,” Ellen interrupted.
“—I've got some daquiri mix. Or we can go out for drinks.”
“We've got plans.”
“Maybe after. I stay up real late. You, or her, or both you guys…”
“I don't think so,” she repeated and closed the door—but not before he was able to squeeze in, with prodigious doggedness, “I look forward to seeing you!”
She locked the door, took a long deep breath, then peeked though a window to find him standing motionless, head down, a few steps from her door, still facing it from the juncture of her walkway and the sidewalk. He stood there pathetically, indecisively, for two full minutes—then rocked on his heels once, turned, and walked home. Ellen sat down on the couch, no longer frightened now, but angry. She thought: You could reduce yourself to the tiniest scrap of an existence—to this triplex, to loneliness and celibacy and thriftiness, making no plans beyond rebuilding a little savings, chastened and foolish, expiating past mistakes—and yet some man, or two, or more, would find you. You were always liable to be there for them—their own portable and private little audience. Bryce would not leave her alone. Her neighbor would not leave her alone.
Now, tonight, in this man she didn't even know and had never even touched, she recognized almost all the same misguided bravado of Bryce, and she sat and marveled at the fact that a man who'd only masturbated to what most nights was a purely imaginary audience nevertheless expected to hold a lover's sway over her.
Of course, her neighbor was completely deluded. And now she realized that Bryce was no less so. His belief in his influence still colored all his appeals to her. And she'd allowed his belief to have an effect, even across a distance of 3,000 miles.
She had split with him, but not yet completely.
She was sitting on the couch making plans when G came home.
G looked around the dark silent room. Then she turned on another light and asked, “What's up?”
Ellen picked up the flyer from the foot of the couch and held it out to G “This came for you,” she said.
G took it, looked it over, shrugged. “Who cares?”
“You might, since it was hand-delivered to our door. By Russell.”
“Fu—Get outta here!” She sat down hard on the couch beside Ellen, demanding to hear every detail. But before Ellen could make it through all of them, G was up and pacing the room. Then she stopped in the middle of it and said, “I think it's time Jason had a little talk with our neighbor.”
Ellen stood up. “No, G, that's really not necessary. Let me finish.”
“I've heard enough—the fuckin' psycho!”
“He's not a psycho. If you let me finish—that's the thing—I realized—you're overreacting—let me finish.”
“I'm overreacting! He talks to me at the carwash and you're ready to call the cops, but now he comes to our fuckin' door and I'm overreacting?”
“Okay, I was overreacting then. I should've listened. You were right, he's just a loser.”
“No. I don't believe that anymore,” G said. “You were right. Something has to be done. And Jason'll do it.”
Ellen tried another approach: “C'mon, G, Jason's not going to want to get involved…”
“Bullshit. He'll be very interested. And,” she added, “Jason's never lost a fight.”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“No, our neighbor is.”
“But if you'd let me finish what I was telling you. The thing is, I realized, he's done now, our neighbor. He blew it by coming over here. He could imagine whatever he wanted before, as long as there was no contact between us. But now he's invited us over, and when we don't show up… You see? It's finished. He'll know we're not interested—that we're not watching him. That we couldn't care less about him.”
G stood shaking her head, then said, “The fuckin' psycho will know it better when Jason gets done with him.”
They debated it from the same clashing perspectives for a few minutes more, until finally Ellen declared, “If you send Jason over there, G, I'm moving out.”
“Ellen!”
“I don't care about my job, or rent—I'll do it. The next day.”
G stared at her. She somehow made her lips vanish, sucking them into her tightly closed mouth so it was just one long angry Muppet-like line, and her eyes brimmed—with fury, not sadness. She stood very still, glaring in this way, while Ellen ventured a faint mollifying smile. G gave no sign of being mollified, but when she spoke at last her voice was unusually quiet. “Fine,” she said softly and turned on her heel, disappearing into her room and leaving Ellen—having used her heaviest artillery to win this skirmish—to figure out how to tell G she'd already decided to move out.
A few nights later, when Ellen had gotten no further than telling G (as gently as possible) that she just discovered she could gain readmittance to the nursing program she’d once planned to attend, G exploded: “I knew it! I fuckin' knew it! The night that guy came over!”
Surprised, Ellen vigorously shook her head and cried, “What?”
“You're letting that asshole scare you away!”
“Who?”
G threw one arm wildly in the direction of their neighbor's house. “Russell. He's scared you off.”
“That's ridiculous,” she said.
G snorted. “Yeah. That's why you never even mentioned this program before.”
“That's not true. I told you I might be going to grad school.”
“Maybe. You were totally vague. And only after you got all freaked out by that asshole.”
“G, I'm not freaked out by him. I told you, after he came to the door, there's nothing to worry about.”
“So why are you running off then?”
Ellen raised her voice, “Because I want to have a life, maybe? I planned to do this two years ago. You know that!”
G took this in, then stared at her for nearly half a minute. “The program doesn't start till next fall, right?”
“Well, yes…” Ellen murmured. “But, in mid-January, there's a night class…”
G threw her hands up and stormed angrily into the kitchen.
Ellen followed, calling, “G!”
“Fuck, Ellen! You're not even in the program yet and just like that! Off you go!”
“I'm not leaving that soon. I'll help you find a roommate. I'll pay for an extra month if—”
“Fuck paying! It's not about the goddamn rent!” G noisily pulled a chair out from the table and plopped herself onto it. “I like you, Ellen. I don't want another roommate—I like you. And that asshole next door—!”
“It's got nothing to do with him! This is for me.” Ellen pulled out a chair and also sat down at the small round table. “I like you, too, G. But you have a life. You go to classes. You go out. I do nothing. Except that stupid job. Otherwise, I'm always here.” And looking, as she said this, at the pink plastic skull-and-crossbones barrette holding G’s reddish hair off her freckled face, it occurred to Ellen that perhaps this was the main reason G did like her so much: Ellen was there so often. Like the mother G must have fantasized about as she grew up without one. The ideal mother, always waiting at home. “If you really like me,” she earnestly told G, “you'll understand this is the right thing for me to do now. I've put it off too long already.”
G sat now with both elbows on the table, her head propped in her hands, her fingers extended up both sides of her face, stretching her mouth and eyes into a silly-putty mask.
Ellen continued, “Besides, if I was running away from that guy next door I would have thought of this two weeks ago, when I was freaked out by him. He's harmless now.”
“My ass,” G muttered through twisted lips. Then she slammed her open palms on the table top. “That motherfucker! Little shithead!”
“It's not him!” Ellen insisted angrily. Feeling she'd only just freed herself from Bryce's pull, Ellen was especially galled by this emphasis on their neighbor's influence. “Stop it!” Ellen told her. “I can make up my own mind. And you either believe this, or—” She looked across the table at the derisive expression on G's face, then said simply, “Fuck you, G”
This threw G—her face softened at once. “What?” she asked.
But Ellen didn't let up. “Go ahead and send your boy-friend over there to beat him up, G,” she said scornfully. “That'll really show our neighbor how bad-ass you are! ‘Cuz you are tough! You are a real in-de-pen-dent woman! Unlike me.”
G shoved herself up from the table and stepped over to the kitchen sink, where she stood silently looking at their neighbor's house, her back to Ellen.
Ellen felt a sudden remorse; she’d gone too far. G was just a kid—still really such a baby. “I'm sorry, G,” she said softly, going to her. “You made me mad.”
G turned around, her face set, leaned back against the sink, folding her arms across her chest. “No, you're right,” she said. “I'm stupid sometimes.” Ellen denied it, but G continued: “Have Jason go over there! Stupid.”
“You are not stupid. Just forget about that guy! It's over.”
G, at the sink, did not look as if anything were over.
Ellen became more insistent: “He's not doing anything! Ever since that night he came by with the flyer.”
“Yeah,” G mumbled.
“No. I mean, has he bothered you in any way? You went to the carwash the other day, was he there? Is he hanging out in his front yard? No. Just like I predicted. He knows we don't care. It's done.”
“Yea, right, Ellen,” G said, “your prediction was perfect. 'Cept it doesn't seem to matter what he knows. I checked last night. He's still beatin' off in his window.”
Embarrassed as G had become when reminded of her threat to sic Jason on their neighbor, she was angry enough for the next week—at their neighbor, at Ellen, at everything—that Ellen wouldn't have been surprised if she'd done it anyway. Feeling wronged by her neighbor and already abandoned by Ellen, G boomed her way through the triplex at all hours, banging, slamming, stamping like one itching for confrontation, or outright violence.
But Ellen—her nightly drive home on the Pacific Coast Highway haunted by images of the ambulance she expected to find in front of her neighbor's house—underestimated G. G found a more ingenious outlet for her anger.
Late one night when Ellen sat on the couch eating a frozen yogurt and watching Anthony Lapaglia pursue in syndication yet another vanished woman on Without a Trace, G—who of late could even unlock a door loudly—entered the living room with four friends and the unmistakable cigarette-and-spilled-beer air of a dive. Heat was among them, and another woman, small and striking, with incipient dreads and the name of Suby, or Sue B, or maybe Sue Bee, as in the honey. Everyone but G greeted Ellen. G was attentive only to her guests, who were voluble in a way that suggested either they were soon to leave for a party or a party was shortly to arrive at the triplex. Ellen went into her bedroom, trusting it wouldn't be the latter, and that they'd all be gone before the Action News Team's Super-Accutron weather report came on around 11:20. She sat down on her bed and read an article in an ad-bloated glossy about an actress famous for falling in love with the leading man of each new movie she made.
When Ellen walked out of her bedroom at 11:15 the entire apartment was dark and it seemed, at first, empty—of everything but pot smoke. But then she heard excited whispering and quiet laughter and saw a clump of huddled figures in the kitchen.
“G!” she called.
A figure hurried toward her, shushing her angrily as she came.
Ellen retreated into the hallway near her bedroom and turned on the hall light.
G turned it off again, and blocked the switch with her body.
“What are you doing?” Ellen asked her.
“What's it matter to you?” G replied.
“I live here.”
“Not for long.”
“Until January.”
“Whoop-de-doo.”
“I can't believe you're spying on him, G.”
“I'm not spying. I'm giving him what he wants. A dream come true. If two girls got him going—five! Holy shit!”
“Oh, G, leave him alone. It's over.”
“Leave him alone? Yeah! Maybe it's over for you, Ellen, but I still gotta live here. It's not fuckin' over for me!”
“He's not bothering you.”
“Yes, he is. I gotta find a new roommate. That's bothering me!”
“You know why I'm going.”
“Yeah, I know,” G said. “One guy brings you down here and dumps you, and another scares you back up north!”
It was no use. Ellen retreated into her bedroom, put on her shoes, grabbed her bag.
“Oh, come on, Ellen,” G said from Ellen's bedroom doorway. “Don't you wanna stay for the main event? Don't you wanna see that fucker's face when we all jump up with the lights on and yell Surprise?”
Ellen brushed past G and walked into the living room. “No.”
From the kitchen, G's friends called in urgent undertones for her to join them, but G followed Ellen to the door, demanding, “Why not, Ellen? Why the fuck not?”
“I'll be at Sara's tonight,” Ellen said.
In her car, fastening her seatbelt, Ellen heard, even with her windows up, a sudden burst of shouts, then hoots and laughter.
The next day G crowed, “You should've seen that motherfucker scuddin' out of the room on his butt!” But otherwise she refused to speak to Ellen.
Three days later, as Ellen finished loading her belongings into her car, G—a hurt child—said, “You always worried more about his feelings than mine, Ellen. That's why you had to leave the other night.”
Ellen shook her head. “Believe what you want, G”
But once Ellen had made her way through the snarl and creep of L.A.'s traffic, and through the desolate hills of the Grapevine—with nothing in the Central Valley's flat landscape to distract her—she passed the time driving north engaged in imaginary conversation with an implausibly rational G, intent on explaining to her why she left the triplex the other night, and why she moved out sooner than planned. Five hours she spent deep in this silent interior dialogue. Concluding finally, only minutes before she saw the first Oakland sign and exited the 880 Freeway and this story (leaving behind us piggy-backed voyeurs, writer and reader), that a woman couldn't be discovered by a man to be watching him without consequences: for his excitement or humiliation she'd be held accountable in unpredictable and sometimes nearly inescapable ways. And she'd already wasted too much of her youth to hazard once more, even with merely mocking intent, the dizzying centripetal circle of a man's self-regard.
Steven Varni, author of The Inland Sea, has lived in Venice, Italy since 2010. For the seven- month run of the 2015 Venice International Biennale of Art he performed in the Das Kapital Oratorio, directed by Isaac Julien and Mark Nash, and his essay on that live work of “epic duration” appears in the catalogue Isaac Julien: Playtime and Kapital. As a photographer he’s provided images for forthcoming titles from the Yale University and Stanford University presses. His children’s picture book, Ciao, Sandro! (illustrated by Luciano Lozano), will be published in June 2021 by Abrams Books.
