Gaps

The man sits on the stairs, a Brooklyn stoop-sitter with an India Pale Ale wrapped up in his hand. There isn’t a lot of light on this street and the sidewalk has all sorts of cracks and crevasses in it — the kind of sidewalk that your mother would tell you not to walk down all by yourself at night. But that’s what these lanes are like, these blocks that spurt out off of Flatbush Avenue like a twisted up family tree where everyone intersects and parallel and perpendicular don’t necessarily mean what you think they might mean.

The concrete sidewalk has gaps in it and the streetlights are all out. The man’s appearance is masked in shadows, but somehow the sound of the hops in his drink gathering condensation on the outside of the glass bottle and the drip, drip, drip of the dewey drops falling down to the concrete make up for his facelessness.

But let’s forget the masked man for a moment. Instead, to his wife.

She is inside, standing at the sink, in their kitchen, which has an awful lot of sconces in it. What you can’t see of the man you can see in his wife. Long brown curls cascade down her back, a thin cotton shirt hangs over her shoulders that are tired from carrying home bags of Trader Joe’s almond butter from Borough Hall in the evening rush hour traffic. She came home, sank down into the blue-grey armchair in the corner of the room, and unhooked her bra — it’s still hanging off of the arm part of the armchair. So many sconces in that kitchen that you can see her nipples perked up through her white cotton tunic because of the air conditioning that blasts through their apartment (first her apartment, then an apartment that she shared with the man on the stoop, and later the apartment where she used to pay 25% more in rent before they got married — but they don’t tell their friends that part).

The wife puts down the sponge that was in her hand and wipes her hand on the red-striped tea towel that hangs limp on the narrow door handle of the oven that will warm her knees when she bakes plum tarts come winter.

She pauses for a moment and leans on the granite countertop, turning her head to the right so that she can look out of the windows at the man that she married. The wife swivels 90 degrees and takes two steps towards the fridge that hums beside the rarely-used dishwasher. The freezer door is covered with save the dates and she said yes’s and we cordially request the pleasure of your presence: yours, and the man that you married. She bends down and tugs on the refrigerator door, pulling a 60 Minute Dogfish Head out before releasing the door handle from the tight grip of her fingertips.

She pops open the cap with a stainless steel bottle opener, not bothering to put it back in the drawer and instead leaving it out on the countertop — a promise of another beer to come before she and the man fall asleep silently next to each other in a lumpy bed.

Everything in this apartment is so far apart. The woman walks across the floral rug that needs vacuuming and collapses onto the sofa. She slides a coaster under her beer and props her feet up on the acorn-stained coffee table that she and the man had bought together at a Pottery Barn in Flatiron after he had moved in. Once the delivery guys left, they made love on it — him pulling her hair, her digging purple-polished nails into his back.

Afterwards, she stood at the counter, slicing an avocado to share, her bra hanging across the arm of the armchair in the exact way that it is now.

But we have been so busy with the wife sitting there, her body heaving up and down in the blue-grey armchair, her eyelashes fluttering open every once in awhile — when the air conditioner makes a jolting noise, when the fridge stops buzzing, when the floorboards from the upstairs neighbors creak under the weight of unseen footsteps — that we didn’t even notice the man stand up and take his drip, drip, drip beer bottle inside with him.

The couch is three-people wide, a cushion for each tired soul to fall into. The man’s wife is on one end, and he sinks down on the other end. He puts his empty beer down on the Pottery Barn table, and spreads his knees out, letting his hips sit wide. The pale ale condensation drips, drips, drips down onto the acorn wood, and the wife seems to almost immediately sense the ring that is beginning to form around the bottle. She swings her feet down off of the table, and reaches forward for her husband’s empty bottle, grabbing it with her left hand. She rises and, after a few seconds of looking down at her feet, reaches for the black bra on the armchair and holds it in the hand with his bottle.

The stoop-sitter brings his knees together to let her pass by him, to let her make her way through to the kitchen. Everything in this place is so spread out, so many gaps between this room and the next, so much space between him and her. Before she can pick her away around him, he reaches his hand up and hooks his fingers around her wrist.

She looks down at him, struck by the suddenness of his hands, the grip of his fingertips. She bends forward, and the man puts his remaining left hand around her waist. He takes the bottle out of her hand, putting it back on the table. The bra, back on the armchair. And she crawls on top of him, the two of them leaning back into the sofa, nearly out of our view.

We keep watching as the gaps between them dissolve, until all we can see are his knees from the edge of the window and her feet splayed out on either side of him. Keep watching until one of them flips off the light switch and suddenly, without the sconces, it’s just us standing in the middle of the sidewalk, in the dark.