by Susan Rosalsky

A person doesn't always need a clock to say what time it is. I know midnight by the sounds coming from 3A. I know four-thirty in the morning by the fighting from downstairs, where the landlord lives. And I know after-dinner by the silence that pervades us when we have eaten from our boxes--Italian or Chinese--and have nothing else to say.

But what is there to say.

"Do you think we should break ..." says this man I live with.

"Yes?" I say, all ears.

"The news to the landlord, about withholding the rent?"

"Oh. I already did."

"What did you think I was going to say?"

"I don't know. How should I know."

"No really."

"Nothing."

Our landlord has a sense of humor. He says he is going to throw us out of our small building for not arguing. That he doesn't trust a couple as quiet as us. He says he likes a little wham, a little pow, a little to-the-moon every now and then. Each time I see him it's have a good fight, knock each other out, did you kill him yet. Then he says 'just joking.' But I've seen his wife in sunglasses in the middle of the night, all the blue and green blossoming below her frames.

How's this for wham. I come home from work and the Mexican we ate the night before is backed up into the bathtub, some detour it's taken after heading south down the kitchen sink. He said he'd be home at seven so I wait. This is something we can work on: together we will remove the rice and beans and flush them down the toilet. Only seven comes and goes, so does eight. He reels in around three smelling like he had a good time and says "What happened here?"

"Where were you?" I say, blinking from the light.

"What is this shit?"

"What shit are you referring to?"

"In the tub."

"Last night's dinner."

"Yeah, but why is it in the tub?"

"Some things are mysteries," I say. "Some things I have no answer for. " Pow. I give him my sweet voice, but he knows.

When I see the landlord he says I'm late, that the first has come and gone. But what is lateness, I say to him, he appreciates a joke, what is time but a short line on a round face. He changes color. Quickly I tell him about the pipes, about the Mexican in our tub, and he says he'll fix my pipes but good if we don't pay up.

The city is filled with people to be avoided. The boy I slept with from around the corner, the girl the man I live with says he no longer does. And now the landlord, who lives beneath us, is on my list. Now I leave early for my job so I don't run into him, with his drooling shepherd. I am careful not to let the door slam shut behind me. I don't wear shoes when I cook. I dance on the couch. I want him to forget.

Recently, the man I live with went out to buy a clock. It's healthier-sounding than the rest of his collection; it is a bully at the beach, flexing the seconds with precision in well-delineated tocks. But from where I sleeplessly lie I hear another, somewhere deeper in our shallow apartment, keeping its own conflicting version of the hour. The two of them divide up the night between themselves--leaving me holding the empty bag. One hand on my heart, I feel for a pulse--it helps me, this vestigial, wombish tendency--but the clocks confuse me.

Suddenly there is this: abrupt contact, bodies on furniture, a displacement of things from where they should be. There are words angry and agitated--not near enough for me to say what is being said, close enough to know that this is violence. There is crying out. His and her voices: a matching set. I am paralyzed with listening, waiting for what I don't know.

There is more. Rapid slapping footsteps, the sound of skin on linoleum, someone is at our door. It is the landlord's wife. She is breathless, she is older than I thought. She is bloody, she is terrifying.

She says, "Shhhh," as if she has to. "Shhh, or he will find me." Below is bellowing.

All that follows is a nightmare. Our door is broken, the landlord comes to claim his wife, spitting contempt at me, at the man who has awoken, at our broken pipes. Crazed, he accuses me of negligence, of lateness. It is not the time to remind him of the rice and beans. Raging and lunging--for his wife, her neck, for anything that can take it--he threatens the man I live with, who has wrapped a belt around his fist and assumed a pugilist's pose on the other side of the kitchen table. I dial for help with my left hand because the landlord's wife grabs at my right. He will kill you, he will kill you, she cries, her face wet with blood and hysteria. Then she goes back down with him, back down to where they come from.

We are both still alive.

The days are damp and gray. Cold, Novemberish. Our door is fixed but our pipes are not and the man I live with speaks of pressing charges. "You know, this whole episode may have a positive side-effect," he says. "We saw him do what he did. He forced his way in. We can get him to fix our pipes," he says, as if it is only the pipes that need fixing.

Then, embarrassed that he did not take a punch at the landlord, he says, "I should've leveled him. I should've given him what for." The news is playing without volume.  

I laugh--blow air through my nose. "You're foolish. Of course you couldn't. And if what you say was true, what were you waiting for?"

"I wasn't waiting. He had stopped beating on her."

"You'd've been pulverized."

"Listen, if I wanted to I could smack you across the room."

"I don't think so."

He raises his hand, I flinch and duck. But all he does is shove me.

Now this is something new.

<<>>