the marriage counselor

Did I mention I went to see an apartment yesterday? A two room studio, if there is such a thing -- two equally sized rooms with a fridge, stove, and sink kind of thrown at jaunty angles next to one another in a little tiled alcove. Instead of the usual Hyde Park room plus kitchen plus dinette, this was a room plus room plus kitchenette. Carpeted in a strong, institutional brown that hides the tracks well and has seen everything. As we walked up the stairs, Glen, the super, who had arrived half an hour late after a prodding phone call from me, wondered out loud, "What the fuck?" There was a big empty Coca Cola bottle on the landing and you could kind of make out the brown spots from what must have been in the bottle. The stairs smelled so strongly of bleach that you couldn't really tell where it had gone though. Down the hall as I looked in the apartment a woman was yelling, "Get the fuck out of my house. Get the fuck out of my house and don't come back. Get the fuck out of here." It's always difficult to describe the qualities of people's voices beyond the obvious, pitch, breathiness. Her voice was neither high nor low, neither thick nor thin, strong and clear without being piercing. A normal, actually quite nice, decent sounding, woman's voice.

But there was something about the volume of it: she was yelling to be heard perfectly clearly down the hall and a floor in either direction, without sounding like she was screaming, desperate, at her wits' end. It sounded like it was a normal range for her, on a pissed off day. I remembered walking in Manhattan one time in the middle of the night and this guy started following me down the street yelling something like "Get out of my city! You cunt! Get the fuck out of my city!" What was so striking about it was not what he was yelling (although I don't think anybody has ever yelled that at me aside from him) but just how loud he was going. He was going pretty much about as loud as he probably could. He was not barring any holds. And I realized (as I stepped off the sidewalk to cross over to the other side and turned my head over my shoulder to yell, sharply, like you might at an animal, "Hey! Leave me 'lone!" upon which he started just a little, paused just a little, before continuing to yell, in that same unreally loud voice, from his spot on the sidewalk, now no longer following me, as I walked away down the other side of the street) that I hadn't ever actually heard someone yell like that, yell seemingly without any consciousness that they were yelling at all, or that it was an unusual thing to do. That's what was frightening about that guy, not that the words were aggressive but that he was yelling like someone who really had nothing restraining him, no, for lack of a better word but I mean this rather precisely, sense of propriety. Either really no intention of being anything like proper or simply no sense of there being some proper way to be. Again it's hard to describe the quality of a sound, but after that guy on the street I became aware of different levels of restraint in people's voices. It's relative, of course -- in Taiwan there is a kind of woman, a chubby middle-aged type with grown children, who yells through most of her life, and might easily be heard upon occasion down the hall, and not even for any particularly pissed off reason. But it's considered completely normal, it's not a sign of unrestraint but just of a certain social role being ably filled. The man in Manhattan, though, and the woman in this apartment building, were neither of them middle-aged Taiwanese housewives.

I finished up looking -- mostly just looking out the windows really, the place faces right out onto a busy street and in the not-quite rain of yesterday afternoon it was kind of magical, the people hurrying by in their trench coats -- while Glen the super muttered about "always making trouble." What's that? "Crazy nigger down there always in some kind of trouble." Glen let me go out by myself while he went and knocked on the door down the hall. "What's up now?" I heard him ask, and in response he got, "Get this motherfucker out of my house. I want him the fuck out of my house, right now. And I don't want him back" "What the fuck?" said Glen, again. Poor Glen.