Auditing
By Tim Horvath
I guess some would call it eavesdropping. But not of the restaurant variety—the kind where your eyes flutter and you zone like you’re having a very mild epileptic seizure, where you lean back just a hair, extend invisible antennae toward the next table, knowing your companion won’t be offended so long as the goods are delivered at the end of the day.
Listen. Go ahead, do it now, I won’t be offended. When was the last time you stopped and really listened to what was around you? If you listen hard enough, you’ll hear the hum of electromagnetic fields, the baleful soliloquy of florescent bulbs, the stoic chorus of wall and ceiling. Listen more and you might hear the resigned grunts of cobblestones and, still more faintly, the silty disintegration of bones.
(Do I exaggerate? Very well, then, I exaggerate!)
My ears aren’t oversized, elephantine flaps, though they’ve been enhanced a bit by artifice in recent years. They’re just your average mollusk-shells, a bit more visible when my barber (language barrier, varying results) mangles my instructions and bares them instead of leaving them crouched in the tufts like stealthy hunters. Still, the ears, the mechanisms, are nothing special in themselves. As I sit on my ordinary couch I am an ordinary American guy, 24 or 25—I’ll be a bit evasive. You might expect to find me reading a thriller or Men’s Journal, fiddling with a crossword, or, on a Sunday afternoon, watching the Pats march downfield, mouthing, “Just cover, you fuckers.” I’m doing none of the above. I’m listening like a still animal in the woods, head tilted, ears extended, waiting for the slightest rustle, crackle, errant breath or adrenaline-charged heartbeat not my own. As is my habit, I’m listening for Jennifer Caputo and Tom Bustamante, one floor up. Tom has just gone to the bathroom, where he’s unpeeled and deposited his condom, allowing it to flop headfirst into the wicker basket where Jen has failed to replace the plastic baggie, which she will figure out to her dismay soon enough, and probably scowl and ignore. Tom has then let forth a generous stream, a cord of piss that sounds like it could lash a dog to a fence-post, into Jennifer’s toilet. He has not made much use of the rim; his aim is good, which is probably why Jen will excuse his careless condom disposal. Jen will go next. Why she lets him go first is hard to say. Maybe it’s the same reason she lets him come first and often only. Who can know? Hearing only gets you so far into people’s heads.
You’re gonna want explanations, childhood roots—that’s okay, understandable. Fuck, I think about it, too. It’s a thinking kind of fetish, much more so than is a putting-on-makeup fetish or a vomit-on-me thing. Not so intellectual as role-playing based on the sexual behavior of various animal species—I had a guy explain that stuff to me once in a lonely bar in Seattle. But still, there’s fair amount of thinking involved. A lot of waiting that goes on. Subtlety is a definite virtue here—yes, I did say “virtue.”
Okay, I’ll backtrack, but not quite all the way to the crib, so if you’re an unrepentant Freudophile, you’re going to go to bed hungry. I mean, I can only give you the stuff I remember, right? Speaking of beds, then—and we will be—that’s where it started. Racecar, red, thick orange stripe, number 52 in a black circle, an eight-year-old’s wet dream before he can have one. I slept while synapses crept. Beneath me, my father labored and played with his ’70 Dodge Charger, Hi-Impact Go Mango, his first child. The clang and scrape of metal, the echoes of his tinkering, would extend well into the night, the heat insulation he’d done for the room doing little to mute sound. It never occurred to me until years after that if he was down there in the garage at the sleeping hour, it meant my mother was alone, down the hall, in their queen-sized bed. It never seemed as though the arrangement should be anything other than the way it was. He was a nocturnal creature, burrowing into manual tasks. By day an insurance broker, he sought out the solace of the garage, the solidity of objects. When I learned the word “tune-up,” it made complete sense to me, the car really nothing other than a giant instrument. Occasionally it could get brassy or woodwindish; mostly, though, I think you’d have to classify it with the percussions. When he really got going, it could sound like gamelan down there.
The first few times I snuck in while he was out, curious, it was what you’d expect—the room an aggregate of motor oil, solvent, damp walls, wet leaves and mango, the latter surely the paint job tripping up my imagination, since I’d never tasted one. The day he finally got careless with the lock, I peered in to examine the leather seats like black water, unlatched and propped up the hood, and explored under the gaping palate of the car’s mouth. But what I saw, and the tiny sounds that accidentally came out of my probings, seemed to have nothing in common with what I’d always heard from above. As I stood there alone, the garage armored itself in a silence that I did not dare breach.
Then I found the magazines. I knew my father loved women—my mother was not an unattractive woman herself, a fact I could easily recognize even before my friends began to make frequent, mildly-suggestive remarks. Yet I’d never thought of my father and desire yoked together until I laid eyes on those mags, stashed in the corner under what looked like a rusting brass skeleton covered with moths, some lampshade. The glossiness caught my eye, a flicker of light from the interior that picked up the glint. What I found on further examination was a rather substantial pile of magazines. The pile, I mean to say, was a mountain. What they depicted is not important today, though I am willing to admit it might have been important at the time, and that I’d never seen humans bound, taped, and chained, never seen them turned, essentially, inside out. Yes, I was shocked. Yes, I was mesmerized, paralyzed, peeling the thick, heavy pages back one-by-one. I was terrified, too, that he or my mother would walk in, though I knew he was out of town at a meeting and that she had vowed never to set foot in the garage. I was confused. Where did this pile fit into his mechanical pleasures? How did these actions—there was, after all, a story, continuity, action if one simply followed the pictures in order—fit in with lubrication, fluid replenishment, twisting screwing unscrewing of filters and gaskets?
You might think I would have snuck down there again, regularly, to catch glimpses of that cornucopia, would have snuck in friends, but I did not. When I shut the door on the car that had led me to the pile, I left behind those magazines, as well. I never went near that corner of the garage, treated it like it was radioactive. On the several occasions in later years that he invited me to join him in his hobby, my skin bristled and I stayed on the far side, always aware of the pile even while I tried to follow his demonstrations.
But that first time, when he got back the next day, and went to work on the car that evening, I listened from the racecar, and heard more than I ever had before. Every scrape, every squeak, was the tweaking of a larger engine, one that powered a vast, unfathomable desire machine. As I pleasured myself, lying still on the bed, I felt that machine overtake me, subsume me, bear me off.
By the time I was in college, there were lifelong habits, well-entrenched. My ears got the better part of my education. “Origins of Twentieth Century Music,” “The Baroque Mind,” sure, but others based solely on the quality of the professor’s voice. “Middle Eastern Geopolitics” only because of the prof’s voice was every bit the chanteuse’s. Others would skip class and get the notes online, but I couldn’t afford to miss a single one. When someone would ask why I was taking a certain class, I’d say only that I was auditing.
Freshman year I had a roommate—I always want to call him Sal Paradise, because he was always using On the Road to seduce women. Dave Mercer. It took us no more than a couple of seconds to recognize that we would never be close, would swap neither clothes, nor raucous stories, nor women. Our longest volley would be “Hey, what’s up?” and “Not much,” and we’d take down phone messages from people about whom we’d occasionally realize we knew nothing.
But Mercer had a huge impact on me. I remember the night. He said, “Hey, you wanna do the towel on the door thing, you know?”
I hadn’t exactly been escorting a steady stream of women back to our room, so I knew he was talking about himself. “Whatever, man,” I shrugged.
“I got ‘bout as close as you can get to a sure thing tonight, ya know.”
I saw the towel dangling on the door when I got back from the library. Walked downstairs a bit and then around the quad, and around and around. Kept glancing up at our window. At midnight the towel was still there. I leaned into the old, thick, door, and then I lay down in the middle of the hall, ear at the gap. I only caught the faintest semblance of sounds from within. Then someone came by, and I feigned being passed out. A girl whose voice I recognized as belonging to someone beautiful snorted and said, “Is that Jeff Simmons? I saw him in the library like two hours ago!” I went away and came back at one-fifteen and the towel was gone.
Another night I was lying in the dark, and heard the mirth of what sounded like at least three people outside the door. One disappeared, and then several minutes of slurping, nuzzling, whispering, ensued. I was frozen like I’d been over the garage, the dorm-cot-caliber bed more challenging to keep hushed. They clattered their way in, and I lay in the darkness as they groped, the sounds sliding and sluicing. You can tell me that technically, legally, commonsensically, I didn’t have sex that night, but when I tell you that I assuredly did, as much as Dave and whoever she was—I gave her brunette locks and athletic build—you’ll have to decide whether to leap with me. Some buy into ghosts, and some into telepathy; I make no supernatural claims. I was merely having sex from across the room.
Okay, make your safe-sex jokes, “Eve’s-dropping her pants for me yet again” and so forth.
Out in the real world it’s a lot harder to get vicarious sex. Aural, I mean. People think, the Internet, they think, the video industry is booming, porno is Mainstream America, at least in the blue states. Problem with that is that it’s all prerecorded. Think about a jazz buff; does a recording keep him happy? Even if it’s Mingus’s 1953 session with Parker, Gillespie, Powell, and Roach on shrink-wrapped vinyl we’re talking about, the answer is a resounding no. He’d murder to see Mingus live. Five minutes of Mingus’s bass-plucking would probably hold him under penitentiary conditions—he could live in that space of three hundred seconds for a lifetime.
Every couple, you see, is a jazz ensemble. As with jazz, there’s structure—you can pick up the melody if you’re experienced and know what to listen for, sometimes even on the first take. Your generic moans and groans are your blues base. Sometimes, you get extended overtures of panting and slurping, trading licks. But a thousand-and-one kinds branch off from there. There’s Steady-as-she-goes weekend sex, practically marked on the calendar, same time every week. There’s Last-ditch-before-you-go-away sex, and I’ve-so-much-been-waiting-for-you sex. There’s Hurry-he-could-be-home-any-minute, there’s It’s-all-over sex, what I call Ova-all-in sex, even Sex-in-overalls, there’s I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening sex, there’s sex that starts and then, as suddenly, sputters and stalls. There’s him-him sex, voices as easily distinguished as a trumpet from a saxophone. I’ve never heard her-her sex, though I’ve thought about paying for it, renting a Provincetown bungalow to bring the odds crashing down. And of course, there’s Fling-each-other-down sex. That’s like your one chance to play the Blue Note; you don’t pause to check if you’ve really got wings. Sometimes, no matter the genre, the tune changes midsong. Improvising—sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it comes back to the chorus, but usually slides into slumber. Encores? Optional. A few occasions, I’ve had to refrain from applauding.
I’ve taken in many a performance in many a venue. Won’t sign a lease for more than a year—too limiting, doesn’t matter if Casanova’s my neighbor. I’ve had a couple of girlfriends—I’m not a freak, not a prude either, and neither were they. One, Melissa, did everything right, and I don’t just mean in the bedroom—she was nurturing, witty, responsible and responsive. We connected…almost. But I would still find myself harboring secret desires for the very sweet couple upstairs, who seemed almost like this colonial couple. I could picture him signing off on the Declaration of Independence while she churned buttermilk. They were mild and polite in the stairwell, but in the bedroom, and at times the living room, they staged a veritable Revolution.
This was intermittent; sex with Melissa was good. So why is it, then, that I sent away for a mail-order made-in-Japan hearing-enhancement device, eagerly awaiting their “Redcoats are coming” moans, their gunpowder creaks and exhalations? I began to savor Anna, my neighbor’s, very footsteps, which, when I fixed the device in my ear, revealed every groan and cry in the floorboards. Once my hearing was augmented, I began to listen to more than the coupling. I began to take comfort in her movement from room to room, and her lingering.
And I began listening to their breakfast conversations, and their talks lasting late into the night when they opted for non-physical intimacy, griped about inane bosses and voiced dreams and traded stories of childhood and demanded to know whether the other had meant something by something. Once, I sprinted to the bathroom, bladder about to burst but determined not to miss a single detail, and most especially not the shift, should it come, from tenderness to lust. As I ran, I forgot for a few seconds that I was wearing the device, was shocked by the way my footsteps thundered. Instead of removing the earpieces, I kept them on, envisioning myself 18 feet tall. My urine magnified that many times sounded mammoth—the words “Niagara” and “Viagra” ricocheted off one another in my mind. I flushed, forgetting for a second that I was micced, and it sounded like a tsunami has to, the illusion enough to make me leap with arm upraised, bracing myself for a wave that would never come.
I began to feel in touch with Anna’s different moods. She was home much more often than he was. One afternoon, I heard her weeping openly on the phone. Channeled through my crude equipment and muffled by the thickness of the ceiling, it reduced her to a dog’s pitiable whining.
“I don’t…I can’t understand why he would do that,” she was saying between sobs.
I was losing key words, like straining to hold onto a distant radio station. I tried adjusting, held the mike with my arm stretched up, but I only got more floorboard-creak.
I resolved after this to do better, found a shop with an ominous silvery-marble front and blackened windows that specialized in actual surveillance and spy equipment. They also sold anti-spy equipment. Smart—keep up with the Joneses, then sell right back to the Joneses. After some consultation with a salesman who was more used car dealer than James Bond, I opted to get an amplifier that “was guaranteed to filter out the interfering hums of refrigerator and dishwasher.” Tested in hotels notorious for diplomatic closed-door negotiations where traffic and street noise were ubiquitous. Now I felt bionic, wearing a brand-new set of ears that would deliver voices only, editing out randomness and asides. My signal would shoot sky-high, my noise plummet. I was breathless with anticipation of nights when Melissa wouldn’t be able to come over, or would go away on business, and I could indulge.
I sometimes thought Melissa would even understand. Me, I’m a book-on-tape guy, but she was a chronic reader. Sometimes I’d lie next to her and listen as she licked her fingertip and turned page after page. Once I picked up a book of stories she’d left propped open on the night-table. Flipping through, I stumbled on a story with a graphic sex scene, one that almost made me blush. So I figured that she might even get it, might understand how every consonant in “fuck” and “me” was an atoll, every spring’s recoil a swaying frond, every slosh a daiquiri. And yet, I have to admit I don’t even fully understand it myself. I mean, I can almost grasp the physical part of it. But how is it that I got so wrapped up in Anna—riveted by her long-distance phone calls? How is it that I found myself cheering from below as I heard her summoning up the courage over months and months to tell her father, implore him, damnit, to put aside his work and look at them for once, to hear them, listen to them, her, her mother, at long last?
# # # # #
TH: The story was conceived a few summers ago in David Huddle’s class in Fiction Writing at the Bread Loaf School of English. Every class we contracted around a certain theme, and each wrote a story every Tuesday and Thursday for workshop. Six weeks, nine stories; nothing like having the flame held to the heels. On this day it was “perversion.” We cheered, but it was tougher than it seemed. Coming up with a “new” perversion is, of course, impossible. Under deadline, things came together as they must–randy neighbors, a visit to a Spy Shop in New York, the bizarre ways proximity and distance play out in every sexual impulse and act.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Horvath has completed his MFA in fiction writing at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of numerous stories, currently assembled as The Complicator and Other Stories, and a novel-in-progress, whose latest alias is Goodbye in Many Languages. He asks that people visit him on his MySpace and his website.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, June 24th, 2007.
