I have put my earplugs now, and I can just barely hear the sound of rocks being tumbled in a cement mixer in the apartment above, so now I can gripe. It’s noisy here. Real noisy. I recently bought my first apartment in NY.
I was living the cloistered contented life of an Upper West Sider, living in a solidly built, Pre-War building, with walls a foot thick, taking the quiet for granted, clueless and happy. But I was renting and wanted to own, and so I departed that gentle place.
After the typical tortured search, I found a place I could afford to buy, in a Post War building. My new apartment was the right size, a decent price, in a good location. Being a Post War building meant it didn't have the details of my old place – in fact it looked a little like a hospital inside – but it was immaculate and on a block I loved, and did I mention it was affordable?
The noise didn’t begin until the second month I’d been there. It was the most amazing sound: the crisp, clipped, clomp of high heels, treading down the public hallway upstairs. I sat up and did the human equivalent of cocking my ear as I heard the key upstairs inserted into the lock, the turning of tumblers, the entrance of the high heel-wearing neighbor above.
As my eyes widened (which they do, by the way, whether or not you can see the remarkable thing happening), I heard her (I assumed it was a her – I hadn’t yet gotten into the fantasizing part of this sonic experience), put her lead-lined handbag on the floor, kick off her heels – into the wall – and pound into the kitchen.
After a few minutes of quiet, I relaxed. I comforted myself with the thought that there must be some special level of humidity in the atmosphere, carrying the sound in a particularly extreme way, like how you always hear a train when it rains, or a lawnmower when it’s sunny outside, and never any other time.
An hour later, I was lying in my bed and I heard the woman above clomp into the bedroom above me, and heard her take off her high-heeled shoes again – didn’t she already take them off once?? – that I knew this would be my acoustic fate. As I lay there, now with my book on my chest, I heard her take off her shoes two or three more times, each time flipping them handily off her big toe against one wall or the other. I imagined she was seated and about to recline when I heard her get up and walk around the room WITH HER SHOES BACK ON. (With no actual visual evidence I started now to try to deduce what was going on up there. Fantasies began forming, not of the fun variety).
It was like “Ground hog’s Day” or a Stephen King novel. The shoes would not stay off her feet, and she could not stop walking around. Even more bizarrely, as I followed her path with my eyes marking my own ceiling, it seemed that she was walking on every inch of her bedroom – criss-crossing here, tossing the shoes off on this side of the room, and then the next.
Where is the bed?? I thought to myself. In every bedroom I’ve ever known, you can’t traverse the entire floor because: there’s a bed in the way.
But no matter how I tried to visualize the space above, she kept thwarting me – because she walked here, there, and everywhere, as, I assumed, she tried to shake off those horrible shoes (Manolos?) that kept re-attaching themselves to her feet!!
I finally fell into sleep (dreaming about Savion Glover trying to put out a fire) until 6am the next morning.
My eyes opened without my moving my head because I was on a certain level, still asleep. Working nights means that I sleep in, at least until 7:30am, and this particular morning, my body couldn’t believe that I had set an alarm. Only it wasn’t an alarm.
The woman upstairs gets out of bed and, yes, she already has shoes on. She must sleep in them I think. They must be sleeping stilettos. In a new state of amazement, I listen as she clomps to one edge of the room. A moment, and then I hear her pull out a Titanic-era steamer trunk from her closet, dragging it to the middle of the floor where she unzips it. (I know most steamer trunks don’t have zippers – this one apparently does). She unzips, and then she unzips some more, and then I hear the zipper chattering yet again, or in another direction, and then again she unzips, and then one last long unzipping makes me sit up in bed. This is ridiculous. How many zippers does this thing have?
But it’s the packing that gets me standing.
For apparently she is (I imagine) a shoe salesperson, and she stores her 600 shoe samples in various bedroom closets, and when she leaves each morning, she packs by yanking out pairs and throwing them across the room into the suitcase. Clomp, Bang, Clank, Whap. The banging continues, until she’s finished, and then she zips the trunk’s eleven zippers up again. Finally, she sets it upright and drags it away. Some mornings she has a limp as she drags, making the whole thing fairly sinister.
Suddenly the walls of my apartment shudder with the slamming of her door, and the world is still again. A picture tilts on the wall.
Since then, I’ve come to know her and her partner well without ever having met them or even seen them. He arrived the next night, unzipping his suitcase (!) for he too it seems, is a shoe salesman. He (apparently) sells steel-tipped work boots. Each night, when they get home, the routine is the same. They tip their suitcases onto the floor of the bedroom, spilling the shoes out into an enormous pile (there’s room because there mustn’t be a bed). And then, each takes turn putting the shoes on and clomping around the room showing each other the new product line. Sometimes he wears the heels, sometimes she wears the boots. Each time a route is completed, they ceremoniously remove the shoes and throw them against the wall.
They also (apparently) sell steel cylinders, perhaps thermoses? which they carry from the bedroom to the living room and back, dropping 4 or 5 in each direction. They may also sell aluminum pots, small dogs with unclipped toenails, cymbals, gongs, cue balls, and loose marbles.
There is occasionally an electrical motor of some kind that sounds in the bedroom. This thing is fascinating to me in its mystery. Even as I lie there at 1:30am, exhaustion tugging at my eyelids, I still muster the strength to marvel at the mystery of this sound. There’s electricity involved, simultaneously grinding, creaking and buzzing.
It must be a winch I imagine, perhaps used to lower the bed from the ceiling or tilting down from the wall, like a drawbridge. Even in my semi-conscious state, I admire their clever use of space.
Revenge is not called for since these two are blameless – this is their job (I think). Everyone needs shoes, and I get a sense they’re good at what they do, or at least they have an enormous inventory. But I can’t do nothing.
My newest idea is to start painting. Buy some Benjamin Moore white, and start rolling it on the ceiling. Just start that first layer of paint that every Pre War building started with in the early 20th century, lapping on another coat every year for the next 80 years, until my ceiling is 5 inches thick and soundproof.
By then I figure the market will have improved and I can just sell the place and go live in an Ashram. As long as it’s in a Pre-War building.
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