These Hot Steps
Following an infidelity, a couple unpacks their apartment and the last of their relationship.
I liked to follow Jane up the stairs, and I felt her eyes paw over my back as we walked down. If you want to fall back in love with someone, move out of your home together. Move away from each other.
Neither of us needed the microwave anymore, so I carried that down to the dumpster. We lived on the third floor in an apartment complex with no elevator, and no working AC. It was a one bedroom that looked over the neighborhood. The balcony faced east, so at sunset you watched the shadow of the building you lived in slowly creep over your neighbors, and that shadow, by inches, smothered the calls of birds, wrapping them in dark quiet.
We used to sit on the patio together and listen to the birds sleep.
Her jeans hugged her waist in ways I dream I could anymore. No really, American Eagle models wish they wore denim like this. Men all want the same thing, and it’s to put our heads on a woman’s lap and cry, or just lay there while her fingers tousle our hair.
I know. We’re disgusting.
We were moving out on one of the hottest days of the summer, late August. It was so hot that when you walked into the apartment, all of your sweat got wicked straight off your forehead. One walk up and down the stairs, and you wished you were wrung out in the sink.
We took turns resting in front of a small swamp cooler. We kept a cup of ice in front of the cooler, like that would make a difference. My turns ended early in case something heavy had to be carried down. My turns were always ending early. I always had to carry something.
There were boxes of books. There was the television. Her mattress. Her TV stand. Her couch. These things her parents bought as presents for us when we moved in together, and then we threw all my furniture away.
“Thank you for helping. I wouldn’t have been able to do this myself.” Jane said. Sweat made her makeup run, and her shiny black hair stuck to her milk white forehead. She looked like a burning blur through the sweat dripping into my eyes. The shadows under her armpits looked like long teardrops.
“Yeah well, you made the decision yourself,” I said.
I dragged the couch down the stairs. Six months earlier, I was sitting on that couch when her phone buzzed. Her screen lit up with the name of her male coworker, and instead of a picture of someone’s face, there was a picture of Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo. If Jane was any other girl, this would have been really funny, except for the fact that Jane loved Rambo, and thought that Sylvester Stallone was really hot.
Ladies, you might be laughing, but what if you saw your man’s phone light up and there was a picture of his favorite pornstar and the girl calling wasn’t you?
I rest my case.
I knew Jane’s passcode, and unlocked her phone. There were messages from the day before. The coworker threatened that he could beat Jane at Street Fighter. He threatened that she wouldn’t be able to handle the margaritas he makes at home. He said, “The only reason you beat me at pool was because I was distracted by you whipping your hair.” Scroll back further, and she’s asking him if he wants to play pool.
They agreed to meet where Jane and I had our first dates. She showed up looking like Joan Jett in a halter top. She liked 80’s action movies and classic rock. She’d put Nickelback on the jukebox and headbang, her hair swinging like a flail.
I dragged the couch over by the dumpster. It wouldn’t be long before someone came and drove it away in their truck. The microwave was already gone, but the toaster oven was not. The TV was gone, but the TV stand remained.
According to the apartment’s lease, we both have to have our names on it or the lease is broken. Apartments like these require that the tenants combined monthly income is triple the rent. With Jane leaving, my monthly income barely breaks even. Therefore I couldn’t stay. I can’t keep anything.
I went up the stairs and we passed each other. She was carrying a box of arts and crafts, little model houses she’d made from cardboard, handmade Christmas ornaments and Halloween decorations.
My hand reached out and fished a finger through her belt loop. My palm rested on the part of her waist you touch when you slow dance with someone in the kitchen.
I asked if she was throwing away our little house and our ornaments, and she said she didn’t have space at her parent’s house for them.
“But you made them, they aren’t some random Star Wars or Disney ornaments that everyone else is going to have on their trees this year, they’re special.”
“Do you want them?” She asked, looking at me with those blue Elvis Presley, Siberian Husky blue eyes, eyes that looked like water from the north pole.
“No,” I said. My finger slipped from her belt loop, my hand left her waist. I went upstairs, back into the apartment. All of the paintings had already been taken down. The heat wave had killed all of the plants and we’d thrown them away already.
Our apartment somehow looked emptier than when we first moved in, like even before you move in, you’ve already furnished it with your hopes and dreams. You walk into a new home and over by the window will be your little dream-desk where you’ll work on your dream books. Behind the desk will be your hope-dinner-table, where you’ll talk about work and our plans for the future, and the walls will be covered with memories we don’t have yet but are planning to: over in the kitchen is your beach photos, and in the hall is Thanksgiving with your parents, and Christmas with hers, and the living room where you’ll build the coffee table while Star Trek: Next Generation plays on the TV and you’ll keep getting confused by the parts because nobody speaks IKEA.
When you leave, the apartment feels emptier than empty, because your memories are worth less than possibility. It has to be that memory is worth less than the possible future, or else she would not have lied to me and gone on a date with another man.
That night, I stayed up in bed, waiting. She stumbled in through the bedroom door, drunk. She threw off her clothes and collapsed next to me on the bed.
I turned toward the wall.
Her hands crept under the covers, her fingers crawled over my legs, over my lap. She leaned close to my ear. “Hi,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”
No matter how soft and warm someone’s lips are, no matter how many times she’s kissed you, when you smell a stranger on her breath, there is no bed in the world large enough for the both of you.
I carried out the dining room table. For years, we held the rule that we ate together at the dining room table. We kept the TV off and the radio on. We normally listened to the local jazz station because they didn’t air advertisements. We were eating blueberry pancakes with bacon on the side when she asked, “How would you kill someone?”
I breathed a deep pancake smell to wash out the cigarette and tequila smells from last night. My eyes were sore from not sleeping at all, while she snored and grinded her teeth next to me. “Kill you?” I said.
“No, not me specifically. Like, if you got to kill someone, how would you do it?” Jane leaned back in her chair, holding her steaming cup of coffee beneath her chin.
“You first,” I said. Already I know what dumb game this is. Already I know that this is a game she played with her coworker the night before while they were playing pool. Was it a talk they shared while chalking their sticks, or was it a little later when they sat across from each other in a booth dimly lit? Maybe it was a talk outside, leaning against the side of the building, the cherry of the cigarette floating back and forth between their lips in the dark.
“I think I would beat someone to death with a baseball bat, or a hammer,” Jane said.
The way the sun poured in between the blinds onto the breakfast table, I could only picture her doing this in a sunny field surrounded by dandelions. The white puffy kind that you wish on. Her hair a big black dandelion flying in the wind as blood spurted from me, her victim, all over the pretty flowers, my bloodweight keeping the pods from lighting into the fields beyond.
“I don’t think you have the upper body strength for that. I had to move most of the furniture in myself.” I said.
“Oh come on,” Jane said. “It’s my murder fantasy. I can hammer smash if I want! Kill them like you would, you big lug.” She sipped her coffee. “Now tell me, how would you do it?”
Her foot fished under the table for me again.
Her bare feet rubbed against my shin.
Used to be I’d lift her foot up onto my lap and rub it. Instead, I answered, “If I were to kill someone, I would kill them with kindness.”
“You wouldn’t!” Jane smiled and kicked me under the table with legs that touched another man, and I pulled away.
“No, really. I would kill them with kindness,” I said. I tongued a piece of bacon stuck between my teeth, my tongue a soft thing jabbing something sharp and crisp. Pepper.
“I would make him my best friend. I’d take him out to bars and play pool. I’d take him to clubs, and introduce him to girls. Nice girls, pretty girls. Girls like you. We’d go to Disneyland together and travel abroad. If he’s ever heartbroken, I’d tell him he’s worthy, that he’ll find someone. He’ll find a sweet girl who is smart and funny and does arts and crafts, and she’ll have a great ass. Every time we’ll hang out, I’ll microdose his food and drinks with MDMA or nicotine or something, and his brain will swim with dopamine and serotonin, and connect all those good feelings to me.”
Jane’s smile dropped into her cup.
“Then I’ll disappear. He’ll go into withdrawals, spiral into a deep deep depression. Then I’ll pop back into his life. It’s that romcom formula, how a relationship fails, and then there’s a grand gesture, an act of redemption. Then I’ll up the dose. After he’s completely dependent on me again, I’ll kill myself, with a gun, where he’ll find me. I’ll make it look like it’s your fault, and let the guilt kill you.”
“I think I’d rather be hammer murdered,” Jane said.
“What did the man you played this game with last night say?” I asked.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Last night, you went out to that pool bar we used to go to with another man. I know because I looked at your phone this morning while you were in the shower. You lied to me.”
We were left to the sound of jazz playing in the background, birds chirping, the soft clatter of our cups clinking against the table, the scrapes of silverware against plates.
We carried the bed down the stairs together. I went down first, to bear most of the weight. The staircase was narrow, the steps steep. The bed was big enough that it pushed me against the metal rail, and those black ridges burned my back from baking in the sun all day.
We couldn’t get the mattress up into the dumpster, so we leaned it against the side next to the rest of our lives we weren’t strong enough to bear. I lifted the back of my shirt and prodded the spot where the rail burned me. It stung, like touching a hot stove, and the pain hissed out of me.
“What happened?” Jane asked.
“The rail from the staircase burned me.”
“Let me see.”
I turned and lifted my shirt.
“Oh my God,” Jane said. Her soft fingers traced down the small of my back, right down the middle. The burn wasn’t there. The birds got quiet, and the building covered us in shade. Light as a feather, her fingers circled the hot spot.
The end.