Hum

Figure 1.

Photograh credit Aaron Wynn

We could hear it from any point in the house—upstairs, downstairs, even the garage. From the kitchen the sound was faint, like the upswing of a snore with no silent intervals in between: all intake of breath, no release. While we were eating at the small table by the window, forks and knives clicking against our plates, it was there in the background, a reminder. If we spoke loudly, the hum could be drowned out for a moment. In the beginning we tried—it was like a game—to keep a dialogue going during the entire dinner just to cover the hum with the sound of our voices. This went on for our first few weeks in the house, but there were only the two of us there; we knew each other well, and there was not much to be said during any given meal. At one point, without ever voicing a mutual decision, we gave up. We fell into long silences, just the click of silverware on plates, the sound of wine being poured into a glass, the polite chewing—and beneath it all, or above it, the continual hum coming from the second bedroom, the source of our livelihood and of our growing discontent.

With music we could disguise it, could even forget it for three or four minutes at a time, but there was always the moment when one song ended, the tinny whir of the CD player while it moved on to the next, so that eventually even music lost its joy for me.

At night, from our room across the hall, we could hear it. "It's just white noise," my husband said. "If you'd stop thinking about it, you wouldn't notice it at all." So I tried to stop thinking about it, but the more I tried, the louder it became. My unease was intensified by the fact that we were not allowed to go into the second bedroom. In fact we had never even seen it.

Twice a month someone would stop by to check the equipment. He or she would arrive unannounced and knock discreetly on the front door. Often this person would bring a cake or a bottle of wine, so that it would look to our neighbors as though a friend had come calling. Once inside, he would avoid conversation and head straight for the second bedroom, toting a large duffel bag. Never once did any of the maintenance personnel—that's how they always introduced themselves, not by name, but simply, "Hello, I'm the maintenance personnel"—agree to stay for coffee. Their abruptness heightened my sense that even though we were merely caretakers of the equipment, not its subjects, we were under its scrutiny twenty-four hours a day.

Because the equipment had to be supervised around the clock, my husband and I never went anywhere together. If we wanted to see a movie, we would toss a coin. The winner would walk down the street, past the rows of primly painted mansions, the neat driveways with expensive cars, across the city road, to the Cinaromaplex. The place was so named because of the machines that piped appropriate smells into the theater during movies—the smell of gunpowder during a gunfight scene, smoke and liquor during a bar scene. The Cinaromaplex was even equipped with the musty scent of sex for R-rated movies, and for the more gruesome films, there was the distinct, metallic odor of blood. The winner of the coin toss would come home straight after the movie, and the one who had been housesitting would go to the next showing. Later we would discuss the movie as if we had seen it together, as if we were an ordinary couple who went on outings as a pair rather than as two halves.

It was the same way with restaurants, plays and museums. When we first moved into the house, we made a pact that we would not sacrifice these small pleasures, the many cultural offerings...