Balls

Illustration by Jane Raese

At twenty years old I was living on my own in a sixth-floor walkup in Chicago. Tamara Grigoryan lived in the apartment across the hall. She was twenty-one and worked as a cashier in a nearby pharmacy. The dingy hallway between us was dimly lit during the day by whatever light came through a frosted glass window at the top of the landing and at night by a forty-watt bulb screwed into a white ceramic fixture on the wall with a silvery beaded pull chain. I can tell you the date exactly—April 5, 1968—because Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated the day before, and there were fires and riots on the west side of the city, which was close enough that no one in our neighborhood was venturing out onto the street. I was in my underwear, in bed, on my back, a book held up to the light from a night-table lamp, reading a novel about a fictional Chicago airport in a snowstorm. That night I was so deep into this story that for a long time I ignored the repetitive thumping on the wall above my head. It sounded like Tamara was playing handball against her bedroom wall. Eventually, I laid the book down beside me and listened long enough to decide she was definitely bouncing a ball against the thin layers of drywall that separated her bedroom from mine. I knew it was her bedroom because most mornings I'd wake up to a short crescendo of groans that built to a remarkably similar orgasmic moan, followed a few moments later by the sound of footsteps and the dim watery hiss of a shower. Often, I would join Tamara, masturbating quickly to the sound of her moaning, and then shower and head off to work myself. Occasionally we met on the stairs, where she would offer me a coy smile—as if she knew I must have heard her through the thin walls. Beyond that we had never said anything to each other more extensive than "Good morning" or "Hi." I had always been shy around women, and Tamara's boldness apparently didn't extend beyond the isolation of her bedroom.

That night I lay in bed a good long while waiting for the thumping to quit. I'd been in my apartment for several months, and she had been across the hall when I moved in—and nothing like this had happened before. Granted, it was no ordinary night. There were fires burning out of control and rioting and looting going on outside, and now and then the cackle of gunfire somewhere snapped the peace of our usually quiet streets. Later I'd learn that some forty people were shot and killed before the rioting was over, but I didn't know that then. Then, that night, all I wanted was to stay in my apartment with my door securely locked and bolted.

I had come to Chicago from New York, where I'd left home a few months after graduating from high school. The youngest of seven children, I was the boy in a set of fraternal twins, and by the time we came along, my forty-year-old father was already constantly outraged by the burden of raising a family. The addition of two more children turned him into a raging tyrant. For many years I thought he hated me, and I hated him in return. Over time, as the children left home one by one, he mellowed. I figured out that he was a man overwhelmed by his life

and that he didn't really hate me and I didn't really hate him. Still, he was relieved to see me go, and I was relieved to move out. I did miss my mother, who was a loving if ineffectual woman, and I had a picture of her and my father and my brothers and sisters on the wall over my bed. When the glass rattled and the frame canted to one...