This happened a long time ago, back when I was married.

One afternoon I sat at my desk writing a letter to a company that manufactures frozen food products. I was writing to let them know I was disappointed with their meat lasagna. At one time it had been really good, this meat lasagna, quite delicious, but the last few times we had it for dinner we noticed it wasn’t quite the same. After some consideration, I realized they were cutting down on the meat and using more noodles. This pissed me off. So while I worked on this letter, writing to let them know we weren’t happy with the meat-to-noodle ratio in their lasagna, it began to register in my brain that I was hearing, from somewhere, the singular sound, faint and infrequent, but still insistent and unmistakeable, of a woman in sexual bliss.

At that time we lived on the top floor of our building, a four storey walk-up, in a corner apartment, so after pausing to listen for a minute, I got off my chair and lay down and put my ear to the floor. At first all I could hear were vibrations, the noise of pipes, the hum of electric currents, but then, much more clearly, the voice of a woman, crying out rhythmically, fading away then returning, sometimes accompanied by low grunts, presumably of a man, presumably of our downstairs neighbour. I lay there on the floor for some time, listening. Jenn was in the living room getting ready to leave for work. She must have noticed me lying on the floor by then but she didn’t say anything. I wondered for a second if she thought I’d collapsed, had a seizure or something. I lay there on the floor, looking at the clumps of dust under the radiator, listening, transixed. Jenn didn’t say a word. 

This woman downstairs was enjoying herself very much. In fact, she was so vocal and expressive, I was starting to wonder if perhaps there wasn’t any actual sex going on downstairs but instead I was listening to someone watch a porn video. At one point the woman moaned, sort of laughed and said Bad boy, in a playful manner. That gave me the shivers. The man was grunting again. It went on. Jenn had to have seen me but she said nothing. The activity downstairs seemed to be reaching a climax. It was louder. The woman’s exclamations were prolonged, high-pitched, like she was crying. I was enjoying myself, lying there, listening. I was excited. This was definitely not a movie; the voices were right there underneath me. Then they stopped. They were done. I could hear them talking.

I stood up, feeling slightly self-conscious, embarrassed. Jenn had finished packing her bag and was putting on her coat. I went out and told her I thought Norman, the fellow who lives downstairs, was having an affair. She didn’t know what I was talking about. But I was having trouble equating the plump boyish looking woman who I knew lived with Norman with the sounds I’d just heard, those cries, that voice. Norman gives guitar lessons in his apartment. It was sometimes an inconvenience for us when we had to listen to guitars tuning and scales being played over and over. I wondered if he’d met some young woman who wanted to learn how to strum chords to her favourite Miley Cyrus songs and had some original ideas about how to pay for the lessons. I saw a tanned, petite go-go dancer type with long black hair and a waist the size of a pop bottle.

My imagination started working on this and I became certain that this woman I’d listened to could not be Norm’s live-in. It wasn’t possible. This conviction became even firmer when I went down to the end of the hallway to see Jenn off. We often did this. She’d go down and get into her taxi and I’d stand at the window on the top floor and look down and wave to her as the cab pulled away.  Directly in front of the building was a shiny black Volkswagen, its parking lights flashing, and I immediately decided this car had something to do with what I’d been listening to. Norman had hired a prostitute who’d parked her car in front of the building and ran in for a $200 afternoon quickie. Soon she would be out, all cleaned up and ready to go, dressed, I imagined, in a tight halter top, a very short black skirt and thigh-high leather boots. I waved to Jenn as she got into the taxi but she didn’t look or wave back and the taxi pulled away and was gone. The Volkswagen sat there, lights blinking, waiting. And I waited too, waited to get a glimpse of Norm’s whore, waited to see her come out and drive away.