John and Carolyn were getting themselves worked up over the hot water in their building.
“I haven’t had a hot shower in two days,” John was saying. “It’s a farce!”
“Oh, yes,” said Carolyn. “Worse than that.”
“For all this rent we pay, you’d think we could get some hot water every morning. You’d never think that the owners of these kinds of buildings were so cheap.”
Carolyn was nibbling the crusts off her toast. She thought she felt a cold coming on, a tickle in the back of her throat and a lightness in her head.
“Yes,” she said. “But at least it makes me go to the gym,” she said. Carolyn hadn’t been to the gym in months but she had gone two days in a row now so that she could use the shower there. Carolyn always tried to look on the bright side of things. She wished that she could stop that.
“Just goes to show you,” John said. “It’s not always so great on the other side.” The other side was the fancy building that John and Carolyn had moved into when they found out that John’s bonus check was going to be equal to his salary for the entire year. John had spread out the New York Times real estate section and said, “Pick one, any one.”
Carolyn had a job, too. It was a small job in publishing that she liked but only brought her enough money to live in a basement apartment on the other side of the river, at best. “If we both made your salary,” John liked to say, “we’d be living in a hovel.”
John was picking up the phone and pacing by the window as he dialed. He looked out the window and yelled into the phone, which Carolyn thought was a little unnecessary. She rarely raised her voice to people. Then again, it was rare that John didn’t get his way.
“That’s right, no hot water,” he yelled. “What don’t you get? No, I’m not going to call back tomorrow morning. I’m going to take a hot shower tomorrow morning and if I don’t, you’re not going to see that big fat rent check I send you every month, do you understand? Comprende?”
Carolyn was fluent in French, but she was very shy about using it. When she and John had gone to Paris, she made him talk to all the waiters and the shopkeepers, even though he only knew a few words from the guidebook that Carolyn had coached him through. John was a little calmer when he hung up the phone, but his face was distressed, as if he had just been through a fight and his back was moist.
“Goddammit,” he said as he pulled his tie through his collar. “Now I have to change my shirt.” His shoes echoed on the floor as he walked into the bedroom and then into the closet. Carolyn had been meaning to cover the windows and buy some rugs, but still hadn’t gotten around to it. The place made a lot of noise. The place amplified all of their noises.
One thing she was glad about was that she could no longer hear their neighbors. In the apartment before this, the walls were thin and on one side she could hear the music from an alarm clock and on the other side, muffled laughter of a young couple she had seen around the building.
