Squeeze Box
Eve Marx
Word Count 980
My husband finds it both annoying and hilarious that during sex, I never make a sound. “You moan more audibly when I’m giving you a neck rub,” he complains as I grunt, groan and sigh in ecstasy as his fingers dig into my trapezius muscles and latissimus dorsi. The truth is, I trained myself early on to be silent during sex after my two-year exposure to a woman I’ll call Joanna, my next-door neighbor on Cornelia Street in New York’s Greenwich Village.
I moved into the apartment, a tiny studio, the summer of ‘77. I was not long out of grad school and another grad student I occasionally hooked up with helped find me a summer sublet around the corner on Jones; while I was living there and commuting on the subway to my boring publishing job, I saw an index card on a realtor’s window in the neighborhood advertising the Cornelia Street apartment. Within two days I was signing the lease and moving into a cramped, low ceilinged studio with no bathroom door, no closet, a place completely devoid of any charm. A couple lived in the flat downstairs; Jane was an aspiring actress and possibly high school dropout who was something like 17; her boyfriend was a moody, too old for her, 30-something musician with a huge mustache and regular guitar gigs around the corner at Kenny’s Castaways and Folk City. She and I “knew” each other because we both were slinging espresso and Sambuca at the cafe across the street, her mostly weeknights while I had the weekends. I had big boobs but hers were bigger and she drew better tips. It seemed to me she and the boyfriend did nothing but fight and fuck, their rage followed by rapture livestreamed through their ceiling and coming up through my floor boards.
If Jane and her musician lived to argue and then have noisy make up sex, they had nothing on Joanna (not her real name) who lived in the studio next to mine. The wall between our apartments was so thin I could hear her every footstep. I heard her chatting on the phone - she had a deep, throaty voice. She was in her thirties and incredibly confident. An aura of bohemian success surrounded her. She worked from home – a true freelancer - designing product packaging for a sturdy stable of big-name clients. An enormous drafting table dominated most of her living space which was otherwise decorated with flowy drapery and beaded curtains and floor pillows and tatami mats. She didn’t have a real bed, only a stack of futons covered with a paisley duvet. Her bed was never made and was always rumpled looking. An Italian moka pot for making espresso lived on the two-burner stove and her apartment was weirdly perfumed by a combination of Dragon’s Blood incense, clove cigarettes and pussy and sperm.
Joanna loved sex and had lovers, lots of them. She was a looker herself with a mass of Amy Winehouse-style hair and a trim dance-trained body. She walked around in a leotard she wore to her jazz exercise dance class. She had a pretty face and a beautiful snub nose she said her father paid for. When it came to men, she was a huntress. She didn’t wait for them to pursue her first. Like the woman/ child living downstairs, she had a preference for musicians and there was no lack of them to fall in lust with for the night; all any woman had to do was sashay into any bar or club on Bleecker Street with her green light on and she could snag a musician. I preferred actors myself. Night after night just as I was finally drifting off to sleep, the noisome music of the city — taxi’s honking, emergency sirens, sanitation trucks backing up, the high pitched laughter and shrieks of laughter as intoxicated patrons spilled out of late-night restaurants all too audible through the old tenement panes of glass — there would be the jangling of Joanna’s keys, and her door creaking open and then the thud of shoes and belt buckles dropping to the wood floor and then sex, raging sex, Joanna intermittently begging for it, bawling and caterwauling through it, grunting, beseeching, pleading for more of this, more of that, often culminating with a low, animalistic growl of string of filthy language where she begged to be fucked in the ass.
One morning after not getting much sleep thanks to Joanna, I stepped into the hallway to take the trash out and saw the door to her place was open. I peered inside. She was standing at the sink, eating a dripping peach, barefoot in her kimono, and alone. She smiled and beckoned me in and I sat on one of the ornate old brocade chairs she was always rescuing off the sidewalk while she fixed us a pot of coffee.
I heard you having sex all night, I said, rudely.
Did it keep you up, she responded teasingly.
Why do you like taking it in the ass, I said. I’d never heard of a woman liking that. I thought it was a gay guy thing.
Poor thing, she said, pityingly. You don’t really know much about sex, do you?.
Not long after, I moved out of the apartment. I moved far out of the neighborhood, all the way up to 16th Street. I quit working at the cafe and moved up in the publishing world, ever so slightly. I still admired Joanna and her freelance life and her carefree attitude towards taking lovers (she called them lovers, never boyfriends) and her decorating chops and how she always found the best stuff for free on the sidewalk. She had an eye, Joanna. But my big takeaway from living next door to her for two years was to keep quiet during sex. And never shout, “Fuck my ass!”
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
