I took the cushion cover off that evening and soaked it for forty minutes and it did not come out.
I went upstairs.
The second conversation was different from the first.
The difference was not dramatic — he didn’t shout, I didn’t shout. The difference was in the quality of his attention, or more precisely the absence of it. He leaned against his door frame and looked at me with the mild expression of someone who has already decided how this conversation ends.
“You’re still doing it,” I said.
“It’s a tea bag.”
“It stains. I’ve thrown out a towel, and now a cushion cover.”
He looked at me for a second with that mild expression.
“You live underneath,” he said. “That’s how buildings work.”
And then he smiled. Not the friendly unfocused smile from the first conversation. A different kind — the kind that acknowledges clearly that he is aware this is not a reasonable position, and has decided to take it anyway, because what am I going to do about it.“You’re lucky it’s tea bags and not something else.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying. Be glad it’s tea.”
And then he shut the door.
I stood on that landing for a full minute.
I want to be honest about what I felt, because the feeling is important to the story.
I was not angry in the simple way. I was angry in the complicated way — the way that includes, mixed in with the anger, a very clear-eyed understanding of exactly what was happening. He had done the calculation. He had looked at me — the woman downstairs, reasonable, eleven years of never complaining, signed for his packages — and he had decided I was the kind of person who would absorb this. Who would keep knocking on his door and being reasonable and eventually accept that this was simply a feature of living in 3B, the same way the couple in 2A argues on Sunday mornings.
He wanted me shouting.
That was the thing I understood most clearly, standing on the landing outside 4B at nine on a January evening. He wanted me to lose my composure, to knock harder next time, to become the person he could describe to mutual acquaintances as the woman downstairs who lost her mind over tea bags. He wanted to provide the story. He wanted me to provide the material.
