The argument came through the wall at eleven o'clock at night and it did not knock first. The wall was plaster and lath and the plaster was thin and the lath was thinner and the argument came through both of them the way light comes through a curtain. You could not see the argument but you could hear every word and the words were not your business and you listened anyway because the wall had made them your business by not being thick enough.

The man's voice was low and constant like a motor running. The woman's voice was high and intermittent like a siren. The man said the same thing over and over in different words and the woman said different things in the same voice and the argument was not about what they were saying. The argument was about the space between them that used to be smaller and was now the size of a kitchen and growing.

You lay in bed and you listened to the argument the way you listen to the radio when you cannot find the station. You caught words. Fragments. A name. A date. A number that sounded like money or a year or an address that one of them had been to without the other. The fragments did not make a story. The fragments made a feeling. The feeling was that two people who had once chosen each other were now choosing the argument instead and the argument was winning.

The argument ended the way all arguments in tenements ended. A door slammed. The slam was the period at the end of the sentence. The slam said this conversation is over and the slam was lying because the conversation would continue tomorrow at eleven o'clock through the same wall. The slam shook the plaster and a small piece of plaster fell from my ceiling and landed on my pillow and the piece of plaster was the argument's way of reminding me that I lived inside the argument even though the argument was not mine.

I played guitar in my apartment and the arguments were the music I played over. The guitar was my wall. Thicker than plaster. Thicker than lath. When the argument started I played louder and the guitar covered the argument and the argument covered the silence and the silence covered whatever it was that the man and the woman were trying to say to each other underneath all the words they were using to not say it.