Stepping down from her black SUV in front of Car Wash to the Stars, a girl in orange bodycon drops something–a belt or purse strap, maybe–beside her nubuck boot heel. Karen’s at the wheel of the family Volvo, Ken in the passenger seat. He’s fiddling with his phone, so it’s only Karen who sees the woman bend over to retrieve her lost item, her nyloned ass presented to the passing car. In photography they call this the ecstatic moment. A younger Karen would’ve pointed out the woman, and she and Ken would’ve taken a cartoony ogle, cracking each other up with bug eyes and wolf howls. But Karen now keeps her mouth shut, eyes fixed. The radio news tells them people have lost everything in the fires, from grand pianos to baby albums. Ken clears his throat for the millionth time. Only Karen’s eyes move, following the disappearing seam. When the woman stands, Karen sees the retrieved item: a pink leather leash, attached to a pink collar around the woman’s neck. The woman offers the handle to the unseen driver of the car and crawls in on all fours.
Karen asks Ken for a divorce. She finds her dream apartment: an older courtyard building on the west side of town in an historically gay neighborhood, around the corner from a rainbow-themed restaurant with drag brunch on Sundays. The neighborhood is in harm’s way, in the path of fires and fault lines, but that makes living there all the more exciting. The people are livelier, the colors richer.
Karen’s building is rent controlled, painted sage green, with original wood floors and tall windows that look out on an ornamental pepper tree. Karen thinks she will be happy here. She stands naked in the living room with the windows open and whispers encouraging sentiments. Without Ken or the kids, you will discover your true self. This apartment will be your sanctuary, a room of your own, a home to bring a woman, when you bring a woman home.
Karen paints the walls bright colors to herald her bright life. Teal living room. Yellow kitchen. Pink dining room. Powder blue bedroom. She drops a box–this is all she does, drop one box, a box of records, moving it from one end of the room to the other–and the trouble with Downstairs Tina begins.
There comes a furious knocking, then the buzzer, then a hammering of fists until Karen opens up. Downstairs Tina is standing there with her drawn face, out of breath and younger than you’d expect, black hair in a high ponytail. Downstairs Tina has dragged along her boyfriend as muscle. The boyfriend never speaks. She has trained him not to.
“Whatever you’re doing up here, it’s really loud. You know. We’re trying to watch television. And there’s been all this noise. Remember that we’re down there. It’s so much louder for us than it is for you. Okay?”
Karen apologizes, says it was just the one box, she just moved in, it’s only 7:30 on a Monday night, and anyway, she’s finished.
“Are you sure you’re done? I don’t want to come upstairs again. It’s really inconvenient. You should be more considerate. Thanks for understanding!” yells Downstairs Tina, already turning away.
Throughout the confrontation, the super keeps his door propped open. He’s peeping through the screen across the hall.
Karen gives Downstairs Tina her cell phone number so next time she can send a message. Downstairs Tina swiftly becomes her most frequent correspondent.
Your bed squeaks.
Was that you scurrying across the kitchen at 2AM? What are you doing up there??????
There’s a clause in the lease requiring 80% rug coverage. How many rugs do you own? It’s not enough. I could report you, but I’m warning you first in case you didn’t know. I’m trying to be a good neighbor.
You should water your plants more often. They’re all dried out, it’s an eyesore.
Excuse me, is my TV volume too loud for you? Why didn’t you say something instead of cranking up your stereo? That’s really passive aggressive. Can’t we just get along?????
Karen tries to be a good neighbor. She tiptoes on talkative floorboards. She arranges rugs along the quietest path but in the morning and after sunset when the wood is warming or cooling nowhere is safe. Karen imagines Downstairs Tina tracking her paths through the apartment. Wearing extra-thick socks, Karen pads from bed to bathroom, to refrigerator to bathroom, because the thought of Downstairs Tina is giving Karen nervous shits, from bed to the kitchen window from which Karen has convinced herself no one can smell the pot, though all the while she’s perched on the counter smoking she watches her phone, expecting Tina’s text, from bed to the refrigerator again because now Karen has shat everything she’s hungry again. She adopts a cat but has to give it back to the shelter because it meows for attention and Downstairs Tina says the cat is keeping her up at night and tearing up the floors and wouldn’t it be awful if someone told the building owners and Karen had to pay to have them refinished.
Obviously, Karen can’t bring anyone home to such an environment. She’s too dejected to go on dates. Mostly sits around in the apartment reading. She starts dreaming about Downstairs Tina. Tina in her bedroom, holding a pillow over her face. Tina pulling open her shower curtain with the tip of a knife. Tina, naked, pushing Karen’s face between her legs with a cruel twist of her hair. At her lowest, Karen tries masturbating to the image of Tina cowed under Karen’s boot, crying, begging forgiveness and promising to be meek and good as long as she lives. Karen spends too long imagining the specific boot she’d wear and never gets off.
When Downstairs Tina leaves town for the weekend, the other tenants gather in the courtyard to discuss the situation. Downstairs Tina has declared war on the entire complex. She called the fire department on the guy next door for cooking spicy curry. He won’t use her name, refers to her only as That Bitch Through the Wall. She tore out another tenant’s new cactus across the courtyard because she said it posed a child safety hazard, though there are no children in the building. Tina tried to have the super’s poodle impounded. He refuses to say her name out loud, only mouths it silently like he’s afraid of summoning an evil spirit.
The super leans in and whispers in Karen’s ear: “The woman who lived in your unit before, her name was Melody. She moved out because she couldn’t take it. Melody lived there ten years. Four months after [Tina] moved in, Melody was gone. That’s what she wanted. She wanted her gone. [Tina] wanted the apartment. I wouldn’t give it to her. I told management to deny her application. That’s why she hates me.”
“You could’ve told me this before I moved in,” Karen says, peeved.
“Yes,” says the super, “But you seemed so happy. I didn’t want to upset you.”
The neighbors invite Karen into their conspiracy. “We can force her out. We can make things uncomfortable. Join us,” says Millie, the owner of the slain cactus.
“No thank you. I’m on a journey of forgiveness,” Karen replies.
When Tina returns, the neighbors do not band together. The super keeps carrying his poodle up and down the stairs so its nails won’t disturb her. Tina is ensconced, a dictator in her stucco bunker.
One afternoon, Karen hears Tina raging at her silent boyfriend. “You stupid motherfucker! You fucking dog!” she screams. A slap. The sound of struggling, then shattered glass. Karen leaves the apartment quickly by the back stairs.
A sunset stroll will do her good. Karen smokes a little pot to calm her nerves. Down the block she sees a youngish woman in a white linen dress, luminous in the dying light. The woman’s glossy brown hair is twisted in a chignon, a hairstyle Karen always coveted but never mastered. Karen decides to follow, trying not to think what this makes her: a lesbionic cougar stalking her prey. The woman leads Karen through the neighborhood, and as she draws nearer Karen sees the linen dress is wrinkled around the rump and thighs. The chignon is coming loose. There’s a streak of green up the skirt. Her walk is loose-limbed, lolling, like someone freshly fucked.
When the woman turns down a long gravel drive past listing stands of bamboo, Karen follows. The driveway leads to a small museum: an architecturally significant house held under preservation, hosting occasional exhibitions by a single artist, a metropolitan ceramicist, and open to the public for a small fee. The woman in the linen dress sits on a bench outside the office and stares into the neighbor’s hedge, unimpressed. Karen can’t sit down beside her, can she? How does a woman make a pass at another woman?
Instead she walks past the woman and enters the small admissions office. The two arthouse characters hunched behind a tall counter inside don’t make eye contact even after she says hello. One of the attendants is tall and black, berobed in silver chains, with a knot of dreadlocks over one shoulder. The other is a doughy person with a shaved head and a dot of black eyeliner beneath each eye. They are both wearing colorless kimonos over baggy linen jumpsuits. They appear to Karen as ancient acolytes of some mystic order.
Karen says, “Do I pay here?” hoping the idea of completing a transaction will prove too tedious and the genderless guardians will simply wave her through. Neither appears especially motivated to assist her. Finally the doughy one mumbles something that sounds like “If you must,” and holds out a yeasty hand to accept the card. She has no idea what they charge her; she says a silent prayer to the banking gods that she isn’t about to overdraft her account for the third time this month. As the credit machine tongues her card, the doughy attendant asks the other in a surprisingly deep voice if they’ve seen the latest Cuaron film. The dreadlocked attendant shakes their head. “I’m holding a visual media fast this year,” they say.
“You’re missing a transcendent experience,” replies the doughy one, sighing and handing Karen back her card, along with a map.
“I’ve broken free of the tyranny of the image,” says dreadlocks. “You can’t drag me back into your cult, honey.”
The house is a single level, save the sleeping baskets, which Karen discovers later, with two main wings arranged in a pinwheel, expanding out from the center, a tiny anteroom with a guestbook and a poster explaining the current art exhibit. The house has no front, no back, and no private rooms. Elements are arranged in panels: windows, doors, walls, closets, grass, all squared neatly and joined together without seam. Karen expects a security presence of some kind, or at least a doddering docent, propped up in a corner like a musty umbrella. But she is free to roam the house unnoticed, and there are no cameras, and no one comes in to yell at her when she grows bold enough to open cabinet doors and turn the water on and off in the deep concrete soaking tub, obviously built for sharing. Each communal concrete room is identical–nearly. Light behaves differently, concentrated or diffuse on unexpected surfaces. The door Karen came in is never in the place she left it, and she can’t be sure what she’ll find on the other side.
A handful of other visitors, Scandinavians mainly, appear through panels like lit statuary, then disappear, leaving Karen alone with the house again. But Karen is not alone in the house. The house was not designed for one.
Karen stops in the kitchen and reads a quote in the visitor’s brochure, describing the architect’s wife: “Pauline was a very, very difficult woman . . . very troubled emotionally. . . . It would have been almost impossible for anyone to get along with her.”
Karen wonders if the architect’s wife ever loved a woman. That’s usually what they mean by “difficult.” She wonders if the woman in the linen dress is still there outside, sitting Frenchly on her bench, apparently waiting for nothing in particular. Karen weighs the idea of going back out to sit beside her. To introduce herself, to make her laugh. To lean over and kiss her boldly. She had always wanted to be kissed boldly. She’d waited too long to receive something that would never come.
In the connecting room there is no furniture, so Karen sinks to the concrete floor, back against the cold slab of wall. She looks back at the pamphlet but keeps her ears perked. She reads a quote from Pauline herself, to her husband, the architect: “I am grateful to you…for this house, which has been so dear to me that in a way it has determined my life.”
Karen hears a furtive shuffling of feet. The sound is at ear level, as though someone is walking on air right beside her face, some three feet above the ground. Beside her there is nothing but a concrete wall. If someone is creeping around in midair, they’ve gone to great lengths to make themselves invisible.
“Who’s there?” Karen says, too quietly for any living person to hear. “Show yourself!”
No one does. The shuffling moves out of earshot. Karen is surprised to realize she is not afraid. She doesn’t feel haunted. Rather, she feels a kind of longing, a sincere wish that whoever it is would stop and talk awhile.
Now there are two voices, male and female, whispering fiercely at one another, but Karen cannot locate their source. She peeks through the doorways leading off of the room. In the bathroom she turns on the taps, thumbs the long neck of the sink, stops the stream again, and the voices fall silent. Did the male voice sound especially cold and poisonous, and did the female voice sound frightened? Who spoke last? What are the conditions of this silence?
I should bring Downstairs Tina here, Karen thinks. She’d hate it.
Karen climbs into the deep soaking tub and sits on her heels, hands on her thighs.
“Open your mouth. Take it,” says the male voice.
Without thinking, she lets her jaw fall open. Karen’s nipples tingle and she feels herself growing aroused. The woman in the chignon is outside, her back straight against the outer wall, just feet away. Karen lets out a hot, heavy breath. One hand drifts between her thighs.
She hears the female voice clearly, as though the unseen woman’s lips are right beside her ear.
“Coward.”
With some trial and error Karen finds the door leading outside. The woman in the linen dress is gone; in her place is a woman around Karen’s age with thin blonde bangs cut blunt across her forehead. The woman is holding a black leather sketchbook. Karen thinks she looks vaguely like Karen’s daughter’s art teacher, Ms Florence, who Karen always suspected was either a Scientologist or bisexual. Ms Florence had a habit of intense eye contact, her watery blue eyes probing for some other entity hidden behind your face. Ms Florence’s suspicions were dead on. Nine of the ten students she regarded this way came out in later years. One of the girls became a Congressman. Karen doesn’t know which of the graduates joined the Church.
“Excuse me,” Karen says to the blonde woman, “was there another woman sitting here before? Brunette, kind of stylish? She’s a girlfriend of mine, we were supposed to meet here, but I got wrapped up in something…”
“There was. She went inside with a man, just a few minutes ago. He was in a suit, white hair. Those rimless glasses. He looked like an architect. They looked…friendly.” The blonde has an unplaceable accent, maybe Slavic, with a hint of lisp.
“Shit,” says Karen, without knowing what she’ll say next. The house is still in her, or part of her is still in the house.
“Isn’t it peaceful here,” says the blonde woman, “But also exciting? This house is always a surprise. The comfort of a dwelling lies in its complete control of space. That’s from the architect’s manifesto. 1916. Have you ever met a house that made you feel this way?”
“No,” says Karen. “I thought my new apartment would, but it’s the opposite.”
“This house is exemplary of the California lifestyle. It was built in 1922, long before the wealthy desired to live in big concrete boxes. It was a visionary achievement. But the architect never received his due recognition. His partner surpassed him. His partner’s buildings look better than they feel, I think. That is often what it takes. The architect lived in this house until his death. Not so grand, for a man of his genius.”
“This is my first visit. My girlfriend said she would show me around.”
“I could show you, if you like,” says the woman. “I study architecture. I was about to head inside.”
“I’d like that,” says Karen.
“Maybe we’ll find your girlfriend. And her mystery man. This house was designed to encourage sexual freedom. You may feel totally private. Then you turn the corner and there’s an orgy.”
Karen follows the blonde woman back into the house through a different entrance concealed under vines. Her name is Aminda; she’s German, but grew up in Singapore.
“You’re not the first visitor I’ve taken under my wing. Some people get very lost in here. There are no boundaries, you see.”
Speaking platforms open to an audience of trees. Trumpet vines thatch the sleeping baskets. Fire flues of beaten copper absorb sunlight until they glow like slabs of fire. Rows of small pink landscaper’s flags line the walkways, warning visitors to stay off the grass. Karen wonders what might explain the sounds she heard earlier. Is it simply that in this house, with its many points of entry, one is never alone? She listens once more, but the house has fallen silent. Still there is this itchy feeling, as though someone is standing just behind and breathing down her neck.
Aminda gives an impromptu lecture about the architect and his wife, leading Karen away from the house, out across the lawns towards the back of the property. Karen hears a new sound carried on the evening winds, the ones that started the fires not so far away. The sound of sobbing. This too issues from everywhere and nowhere. Outside and in. Right there beside them and very far away. The farther from the house Karen walks, the louder and more heartbroken it seems.
“They had an open marriage, you know,” says Aminda. “Mainly for his benefit.”
Karen had discussed this possibility with Ken, before the end. But she was terrified in her heart, as a woman, of Ken falling in love with another woman. She did not have such concerns for herself, at the time. She thought she had discipline.
When they are some distance from the house, Karen turns around to face it, expecting that she will at last be able to comprehend the structure in its entirety, to pinpoint the sobbing’s source and to soothe it. But their path has taken them down a gentle slope, and from where she stands now the house appears disconnected, estranged. The sleeping baskets collapse. Bamboo feathers one wing. New configurations of panels appear. The house’s center shifts magnetically in response to their departure. The distant sobbing becomes glassy, fountainish laughter: the laughter of the woman in the linen dress.
Aminda produces a pair of birdwatcher’s binoculars from her satchel. “There are windows all along the top. The architect intended for the house to be lit entirely by natural sources. But he didn’t want his guests to worry about peeping Toms. If one’s surroundings are private, it will be much easier to reveal oneself inside.”
Karen takes the binoculars. Squinting, pressing the binoculars hard into the bridge of her nose, she sees the crown of a glossy brown head, hair loose now, bobbing towards the narrow stair that leads to the baskets. Karen and Aminda wait in silence for the apparition, hardly breathing.
The man emerges first. His skin is milky-smooth despite his white hair. He looks like the curator of a foreign museum, a secret agent. He looks around to make sure they are alone, and his eyes slide over Karen and Aminda. He holds out his hand for the woman in the linen dress to help her onto the platform. Through swaying trumpet flowers they see him take her by the waist and kiss her, his precision grading swiftly into wolfishness. He unties the sash and unbuttons the dress from neck to waist, exposing her breasts, small enough not to need a bra. Even without her dress, the woman remains detached, her face a beautiful mask turned towards the garden. From the sleeping basket, she has a panoramic view. Her eyes rove over the lawns and restless bamboo, purplish cattails, small orchard, the sunken pond that holds ivy instead of water.
The man bends her over the railing and buries his face in her hair, unzips his fly. She bows her head and takes him. He turns her around and hoists her up to perch on the railing, then continues his cruel rhythm. She throws her head back. The woman doesn’t make a sound as he penetrates her. She stares straight at Karen with her mouth open, a soft black hole. Karen sees the woman see Karen’s binoculars and Aminda’s warning hand. The woman takes in Karen’s gray hair, her Eileen Fisher sweater, her body straining towards the scene.
The man’s hands, especially long and fine-boned, wrap one over the other around the woman’s white neck. He drives harder, her whole body shuddering as he makes contact, and scoots her closer to the edge. The man’s hands tighten, his face contorted into a lascivious grimace. Her face flushes red, then purple and her white hands scrabble at his chest. Will he stop?
Aminda touches Karen’s arm with a look of concern.
“Is that your friend? That looks painful. We should intervene, don’t you think?”
“It’s alright,” says Karen. “I don’t actually know her.” She is horrified by the emotion rising in her belly. Not fear, not protectiveness, not her responsibility to defend another woman against violence. Excitement. She wants to see the woman die.
“I’m sorry, I can’t stand by and do nothing,” Aminda says, her voice steely, all hint of flirtation gone. She holds out her hand for the binoculars. Karen doesn’t move. She holds the lenses to her eyes. The woman struggles. The man’s face pulses with his gathering orgasm. The dress waves and ripples over the balcony like a flag.
The vision dissolves as Aminda yanks the binoculars from her grip and takes off across the lawn. Karen shakes herself awake and runs after her.
“Wait, I’m coming!”
“I’m coming!” the man shouts. Drool drips from the woman’s gaping mouth onto the leaves of a climbing nasturtium. Her exposed breasts point sideways and her torso is raked with red streaks from his manicured nails.
Aminda pounds up the narrow staircase to the sleeping basket with Karen on her heels, reaching the basket at the moment he releases her neck and withdraws. The woman has been balanced so carefully that this small act upsets her equilibrium and she falls, screaming, and lands in the empty reflecting pond with a thud. Aminda and Karen are alone in the sleeping basket. There is no man to be found, and they are blocking the only exit. Karen runs to the balcony, expecting to see the woman’s mangled body among the skunk cabbages, but there is nothing, an unruffled carpet of green.
“What the fuck,” Karen says. “What the fuck.”
To her horror, Aminda laughs. Her eyes are hard as diamonds.
“Pauline put on a show for us.”
“Who?”
“The architect’s wife. Her ghost, anyway.”
“What the fuck, Aminda. This house is haunted? I didn’t see that in the pamphlet. You could’ve warned me.”
“They don’t like to talk about it. Attracts the wrong kind of crowd. Pauline was killed by her lover at a party. It happened in front of everyone. Including her husband. He said that was her wish.”
Aminda steps close to Karen, close enough that she can see faint lines forming between her eyebrows and smell the musky perfume on her neck. The balcony railing cuts into her back.
“You want to fuck,” Aminda says, more of a statement than a question. “I smelled it as soon as you arrived.”
Karen notices Aminda’s strong, square hands. She has a tattoo of a black snake on her inner wrist.
“You’re deceitful,” counters Karen. “You tricked me.”
“Why else would you come here?”
“I have a bad neighbor.”
“We’ll make short work of her,” says Aminda with a mischievous grin.
Karen takes Aminda by the throat and forces her to her knees. The last rays of sun wither and die, leaving the sleeping basket wreathed in blue shadow.
“Open your mouth,” Karen commands. She lets the spit fall from her lips onto Aminda’s waiting tongue.
— Mads Gobbo is a writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. She is the co-author of Double Black Diamond, a short story collection published by Double Negative Press in 2025.