Diamonds and Rust

Photo Credit Jeff Stroud

I'm taking an online writing class this summer with teachers Robin Rice and Emily McDowell at https://www.bewhoyouare.com/ The writing prompts are pictures and we are free to write whatever we'd like to as inspired by the photo.

I had never seen the couple in 203. When I was moving in, I noticed a grey tabby sitting on the fire escape, next to their open window. Someone was trying to learn Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust” on the guitar. A crystal suncatcher hung from the sill.

The pre-war apartment walls were thick plaster but the wall separating my bedroom from Diamond and Rust’s was thin, evidence of a shoddy seventies remodel. Those slender walls plus the open airshafts and windows of a hot Brooklyn summer, made every sound from 203 echo through my bedroom.

Thursday night, Diamond and Rust were arguing again. Rust (she’s Rust), was upset by a comment Diamond made about Rust’s job being beneath the earning comps based on her degree. Oh, really? I sat up in bed. That was rich. He was going to go there? About the job she’d worked so hard for? Then I was pacing. Did he think his part time temp gig in an actuary’s office was a career? At least they had comps for what she did for a living. He didn’t know her life. Not like I did. I knew what Rust had to put up with to pay their rent while Diamond worked on his never-ending dissertation. I had heard Rust’s crying calls to her mom about that asshole Steve in marketing.

I stopped pacing. It was quiet. Then, the unmistakable sound of rhythmic bedsprings. She’d apparently forgiven him faster than I had, as usual. Typical. We were all going to be awake awhile.