The Masturbating Banker

About the best thing one could say about Ivy McKinnes was that she was above average. She’d been in the top twenty-percent of her class at every level of her education, and she’d graduated from business school at the precocious age of twenty-six. But in a city of eight million, there were a lot of above average women, and in this massive crowd, Ivy seemed about as nondescript and unimpressive as a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker could have been. She was neither tall nor short, not quite a blonde, and not distinctly a brunette. Her face was pretty enough to be considered not unattractive. She wasn’t so particularly witty or funny, but she didn’t completely lack a sense of humor. There really wasn’t anything about Ivy that would’ve given an indication she was about to become one of the most talked about people in the city. Ivy never would’ve considered her fifteen minutes of fame as a likelihood, and certainly not in the form it came.

Perhaps the thing Ivy McKinnes could take most pride in was her success as an administrator for the advertising firm Shuler & Dent, headquartered in Midtown a few blocks from Grand Central. And as Ivy rose through the ranks at work, her salary became considerable enough that she was comfortable. She could afford all the clothes and shoes she wanted to buy. She didn’t have to think about the cost of dinner at nice restaurants or tickets to the occasional show or concert. And, in the fall of 2015, when her boss left for a more lucrative position in a larger firm, Ivy’s promotion led to a pay raise that allowed her to change the one element of her New York lifestyle that was still below her above-average standards—her apartment.

Almost every time Ivy climbed a rung on the corporate ladder, she traded up living spaces. She’d moved from a shared three-bedroom in Astoria to a shared two-bedroom walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, and then to a run-down post-war studio on the Upper West Side, and finally to a third-floor Midtown studio within walking distance of the office on summer days. So, when she was promoted this time, Ivy called her broker and asked him to find the next rung.

Many of her friends were moving to Brooklyn, where luxury high-rise living was affordable enough that young professionals were migrating across the river to start having children in a quieter, more comfortable environment. For Ivy, though, Brooklyn seemed a bit too far away from things. Ivy was looking to stay in the middle of the action—near work, near night-life, near shopping and restaurants—somewhere all of her friends and family could come visit and believe that Ivy was making it.

For all these reasons, Ivy was ecstatic when her broker found an available one-bedroom on the thirty-seventh floor of The BorlandEast in Midtown. The Borland was one of the few pre-millennial high-rise residences that had anticipated the 21st century housing market in New York. Ivy found it ideal for its location—a full five blocks closer to Shuler & Dent than her Midtown studio. And the recent competitive uprising of luxury high-rises in Brooklyn and Manhattan had left the prospect of a one-bedroom just below the penthouse level at The Borland financially feasible. This was modern suburbia. The young and wealthy weren’t moving farther out anymore, they were moving higher up, and Ivy was happy to be among the lucky few looking down on the city beneath her.

Perhaps the most salient change in Ivy’s new lifestyle was something The BorlandEast was quick to advertise to prospective tenants: “Urban Sanctuary” was what the building’s website called it. Modern building materials, near-silent heating and air conditioning systems, and in Ivy’s case, the distance from street-level—all these factors helped to create a sense that her residence on the thirty-seventh floor was in a whole different New York than the one she’d grown so accustomed to. The ubiquitous background noise that all New Yorkers tune out by necessity—the honking taxis; the howling sirens of ambulances and fire engines; the barking cops; the hissing pneumatics as the busses lurch to a stop and open their doors; the roaring of the engines as the busses pull away; and the echoing reverberations of all these constant noises—their absence added up to a sound that had become far more noticeable to New Yorkers like Ivy: silence.

Quiet had become so obvious to Ivy that she didn’t know what to do with it. Even as she boasted to her friends about the sweet sound of silence on social media, Ivy found it troublesome—haunting almost. On the first night in her new apartment, Ivy resorted to donning socks so that she wouldn’t have to hear the sound of her skin snicking off her living room’s wooden floor as her feet came unstuck with each footstep. Ivy caught herself talking aloud within hours of moving in. Before long, she’d unpacked her speakers and was playing music non-stop just to fill the void. And through all of this, she believed that in a matter of days, her brain would adjust, as it had adjusted to the constant noise when she first moved to Manhattan years before. But Ivy was wrong. She became agitated whenever her television was off or her music stopped. When she forced herself to sit for even a few moments without some artificial source of sound, she grew restless, and on several occasions, even caught herself getting up to look out the window when the sound of a strong wind gust had penetrated the thick double-paned glass—as though she might catch a welcome glimpse of that comforting noise’s source.

At night, Ivy would switch the air conditioner to a setting that ensured it would stay on all night to provide some regular sound. Otherwise, she would lie awake for hours without a chance of sleep. But after a few days of shivering, Ivy decided that it was nonsense that needed to stop. Three weeks after moving into the Borland, Ivy shut off her television, her music, her air conditioner, and she began to condition herself to the consequences. She had no idea this decision would alter her life in such a monumental and unpredictable way.

That night, her first adversary became the digital alarm clock she kept on her bedside table. The more she tried to drift off, that reliable relic would remind her of each passing minute, and the more minutes it registered, the more Ivy became aware that she was failing. The silence was getting the better of her. Ivy watched an hour pass on the clock, tossing from side to side beneath her covers. She watched another thirty minutes pass. She couldn’t shut off her brain.

Ivy lay awake for almost two hours before she finally heard the sound that broke the silence. It was faint at first, perhaps like the sound of a musician softly tapping her bare foot on stage in an empty auditorium. It was slow and quiet and distracted Ivy’s mind enough that she forgot about her own personal struggle to fall asleep. The mystery of this foreign sound gave her something new to think about. But as the noise got quicker and louder, it began to trouble her. It seemed to be coming from the bathroom. Suddenly, the worst possible thought registered in her mind in the form of two words: “rat” and “toilet.”

Ivy sat up in her bed thankful that she’d always been in the habit of shutting the toilet lid—always. Ivy crept toward the bathroom half-curious and half-terrified of what she might do if she did find a creature in her toilet. She’d heard of things like this happening all the time in New York. But as soon as she turned on the light and swung open the bathroom door, she could tell the sound wasn’t emanating from the toilet as she’d feared. The sound persisted, though, and was louder in the small, granite-tiled cube. It was also growing faster, so Ivy sat perfectly still on top of her closed toilet bowl, listening. After a few seconds, she identified the source as the ceiling vent, and after listening to the faint repetitive slapping noise, she began to discern what she thought to be the sound of a low male voice making faint but equally repetitive grunting noises. Ivy listened for a few more seconds to confirm her suspicions and decided that her upstairs neighbor was a man, either single or sexually frustrated, or possibly both. She giggled, being sure to not to laugh loud enough to give her presence away, and she returned to her bed thoroughly amused by this accident in voyeurism. She climbed into bed, thinking about some of the other incidental sounds she’d overheard from neighbors in all her other New York apartments. There was the fighting couple next door in Hell’s Kitchen, who’d always made up just as noisily as they’d fought. The yipper dog from her first place in Astoria. And how could she forget her gay downstairs neighbor on the Upper West Side who hooted like an owl when he climaxed. But this was her first confirmed masturbator. None of her friends even had a masturbator story. The closest was Claudette, who had an across-the-street nudist when she was down on the Lower East Side. And as Ivy contemplated all these things and what her friends might think of this funny little story, she drifted off to sleep with a grin on her face and slept better than she could remember having slept in years.

Ivy was correct in assuming some of her friends would find it amusing as well. It was one of those New York stories they could all relate to. At some point, everyone in the city contends with their own hooting downstairs neighbor or yipping dog. Most choose to laugh about it when their time comes, as there’s not much else you can do. And Ivy was satisfied at her little story’s success with the few she chose to tell about it. But when she lay down again in silence the following night, Ivy wondered if she might not have to hear the next session. It was only a few minutes after she climbed into bed that she got her answer. Once more, the regular, almost mechanical progression of that slapping sound began as an almost subliminal suggestion, which progressed to a noise that was quite audible from her bed, through a door and almost twenty feet from the vent in her bathroom ceiling.

Perhaps it was Ivy’s sensitivity to the sudden silence that had enveloped her life, but when she was in her new apartment, she heard everything now—the refrigerator motor, the faint echo of the elevator bell in the hallway, and the welcome rush of the air conditioning switching on. She became attuned to even the quietest sounds in her new environment. But the more she became accustomed to these regular sounds, the more the neighbor’s nightly self-gratification began to grate on Ivy’s nerves. It seemed to get louder and louder, and the same noise which on that first night had distracted her enough to bring sleep, now kept her awake as she lay in bed.

Each night, Ivy lay there wondering if the man wouldn’t ever take a night off. Didn’t he get tired enough to fall asleep in front of the television and forget? Not even one night? She wondered who this masturbator might be. Ivy examined every man she rode the elevator with, waiting for the time when one of them would push button 38 and potentially put a face to that nightly noise. It never happened. Ivy covered the crack under the closed bathroom door with a towel hoping to dampen the noise. It didn’t work. She resorted to earplugs in her own “Urban Sanctuary,” and this too failed, as after thirty seconds or so, Ivy would begin to hear the faint sound of her heart beating, which would grow louder until all she could hear was the mechanical thundering of her own biological motor. Upon throwing the useless earplugs to the floor in frustration, Ivy heard it again—the repetitive slapping noise filtering through her bathroom door. She was disgusted. She’d endured it in silence for weeks and was utterly dispirited. Ivy picked up her phone, and without thinking, she tweeted a single tweet that evolved into the following thread over the course of the next several weeks: