A match made in heaven.

As I write, I can hear Mildred and Sam in the next apartment, as usual, yelling at each other.

It's one of the benefits of living in a New York apartment: there's always a drama going on. Is that why so many writers gravitate to apartment living? The stories are right there through the thin walls next to the breakfast nook.

"Seinfeld" has offered the nation an image of New York apartment living as a kind of singles dorm where over-aged adolescents walk through unlocked doors and banter in a party-all-the-time atmosphere.

Reality, of course, is very different. Even in Mayor Rudy's idyllic near-crime-free city, no sane person would leave an apartment door open. And many New York apartment buildings, like mine, are filled not with yuppie singles but with older adults. Nearly everyone is past sixty, and some are bearing down on the century mark. Instead of a college dorm, our building is more like a nursing home. If I were living in the suburbs, as a forty-one-year-old, I'd be firmly ensconced in middle age. Living in my Queens apartment building, I'm still something of a young Turk.

Mildred and Sam fit right in, agewise. They moved here with many of the other tenants after World War II. In fact, they are contemporaries of Ricky and Lucy, who on TV reruns are forever young and forever in the same apartment. New York renters stay put, especially if they have rent-controlled apartments. The result is a combination of stagnation and stability. It's as if Ricky and Lucy are still where they are on television, frozen in place by their 1950s-style rent, but now too old to go out hoofing with Fred and Ethel.

In the style of New York apartment living, we know our neighbors enough to say hello. Most are gentle and pleasant people living out their retirement years. A few are infirm. All in all, we exist amidst a cultivated and pleasant distance that suits all parties fine, such as the older Jewish woman who made sure to leave me a vacant washer in the laundry room last month and wished me, her Christian neighbor, a happy holy day last Christmas.

But that is not the case with Sam and Mildred. We have been forced into a kind of intense long-term relationship in a way we never could have imagined. They are like uninvited visitors who barge through our apartment walls, carrying on an argument which has been going on in various forms for decades. Sam is wheelchair-bound because of a stroke and dependent on Mildred for everything - an uneasy dependence, it is fair to say.

In a family magazine, one can't even begin to describe the tone of their verbal abuse. She will complain about his incontinence, his slurred speech, his demands to be fed. The "f" word is a regular part of her banter. Her trump card is a warning: if he doesn't shape up, he will be sent to a nursing home. Sam gives as good as he takes. "You b . . .," he yells at the top of his lungs, the words slurred but the meaning intact.

Sam and Mildred are legendary in the building. We live on the first floor of a six-story building, but tenants on the top floor tell us they can be heard there. And apparently Sam and Mildred were at it long before we moved in three years ago. In their younger days, he owned a business and held the upper hand in their relationship. He would yell at her; now, in his dependence, he mostly gets it from her.

Their arguments are now part of the background noise, only highlighted when a visitor asks what's going on next door. My fifteen-year-old nephew, who lives in a quiet suburb, expressed a fascination with the arguments during a recent visit. "Cool," he said, listening in on a verbal blast from next door, experiencing a kind of warped vicarious adolescent thrill.

There are times I wished I lived in a "Seinfeld"-type apartment universe, where hip yuppies closer to my age share common insights into life. Or maybe a house in the suburbs in a community where parents come together and enjoy the routine swirl of children's soccer games and high school proms, then retreat to their homes, all at a safe distance from one another.

But my neighbors, even Sam and Mildred, offer their own kind of insights and lessons. They are old. Someday I may be old. They are reminders that what I am now - my relationships, idiosyncracies, habits, obsessions - are sure to remain with me, for better or worse.

Miserable old arguments will continue. So will happy relationships. Old age is part of the continuum of life; it promises no abrupt change from the past.

Sam and Mildred's regular arguments remind me every day that the important relationships, husband and wife, parent and child, can never be taken for granted. Just beyond my wall is a loud statement that misery begets misery, and that the cycle of recrimination practiced upon those we are supposed to love is a long, lonely road to nowhere or the bare walls of an apartment in Queens.

Peter Feuerherd is a frequent Commonweal contributor.