Gotham Diary:
Snooping
6 May 2015
Last night, I spent a few hours snooping on my neighbors. This has only just become possible, given the extended winter. I’ve been sitting out on our new balcony — familiar in every way, really, but for the view — for a few weeks, now, on and off. But snooping requires patience, and patience requires balmier temperatures than those prevailing until the last couple of days. Yesterday was almost too warm; the promised rain never materialized. In the evening, it became more pleasant. After the whole business of dinner, I stepped down onto the balcony and took a seat.
No, I do not have a pair of binoculars. Snooping is not spying. Snooping is nothing more than attending to what can be seen by what used to be called the naked eye. (A naive concept, I suppose, what with computer screens.) Here is an excellent anecdote of snooping, set in the lobby at the Algonquin Hotel, during the making of the film, Star! The snooper is of course the Long-Winded Lady, Maeve Brennan.
I picked my way across to the newsstand and bought cigarettes, and I was starting to leave when I saw Julie Andrews. She was alone, sitting in a high, high-backed armchair beside the entrance to the Rose Room, having her box lunch. Her tight short dress seemed to be made of crystal and light, and she was wearing a crystal headband for a crown; she looked like Titania. The chair was much too big and too high for her, and to balance herself and her lunch she had put her knees together, and her feet, balanced on the tips of her toes, were far apart. She was very hungry. All her attention was on her sandwich, which she picked up with both hands, and she was just about to take a bite out of it when she raised her eyes and saw me standing and staring at her. I immediately stopped thinking of Titania and began thinking of Lady Macbeth. At the sight of me, Julie Andrews froze in fury. Behind her sandwich, she was at bay, her hungry face glazed with anger. She is a Star, no doubt about that. She shines and radiates, and she can case a spell, any kind of spell. (169)
There were two moments, last night, at which I wondered that the person in the apartment into which I was peering was peering back. But it was dark, and even if I could be seen sitting on my balcony, the direction of my gaze can’t have been discernible. I expect, however, that, by the end of the summer, some residents of the building across 87th Street will have begun to wonder about me.
The first question for a snoop such as me is simple: how many apartments are we talking about? Which windows belong to what apartments. My default model is the two- or three-window apartment, for the simple reason that most of the apartments in our (much larger) building are either one or the other. Our old apartment upstairs had three windows, one for each bedroom and one for the living room. A one-bedroom apartment will have two windows; although the one-bedroom apartments to either side of our old apartment each had an extra window, one in the kitchen and the other in the bathroom. Our new apartment is so brightly lighted during the day, despite being on a low floor, because, very uncharacteristically for this pile, it has eight windows: the three principal ones, two in the dining ell, and one each in the kitchen and the bathrooms. There is light everywhere. But this, as I say, is unusual.
The building across the street represents an older generation of apartment building. I don’t know when it was built, but I’d say that it could have been at any time between 1935 and 1955. There appears to be a doorman behind the desk in the lobby, and there must be elevators, but the front of the building (and presumably the back as well) is bedecked with fire escapes — artistically minimal fire escapes, but fire escapes nonetheless, those signs of downmarket premodernism. I expect that the apartment house went up during a transitional period in the building codes. It has been difficult for me to determine the overall level of affluence, but then that is simply the starting point for my snooping. As for the layouts, they follow, so far as I can tell at this early point, a model with which I am unfamiliar.
My efforts were hampered, as you might expect, by window coverings. Across the street, shades seem to be favored. Pleated shades in pastel colors — not cheap. I’m not a fan of shades. It has always struck me that shades ought to extend from the bottom sill upwards, not the other way around, but while such shades are available, they are uncommon, and nobody across the street appears to use them. A few windows have woven shades or glass curtains, which permit a certain publicity but not very much. One window only is draped with full formality, and I’m about to lose sight of that one as the leaves on the sidewalk trees get bigger. Pretty soon, my snooping will be limited by the greenery to the top three floors of the building across the street.
Shades not only block plain old snooping; they also make it difficult to answer my original question, which depends on getting a sense of the layouts of the different apartments. In order to connect the windows, I can rely on two kinds of evidence. I can watch a person disappear from one window and reappear in another. Or I can watch one window spring to life when the lights are turned on in another one. Two nights ago, women in two apartments, one above the other, established the connection of two rooms, one of which appears to be a kitchen. This did not come as a surprise (because of matching paint, one salmon, one powder blue), but it was satisfying to be sure. Last night, my patience taught me much more: the apartment directly across the street and one floor up is much, much bigger than I thought it would be. I watched a man proceed from one of those kitchens, through the big room adjacent to it, providing unnecessary confirmation of the previous night’s discovery, and then further on to the room behind the next window, and, sometime later, into the next, which I already knew must be connected because, by then, the light trick that I mentioned had occurred in the apartment directly beneath, demonstrating one of the inferences that can be drawn even when the shades are down. The big surprise was that this man, the one in the apartment across the street and up one flight, suddenly appeared in the room two windows away. I never did see him in the window in between, but I cannot imagine how that room, which was lighted and unshaded all evening but which never revealed an occupant, could possibly belong to any other apartment. Later, another man, with more hair on his head and a dark red T shirt, appeared in the kitchen and the big room, but I never did see him in any other window. In the distant room, the first man disappeared from view in the manner of someone getting into bed. After a while, the lights went out. Later, they came on again, and the man got up and came to the window. By this time, Kathleen had come home, and I was explaining my findings to her, and the man at the window seemed to stare in our direction. But then he opened the window a bit: it had been closed tight, and he couldn’t possibly have heard me. After a while, the light went out again. Aside from not learning where the man in the red shirt spent the night, I never all evening saw the woman who, the night before, had appeared in the kitchen and the big room.
Meanwhile, I saw an interesting group of people in the apartment directly below. There were two women, one a blonde and the other a brunette, and a man who, when he first appeared, was wearing a tie. All three were thirtyish and trim. I caught a glimpse of the back of a child as well, a boy of nine or ten.
Highly satisfied by this proliferation of puzzles and mysteries, I followed Kathleen into our apartment when she decided that it was time to go to bed. Our bedroom window, though open to viewing from many other apartments in our building, cannot be seen from the building across the street. It is almost like living in two apartments.