My Rear Window

Credit Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum

About ten years ago, I found a roll of undeveloped film in my closet, tucked away in a box crammed with ephemeral youth. Yearbooks from high school. A Rough Rider patch from Teton Valley Ranch Camp. Letters from friends I barely remembered. This roll of film was no regular roll of film; it was a cartridge from a Kodak disk camera that was briefly popular in the nineteen-eighties. It was incredibly thin thanks to the groundbreaking innovation of the internal-disk film, its only problem being the poor quality of its prints, hence its short life span. As a teen-ager, I loved my disk camera, and took it everywhere via my back pocket. It seemed like something from the future, an indication of a streamlined world, and it thrilled me in the way that moving walkways in airports thrilled me, still thrill me to this day. And here, twenty years later, was that future, however defunct, in the palm of my hand. What did it contain? What kind of past spun on that magic wheel?

I have always been drawn to photography, fine art or otherwise, though I am not much of a photographer. I appreciate its egalitarian nature, its reproducible quality, its shooing of absolute expertise. We all take photographs, now more than ever, documenting our lives and sharing them on social networks with the studied eye of a curator. This is me eating a cronut. This is me meeting the Pope. This is me soaked after a rainstorm. We are living in the viral age of the photograph, of the image taking over for the self. As Roland Barthes said, and I use this quote only to sound smart, The photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Facebook and Instagram are our front windows, the person we want the world to see. But every photograph has a built-in narrative, a readable subtext, a rear window in which the viewer participates, often at odds with the presenter. If I post a picture of me eating a cronut, no matter my attempts at directing the response by way of a hashtag, you thinkwell, I dont know what you think. What an asshole, probably. We read ourselves in others. Always have. We project. We fill in the blanks. We dictate the story. And what is the story we want, the story we need? Every photograph is both a film still and a self-portrait, as Cindy Sherman has shown us, and often desire is at its heart.

I was cleaning my closet because back then I was cleaning everything, and yet my life was still a mess. The reason for this cleaning and this mess: I was writing a novel, a first novel, after publishing a book of short stories, and said novel was not going well. I had already missed two deadlines and had no hope of making the third. Since the book was so late, I decided that the writing had to be perfect, not just the language, the metaphor, the simile, the dialogue, and the character development but the way the words looked on the page. I started to notice the line breaks of the right margin and its row of crooked teeth, and decided that they needed to be as straight and as even as a movie stars smile. I was no longer a writer but an orthodontist; word choices became cosmetic, punctuation like a tightening of wires. Then I discovered the Justify Text tab on my old Powerbook 160. Yay. But this only briefly solved the problem, for I soon noticed the extended gaps between words, the spaces that needed filling, and I was back in the dentists chair, pushing and pulling and adjusting. This was no way to write a novel, so instead I cleaned my apartment and asked myself, again and again, Why did I want to be a writer?

I grew up on Seventy-third Street and Lexington Avenue, the mean streets of the Upper East Side. My parents apartment was on the ninth floor and had views, west and north, of the neighboring buildings, the windows like a contact sheet. My room was the smallest, perhaps appropriate since I was the youngest, and my one small window looked out onto the interior airshaft, a square of deep, dark space never penetrated by the sun, a sort of prisoners vantage. Whatever noise dropped into that pit echoed. My memory of bedroom sound is of babies crying and of Spanish music from the transistor radios of housekeepers and of pigeons, hundreds of pigeons who roosted overnight: the cooing, the almost plastic snap of wings, and, on occasion, if startled, the grey explosion from below to the blue sky fifteen floors above, a mushroom cloud in the form of rock dove. It was, in its way, thrilling, and sometimes, when bored, I would drop something from my window, something that might light the fuse and ignite this thermonuclear pigeon bomb. We were always dropping things from windows back then. It seemed our inalienable right of living so high above ground. Paper airplanes, of course, and paper helicopters that would slowly spiral down and make us question the certainty of gravity. There were the green army men with homemade Kleenex parachutes, their descent doomed. Super balls, often with a kid on the fourth floor gauging the return bounce. Fruit. We were Letterman before Letterman was Letterman. But our favorite projectile was the soggy, its technology quite basic: toilet paper soaked in the bathroom sink and fashioned into a grenade. It made the most satisfying splat on the sidewalk. We would invite friends over with the express purpose of trying to nail them en route to our awning, and more than once my older brother and his friends would rain Charmin fury upon my unsuspecting head, turning me into papier-mch. Sometimes we got in trouble, but less often than you would think. In many ways, the window was our back yard.

New York City is a place of real-estate envy, of coveting thy neighbors townhouse, of always wishing for another room. Like many of my fellow city dwellers, I have a recurring dream of discovering a hidden door that opens upon a vast network of other rooms, that my apartment is in fact much larger than I realize. Sometimes it even has a swimming pool. Those are wonderful dreams, only to be undone by waking up and returning to my limited square footage. My only other recurring dream is of being nude in public, of being exposed for all to see, often, for some reason, at a grocery store. There I am, nude man, trying to pick the perfect peach. It is both natural and unnatural, and I seem to be the only one who cares about my lack of clothes. Everyone has had this dream. Sometimes I think the story of Adam and Eve is a direct response to this ancient anxiety, that the sin of man is not the desire for God-like knowledge but rather our secret, unknowable all-too-human shame.

Growing up, my brother had the good room, nice and big and with large windows that looked toward the apartment building across the street. I was envious of this room, four times my own space. I was also envious of my brother, with his natural way with friends and his uncomplicated masculinity, his ease with violence. Even as a boy he was a man. When he was fourteen and I was eleven, we discovered a row of windows on the tenth floor of that building across the street, in particular the bathroom window, where on many a night a woman would shower with the shades open. Being New Yorkers, we were already practiced Peeping Toms. My brother had a pair of field binoculars that lived on the sill, and we would spy on the neighbors, watch them eating dinner, watch them watching television, which seemed more thrilling than any episode of Fantasy Island. Some form of nudity was always the unspoken goal, but beyond the unfortunate old man on the twelfth floor that goal had never been realized. Till now. She was blond, probably in her late twenties, though our eyes were too young to properly determine any age between eighteen and sixty, and attractive, or at least attractive from this magnified yet still postage-stamp view. My brother hogged the binoculars, as older brothers do, and on the occasion when I had my brief turn I remember being struck by all that exposed skin, by the casual way she lathered her hair and body, by how the quotidian interacted with the majestic, as though Prell were Latin for grace, which reminds me of the Prell slogan from that era: I was flat until I went fluffy. Well, in that bedroom, ladies and gentlemen, I went fluffy. But it wasnt the fluffiness of my brother, with his bravado of pussy and tits and Boy, would I like to bang her. No, for me it was the glimpse of the private, the sense of being the author of this scene, as if without me this shower would sink into obscurity, the strange kind of power of being a voyeur, and, of course, the built-in guilt, the confirmation of my inner pervert. Seeing that woman naked was like opening a secret door and seeing myself naked.

When I was thirteen, I snuck into my parents room and slipped under their massive king-sized bed a tape recorder armed with a TDK-180 cassette, meaning that I could capture ninety minutes on a single side. I pushed record. I knew they were going to bed shortly, and I wanted to eavesdrop on the mystery of their pillow talk. My brother was away at boarding school, my sister at college; it was just me and them in that apartment. A year earlier, I had stood in front of my parents in all earnestness and told them that I wanted to be a writer. It was almost like a confession. I remember my father lowering the tumbler of Scotch from his lips, a Scotch I had lovingly poured for him, and telling me that I didnt know enough words to be writer. He was right. I was a sixth-grade dyslexic; words were not my forte, they were my downfall, and I could hardly read a paragraph without bursting into frustrated tears. But there was something about telling a story that I found liberating within the otherwise smothering universe of spelling and grammar. My mother, on the other hand, said, Thats great, dear. You will make a wonderful writer. Such imagination. My father rolled his eyes. He was always rolling his eyes, especially when I made my mother laugh, which was something I did often and easily. Jesus, Gail, youll laugh at anything he does, was his constant lament. I performed for my mother, while for my father I poured his evening drink or fetched another pack of Marlboro Reds from the stash in the drawer by the kitchen phone. To him, I was not a boy but a man in training. I have to say, I was always baffled by their relationship. My mother was so full of life, so friendly and accommodating, and my father was, well, not quite the opposite but rather a much tougher nut to crack.

They met the summer that Rear Window was releasedshe was fifteen and he was twenty-oneand they were married five years later. They rarely argued, but I never spotted much intimacy between them, and was curious about what they said from the solitude of their bed, which was the size of a small studio apartment and did not portend much physical contact. So cue the tape recorder and perhaps page Dr. Freud. I dont know what I expected to overhear. I wasnt looking for sex. No, no, no, no. Or I dont think so. Maybe I thought they would reveal some secret life they had together, remove their parental masks and expose the real Parker and the real Gail. I also think I half-expected them to talk about me, their wonderful youngest child, so clever, so handsome, no doubt a famous writer some day. I remember the next morning, sneaking back into their bedroom and grabbing the tape recorder and rushing into my bathroom, locking the door, the eternity of rewinding that tape, the fear of a snag, or, worse, a break, until finally the jolting click of all done. I almost anticipated the pigeons in the airshaft startling. Here were my parents, on my lap. I pushed play. After much silence, I heard them walk into the bedroom and go about the business of getting ready for bed. A sink runs. A toilet flushes. Curtains are drawn. There are a few coughs, which belong to my father and augur a future battle. Keys and loose change land in a dish. A sigh of settling under the sheets. Bedside lamps going dark. And then, only two words, spoken twice: Good night. And soon after that, some one-sided snoring. Thats all there was, and I still dont know what to make of it. Were they particularly exhausted that night, or simply not in the mood to talk? Was this routine or outlier? I listened to the good nights over and over again, trying to decipher something from the tone. Love. Anger. Affection. Bitterness. Indifference. Contempt. Comfort. But all I heard was the good and the night. Childhood is a kind of detective story, our parents the possible crime. We gather clues. We make assumptions. But often we come no closer to a solution. My mother and father have been married for fifty-five years, and they probably love each other now more than ever. And I never listened to that tape again. It seemed like something that was too powerful to be trifled with, like a planchette resting atop a Ouija board.

In my teens, I knew two fathers who jumped to their deaths from their apartment windows. Both men were in their fifties, and both of them removed all of their clothes before opening the window, staring down, and jumping. Im curious about that instinct: not so much the instinct to jump but the instinct to jump naked, to return to the womb at thirty-two feet per second. I remember being more shocked by that particular detail than by the act itself. Totally nude? Like, everything? It both made sense and made no sense at all, and I tried to imagine those dads, composing their notes and then calmly unbuttoning their shirts and heeling away their shoes. They wanted to be stripped bare, to expose their hidden, broken selves to the world. There was nothing to hide anymore. This is me. A brief moment of commune and control, the freedom to fall literally. The center might not hold, but it also doesnt spin. And I think of their crushed bodies with a kind of tenderness. Looking up from the sidewalk, I was always conscious of this stark deadfall. All these people, all these windows. It seemed to me something that should happen more often, and I had a particular fear of one of these poor souls landing on top of me and killing me, an inadvertent murder-suicide. I could almost feel them falling, could feel myself falling. Life in the crosshairs.

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My Rear Window