“We’ve become a nation of peeping toms.”
Stella, Rear Window (1954)
I spend hours on my deck during this pandemic. I bundle up on cold days and sit under a patio umbrella on rainy and sunny ones. I watch the sun set from the recliner, listen to the finches trill, and I’ve even watched an epicurean squirrel eating a slice of pizza just feet away. It’s life in the city.
Across the postage stamp-sized gardens I can see the apartments stacked, with layers of singles and families going about their daily lives. Next door is another deck, and the people climbing through their window to have a smoke act as if I am invisible, and I reciprocate.
Every few days a portly middle-aged guy climbs out his window and up the fire escape to his roof, belly hanging over his shorts. I engage him in simple conversation, perhaps to assuage him because he looks like a P.K. (what my family calls a “President Killer”), and I can imagine him climbing across to my roof and down our fire escape to rob, kill, and maim.
Why, for all you know, there’s probably something a lot more sinister going on behind those windows.
Lisa, Rear Window
James Stewart (“Jeff” Jefferies) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window would have praised my perspicacity—or my vivid imagination. The character of Jeff would fit right in with this Covid-19 pandemic. He was a captive audience, too, hobbled by a broken leg and sitting for days and weeks in his small apartment in Greenwich Village, looking out the back window. Often armed with binoculars or a camera, he obsessively inspects the humanity (and lack of it) across the courtyard.
I’m not much on rear window ethics.
Lisa, Rear Window
Stewart quickly turns into a voyeur, seeing what people do in the privacy of their own homes (although he can’t imagine a home for himself with the charming Princess Grace, Lisa Fremont). He has become the audience, and the spaces across the way are like a movie screen. Jeff sees a dancer, who he dubs “Miss Torso,” a songwriter, a dog in a basket dangled down for a walk, and a couple sleeping on a mattress (until it rains). He sees and hears the neighborhood’s everyday domestic dramas and spats. But the tension rises when the body of the dog is found in the garden, strangled. When he observes Perry Mason (Thorwald) furtively dragging his suitcase after a particularly bad argument with his wife, we all suspect what it contains. The film becomes a grand soap opera, complete with the twists and turns of the best thrillers.
A murderer would never parade his crime in front of an open window.
Lisa, Rear Window
I have quarantined myself in our two-floor apartment in a neighborhood of old brownstones in Jersey City, and both my husband and I have made a home on our small and slightly derelict deck facing the back of the building.
We built our first deck in 1991, and our hippie carpenter chopped off the tip of his finger during his first week of work. We drove him to the hospital, but he refused any money because “it was my own fault that I got so drunk last night.” The construction caused a leak soon after, and we had to rip the deck up and rebuild it. It is now sturdy, home to a weathered Buddha that looks like it came from the Song Dynasty (but actually came from the local plant store), one dead plant and a few happy cacti, a hammock, and a table with chairs. The sun hits the deck directly and it heats up quickly. My plan is to get a plant mister for the summer, and we will become the plants.
Over the past eight weeks, I have begun to feel like James Stewart in Rear Window. I am the audience as the life dramas play out, although I can only hear bits and pieces of the dialogue. People go about their lives as if no one is watching. Sometimes we can hear them breathing.
What people ought to do is get outside of their own house. And look in for a change.
Stella, Rear Window
Across the way there are apartments in old or renovated brownstones, some relatively cheap and some costing more than a million dollars. Some care for their small patches of land or deck lovingly, as if caring for children. Others, like the hostile brownstone owner next door, let their backyards grow wild, with trees leaning over remnants of fences and garbage moving like tumbleweeds in the grass.
Why would Thorwald want to kill a little dog?
Because it knew too much?
Lisa, Rear Window
On the top deck across from me, partially hidden by large plants, is a young couple with two small children. We followed her pregnancy last summer and feel as if we know them. In lower apartments we can see massive televisions always turned on, with images glittering across the yards. On the bottom floor’s courtyard is a very mixed group of 20-something couples and friends who play a game in which a beanbag is flipped into a hole (unfortunately called “Cornhole”), eliciting yells that pierce the neighborhood. They never wear masks and happily breathe on each other, laughing and drinking. The only Caucasian is wearing what looks like an Indian dhoti and dancing, the others seem serious and tug on bottles of beer.
Where’s that wonderful music coming from?
Lisa, Rear Window
Three doors down on my side a pal is obsessively power washing every inch of his brownstone over the period of several days (he thoughtfully called to apologize for the noise). We saw him on his deck the other night, and he mimed power washing himself (although I am sure that he would be the last person to need it).
Across and to the left of us is the mystery family who populate all four floors of their building and are, we assume, wealthy. For years we have been seeing a bald head, belonging to a middle-aged man who we believe is washing dishes in a sink. He consciously doesn’t see us, so close across the garden. We heard impassioned and slightly frightening arguments emanating from there and were unsure about their domestic arrangements. But they are still there—although since their windows are often dark we assume that they have an escape in the Hamptons or the Jersey shore.
There can’t be that much difference between people and the way they live. We all eat, talk, drink, laugh, wear clothes.
Lisa, Rear Window
Next door to us the garden apartment has recently been rented to a young couple who vigorously built a city garden, with astroturf, flowers, trees, two small metal French coffee tables, and chairs. Over the past few days they erected what would seem to be an impermeable fence made of several layers of bamboo in order to keep the two noisy children downstairs from peering through or over the fence. We, of course, can always watch them from above.
The garden apartment in our building is old (our building is from the 1830s. although I assume that the garden is from the 20th century) and made mostly of bricks interspersed with plants. The two moms downstairs take turns tilling the soil but their garden is not a good playground for their children, who could easily unearth the bricks to use as weapons at the slightest provocation.
Further down the way are apartments with outdoor exercisers, barbecuers, telephone chatterers. The smells of Indian and Italian food waft in the air. Every building houses a United Nations of people of various ages, sexual proclivities, continents, bank accounts.
Chances are low that there will be a murder in any of these apartments, but I’ll be ready if there is. I am a camera and see everything as if it is a giant Zoom meeting, with people in their boxes of apartments forming a panorama of human life—the boredom, the frustration, the peace, the fear, the joys.
It’s Just Another Wednesday. The calendar’s full of ’em.
Jeff, Rear Window
We are all voyeurs, involved in the lives of others and titillated by drama. Like Jeff in Rear Window, we watch but have no power……unless disaster strikes, which, these days, it certainly can. Then we (at least some of us) may act, like Princess Grace and Thelma Ritter did.
Sometimes I wish that I had Thelma Ritter here with me, wisecracking about the action and providing common sense advice. But then I begin to think that maybe I AM Thelma Ritter, at least for the duration.