On the View Outside My Window
♠
My room is at the back of the house. There are
four houses visible from my window. My seat, positioned as it is at my desk,
allows a clipped view. My line of sight is level with the bottom third of my
small window, and so I do not see the yard below with its one broken deck
chair, the small garden shed, and the square of yellowed grass, nor do I see
the alley that separates the back of my house from the backyards of the four
houses that are visible. I know, too, that there are more houses to the left
and to the right, just outside of my view, on both my side of the alley and the
other, as I also know that there are garages leading onto the alley, and these
I know principally by the morning sounds of my neighbors; alarm clocks, revved
engines, garden tools, and the too loud voices of children; though I sometimes
hear sounds in the afternoon, too.
Of the four houses visible I can see only their
second floors. The ground level view is obstructed by trees and garage roofs.
They are colored, from left to right, gray, cream, cream, and white, and their
architectural structures are all identical; each second floor comprises of,
from right to left, a narrow bathroom window and two slightly larger bedroom
windows. Beneath each bathroom window is a back door. The two middle houses,
being identical in color, are virtually identical in every other way, though
the chimney of the house on the right has flecked paint and out of the tree in
its backyard there protrudes a half-rotten canoe.
In the mornings the windows of each house have
their shades drawn as a rule. The bathroom windows, not having shades, are made
of that obscuring glass which allows light in yet bars unwanted eyes, though
they still can cast alluring silhouettes if the inhabitants have chosen to
light their bathrooms in a specific way. The cream-colored house on the left
has this type of lighting, as the shower in the bathroom is positioned right at
the window, which I know not only because of the 5:30 am silhouette I see there
every day, but also because of the row of bottles, which I imagine are shampoos
and washes and other beauty products, and the shadows they cast at the bottom
of the window frame. The lights come on in the other houses at different times;
gray, 6 am; the other cream at 7 am; and lastly the white, which until recently
was uninhabited, and now lights up for about an hour starting at 6:15. And the
back alleyway comes alive at around 6:30, with the inhabitants of the other,
invisible houses making their morning noises commingle with those of the houses
I can see from my window until around 7:45, when all the lights have gone out,
the shades are drawn, and the alley subsides into its normal silence.
When I first moved into this neighborhood I’d
thought it strange that the mornings should be so early and so regulated. It is
a quiet neighborhood and most of my neighbors on my side of the alley are
elderly, long past the days of waking up early and going to work. To be sure,
they wake up early. But they putter about the house and water plants, call
long-distant relatives, check their mail repeatedly, turn on the tube at about
ten o’clock, and generally stay indoors. I hear their shuffling shudder through
my walls. The neighborhood is attached to the northern side of a large
graveyard, and I always thought there was a secret sympathy between the age of
the local population and the proximity to the gravestones. But, across the
alley, in the houses that face the graveyard, it became obvious that there
lived families of youngish professionals, with kids young enough to require trikes and plastic wheel barrows, toys that tinkle, and
early weekend morning excursions. Now that I’ve grown used to their schedules
I’m glad that my window looks onto these houses with children in them. It’s
much more interesting to think of the young than the elderly and dying, and it
also gives the neighborhood a bit more life, a bit more potential, for
otherwise it would simply be a neighborhood of halfway houses for the elderly,
waiting to pass on to a more permanent home.
Daylight hours afford the best view for the
observation of the houses. Though, as you can imagine, there’s very little to
observe. Experiments in ratiocination abound. For example, in one of the gray
house’s windows sits an air conditioner unit all year long, which leads me to
believe that the person who lives there is a tenant who cares little about the
cost of heating. The two cream colored houses’ exteriors are dilapidated and
run down—both need a new coat of paint—and so I’m inclined to believe that
those houses are owned by the people who live inside. The white house has
recently been refurbished, with gleaming white window fixtures, very clean
window panes, and two brand new satellite dishes on top. Obviously, the house
is rented out in toto. These experiments vary in
degree of thoroughness and fancy, for sometimes when I find myself bored I
create stories for the inhabitants, as with the cream-colored house on the left
with the broken and slanted window shade in one of the bedroom windows. At
times, I think that there was some sort of fight—not fist fights or domestic
violence, more kids being kids, throwing things at each other, rowdy and
rough—and at others I think that it is the consequence of a landlord’s indifference
or laziness, that the shade has been broken for years and will remain slanted
for years, with each new tenant being slightly irritated that they’d forgotten
to mention it to the landlord before moving in. Sometimes, in my more maudlin
moments, when I see the antennae and satellite dishes, the cables snaking in
underneath window sills, or, at night, blue light filling one of the rooms, I
think that for all my deductions and flights of fancy, that these people who
live across from me live unremarkable lives in front of the television—like so
many other people—and that the air-conditioner in the window, far from being
the result of indifference, is only the expected result of a tube junkie’s
laziness, or that the broken window shade is never fixed, the slant never
corrected, because someone pulled the shade into that precarious position
months and years ago to block a bright ray of light from outside reflecting off
the TV screen.
At night the view is even more unremarkable. In
the past when I’ve looked to other windows at night, the light within usually
affords some glimpse of the inhabitants’ lives; a framed picture or a poster,
the location of a table or desk, the color of the walls, a person slowly
getting undressed. But with these houses I have in front of me there are no
indications of the life within. There are only windows of light or windows of
darkness. Aside from the bathroom window of the cream-colored house on the
left, even silhouettes are a rarity. There are very few sounds, too. Sometimes
I’ll hear someone exiting the back of their house, jingling keys, sometimes
taking the car out for a spin. But these moments are rare, and in any case, I
can’t see who the person is or what they’re doing, and as a result I find these
interruptions irritating. The hours between 5 pm and 10 pm are generally the
worst for this window-watching, as I get a strong impression that these people
know people are watching, will watch, will want to see, and thus that they are
very concerned with their privacy; so much so that they’ve positioned lights to
cast the faintest silhouettes, they avoid the open view of the window to thwart
unwanted searching eyes, and that they speak in whispers to keep their doings
secret.
I used to have a friend who’d invite me over for dinner.
He lived in a crowded, upscale residential neighborhood, full of large
apartment buildings. Smoking was not allowed within his apartment so I was
obliged to smoke cigarettes on his fire escape. The view from the fire escape
was quite good. Below there was an overgrown garden, more shrub than grass, and
the restaurant on the ground floor used much of it for depositing its trash. To
the left there was an apartment building, all lit up from the inside, where you
could see, in one apartment, the kitchen, in another, the dining room, and in
yet another, a bedroom, fully visible to the eye; so visible, in fact, that I
sometimes found myself staring directly at the inhabitants of those rooms,
those apartments, and they’d sneer and pull the shade or hurry out of view and
switch off the lights. On the right there was an even better view, for there
was an apartment with all of its windows facing the fire escape. I could see
into the kitchen, with its rows of hanging pots above the oven, an island in
the center with a large cutting board and a basket of fruit, a sink with
stainless steel taps and a ceramic soap dispenser. I could also see the dining
room with its dark wooden table, seating for eight, and the two silver candle
holders standing empty on each side of the pine cone pile centerpiece. Next to
the dinner table along the wall, rather than a side board, they had a small
desk with an HP printer and a Compaq computer, situated in such a way that I
could, if someone was using it, see exactly what they were doing.
A man and woman lived there, a young couple. And
though you could see directly into their apartment from all sides, they never
seemed to mind; indeed, it seemed that they had nothing to hide. I never
witnessed any fights. I never saw anything to indicate foul moods, tantrums,
or, even, any indications of the doldrums of domesticity. Even when looking at
their computer screen they seemed to never do anything out of the ordinary; no
porno, no computer games, no online gambling; nor did they even seem to have
the more minor and common addictions to social-networking sites or gossip rags.
And they never drew their shades. Their normalness comforted me, as did their
apparent honesty, and I think of them and their house frequently as I look out
of my window now; at these blank windows, these unstoried
apartments, places peopled with silhouette-less shades.
Perhaps it
is a problem of viewpoint, of distance. Looking at these houses I am reminded of
a dorm room I occupied in college, which looked out onto a vast expanse of
For I never see anything—just windows, the back
ends of these houses. Even when looking at those woods I would see nothing—just
trees. The desire to look was not extraordinary, but the desire to see the
hidden lives of these people was a need. Maybe I thought that if I could catch
these lives unawares, if I saw some private moment, some secret scene, I’d gain
an insight into the lives of the many others; or, maybe, as a voyeur, I’d find
some solace in living my life through the lives of others, and in their love
find love, in their anger find my anger, in their windows find my face peering
in. But in both cases I failed, and so perhaps this was not the desire, for
you’d think that I’d alter the position of the chair at my desk, pick another
window to look out of, or bundle up my hopes in a telescope, and watch my
neighbors leisurely through a crystal-clear lens.
They remind me, these windows, they remind me of
the eyes of disinterested companions, vacant, open, and unseeing. Windows into the blank soul of a passing moment, a view of the
world from a cold and dead interior. They remind me, too, of the eyes of
the many people in my dreams, lidless and entirely white, irises rolled back to
ignore me completely. A form of paranoia, perhaps, a kid’s desire for attention,
maybe. They—the windows—also remind me that there are those lives on this earth
that have no secrets, that there are private lives no different than their
public presentation, and the fight you see on a public bus is one that has
taken place and will go on long after the front door to the house is closed,
locked, and bolted. So even if I could get in, as it were, through the back
door, even if I could spy on life from behind, surprise the secrets out of
these lives, there’d be very little of interest to see.
And yet I hold my own secret desires, and, as a
result, they must too. If I think back to the young couple with their openly
visible house, that honest, boring couple, I sometimes think that their
openness was a ruse. What rooms were made to be visible? Dining
room and kitchen. And I merely assumed that their other rooms were
similarly open to view. But they must have had at least one or two more rooms,
hidden away, out of sight, like the bedroom and the bathroom. And perhaps in
one of those hidden rooms there are dirty doings and sinister sets; say, the
bedroom got up all gaudy with velvet curtains, red-scarfed
lights, the image that comes to mind borrowed from porno mags
and skin flicks; dildos lining the wall like the pots and pans in the kitchen, lewd
leather outfits littering the floor. Or, maybe, and this seems more likely in
that I’ve read of such things in newspapers, a homegrown methamphetamine lab on
the vanity, crack cocaine pipes cluttering the bathroom sink, rusty razor
blades ridged with white crystals in the medicine cabinet, or used syringes
embedded in the bathroom rug. Drug addicts and sexual misfits—a fiction as
banal as can be, to be sure, for there could just as well be domestic abuse
going on in those hidden rooms, or anti-depressant infused equanimity. Or, my
unhappiest imagining of all: One of those hidden rooms is where they hide the
tube.
***
I recently decided to put an end to this
speculation. I decided to take a walk on the other side, down the street that
borders the graveyard. The plan was simple enough: identify which houses I can
see from my window, and then peer inside. In execution it proved to be a little
more difficult. Houses look different from the front. I had trouble
distinguishing my four houses from the rest of the houses on the block. At
first I thought it would be a simple matter of finding just one familiar
feature. The sequence of the colors of the houses—gray, cream, cream, and
white—I thought was all that I would need. Initially, I thought I’d found them,
but then I realized that the order had to be reversed, and that from the front
the sequence would be switched, and they would, from left to right, be the
opposite of the way they were presented from the rear. It was about mid-day
when I took my first walk, and when I had finally found my four houses—it was
the white house that tipped me off, for though there are other similar-looking
white houses, the one from my window is the newest on the block—I realized that
the houses were empty, the kids were at school, the parents at work or running
errands, and the street was as quiet as the cemetery behind me. In one house,
further down the block, I could hear a radio playing classical music—or was it
a TV?
I went back later on, at dusk, when I knew the
surrounding houses at least would slowly come to life. And my confusion grew.
For it’s the holiday season, and the lights which I’d somehow ignored or missed
were switched on, coloring all the houses on the block in a dull mélange of
yellow, red, and white. I found the new white house, which also was dressed for
the holidays. There were four or five children playing outside on the street.
They eyed me suspiciously for a moment, interrupting their play to observe the
stranger observing their game, and then continued on with what they were doing.
And the houses were all lit up from the inside, the window shades pulled back
to offer an uncompromised, unequalled view.
In my four houses, and in all the houses down the
street, the people were preparing for dinner. In my four houses there were six
families at home, the second floors of the two, middle, cream-colored houses
were dimly lit, and empty of movement. Soon, a man came out of the white house
and called out to the kids playing on the street. The children dispersed, two
of them ran up the white house’s steps to be ushered in by their waiting
parent. The other children ran further down the street, disappearing into
other, Christmas-lit houses. I heard the clink of cutlery, chairs scraping
hardwood floors. In the gray house to the right a baby was crying, and I could
see a woman with her back turned to the street, bobbing up and down at the
window, turning this way and that, and soon the baby became quiet. In the
cream-colored house on the left, through a paper snowflake dressed window, I
saw a bookshelf lining one wall, and half of a decorated Christmas tree. An
argument had begun in the other cream-colored house, snatches of angry voices
floated out onto the street, something about homework, dessert. A child began
to howl.
I went back home and sat at my window. The houses
looked the same as they ever were, barely lit, shadows darkening the
windowsills. Shades were drawn, silhouettes non-existent. And I wondered again
at the value of it all. These people—most people—will face forward, whichever
way forward is designated to be. And their lives are not hidden, and their
secrets are not buried out back. And I realized that I did not want to know
their secrets, even if they had any, and I did not care if after dinner, after
the arguments are argued, the dishes done and dried, and the children put to
bed, whether or not the people in these houses unfurled their evils and set
about cultivating their secrets. I did not even care if, as I suspect, each and
every house on the block, after the Christmas lights are switched off, were lit
up by the whitish blue of a cathode ray tube. I did not care, and I did not
want to know, and I must remind myself of that now as I look out of my window.
—SS