The broadcast of The Conversation was part of a double bill on whatever channel I was watching, and as Coppola’s film ended and Antonioni’s Blowup began, I ordered out for Vietnamese food and decided to settle in for the evening, trying to take my mind off the appointment with the doctor scheduled for the next morning. Ordering takeout, the ability to get whatever you want at almost any hour delivered to your door, has been one of the great pleasures of returning to New York. The food came well before the scene where David Hemmings blows up the photographs taken in the park, enlarging and re-enlarging until the images lose all definition, pixelating before pixels existed in photography, becoming a field of indecipherable grain right at the moment when they are about to reveal the full horror of what he, the photographer, has captured, which is to say, Vanessa Redgrave’s participation in a plot to kill a man, just as Cindy Williams, a few years later, played her own white-bread-American-hotel-room murderess. I noticed for the first time that at the beginning, when we first see Hemmings, we know nothing about his character. Having left the doss house in disguise, he goes to his car, and as he drives he speaks on a radio in a way that suggests he might be a spy or an undercover police detective; it is only gradually that we realize he is nothing more sinister than a photographer, another kind of spy. In his white jeans and blue shirt and hard-soled shoes he has a poisonous yet angelic beauty, a charisma I long tried to emulate, believing it might be the key to attracting the rather brittle young women I so often desired but who seemed, in my youth, oblivious to my bookish charms. The barely clothed models he abuses become a metaphor for surveillance, offering glimpses of what we (or what Antonioni) think we want to see, those expanses of exposed skin drawing attention to the dominance of the photographer’s voyeuristic gaze, standing in for the gaze of the audience, the viewers viewing the viewer viewing the viewed.
As I watched Hemmings mince through dingy South London I indulged in my food, I ate sloppily, I enjoyed seeing those 1960s British models mess around topless in lengths of colored paper. The weird oral fixation Redgrave seemed to betray as she tried to make Hemmings give up the film he had shot was more powerful than I had remembered, her fingers always flying to her mouth, and perhaps it was on account of Caroline Fogel’s comment from dinner the previous night but I remembered how, in James Ivory’s adaptation of Howards End, Vanessa Redgrave raised her hand to her mouth as she told Emma Thompson about the pigs’ teeth in the tree at the eponymous house, and how that gesture, her middle finger tapping her teeth, had always struck me as so profoundly erotic as to be almost obscene, quite out of place in the world of Edwardian England. Perhaps that was the point, however, that sex was erupting everywhere, even from beneath the bark of the trees themselves, and in the almost subconscious gestures of the nouveaux riches.
The mimes playing their fantasy tennis game at the end of Blowup were a disappointment, as they were every time I had ever seen the picture, but unlike some of my friends and colleagues who insist it has not stood up well over the years, I remain convinced that Blowup achieves greatness precisely because it is so unquestionably of its particular moment: like The Conversation, it tells us a great deal about the psychological preoccupations and mania of those decades, the ways in which surveillance, undertaken for intelligence gathering as well as other more nefarious purposes, was beginning to work on the collective unconscious of the movie-going public.
Having watched both films and feeling that slight numbness that comes from too much exposure to a screen, I went to bed to read a collection of essays by the late historian Tony Judt, someone who was never quite a friend although we knew each other, and I found that within half an hour of climbing under the duvet and expecting sleep would come after I had read one or two short essays I was in fact wide awake, so much so that I finished the book. Although by then it was after midnight and I knew I had the appointment with the memory specialist, Dr. Sebastian, the next morning, I got out of bed and went through to the living room, found myself standing at the window, the blinds open, in my T-shirt and shorts, feeling a draft coming in around the expanse of glass. Because the room was dark I could see clearly down to Houston Street and I thought, for a moment, that someone was standing there watching me, or had perhaps already been standing there as if he were waiting for me to come to the window and when he saw that I had noticed him he immediately began walking towards Broadway. Perhaps I was already edging into unconsciousness, but my mind both registered and did not register the event of this acknowledgment, the nod I think I made and his slightly flustered forward movement. Part of my mind thought it was nothing more than coincidence, that he had not been looking up but instead consulting the screen of his smartphone, reading an email or checking directions. I was certain, however, of a reciprocal acknowledgment, that by nodding I was telling him I saw him watching me, the two of us watching each other: Hello, hey you, my watcher, I can see you! I know what you’re doing!
There was something about the encounter that made me double-check the locks on the door to the apartment and when I returned to bed I also locked the bedroom door, almost as a reflex. One would think I must have been suffering from paranoia, locking myself in, behind two doors, in a building protected by a doorman and CCTV cameras. If there were a break-in, campus security and even the NYPD would respond and all would be well. Nonetheless, I lay in bed thinking of that man’s dark shape on the street, of the head cocked in my direction and the frisson of communication I felt when my nod seemed to act as a trigger for his movement. Who? Who would be watching me?
Though at the time I did not quite understand why it should be so, the exchange with the man on the street made me begin thinking about all that had happened so recently in Oxford. Perhaps the effects of the complicated life I led during my later years in Britain had somehow followed me across the Atlantic.
Now, as the evidence grows around me, that seems all but certain.
~ ~ ~
I should have recognized the address when Peter gave it to me but, like other bits of information in my life, I had blocked out the associations that might have been conjured by West End Avenue and was surprised when I arrived there on Monday morning to find Dr. Sebastian’s office just around the corner from the apartment where I last lived in New York, with Susan and Meredith, on the top floor of a converted brownstone, a school across the street and the sound of garbage trucks often waking me on a Saturday morning before dawn.
I had not been back to 75th Street in more than a decade, not since the summer when I moved out of the apartment and, for a brief period, up to my mother’s house in Rhinebeck, before the subsequent and more significant migration to Oxford. When I moved out of the family home I conceded nearly all the furniture, which is also why I took not so much as a lamp or end table across the ocean. At the time I tried half-heartedly to fight Susan for the sleek four-slice toaster I had bought only a few months earlier because I was tired of making toast in the oven, but when I saw Meredith’s face fall, it seemed as though losing the toaster might just be too much to bear, that losing her father and the possibility of toast when she wanted it would push her into juvenile delinquency in a way that the more serious ructions on their own might not. So I left home only with clothes and books and photographs and the art that was indisputably mine, some of it acquired before Susan and I were married, much of it — including an early Neo Rauch bought before his prices rose beyond my means — purchased with money left to me by my father and thus, I argued, not a matter for negotiation. The art was my inheritance in a real sense, although some of that money had also helped us buy the apartment, which I relinquished to Susan (although really, I convinced myself, to Meredith) with no more argument than when I abandoned my toaster and my favorite floor lamp and even the black acoustic guitar my parents gave me in high school and which Meredith had inexplicably named Bobo, taking it to play with her friends when they congregated on the promenade in Riverside Park, channeling some kind of nostalgic hippy vibe Susan and I had both been too young to impart.