Her entry is a strange twist of voyeurism: we’re watching her watching them. But of course there’s no pornography in real-time. There isn’t any story, either. Who these people are or where they’re coming from is not what makes us want to watch them. It’s a fact that’s hinted at, that may or may not be revealed. We’re outsiders, choosing just how much of this alternately awkward and cinematic slice of life we’ll watch before shifting our gaze to another window. The couple are oblivious to us and continuous. They exist much more forcefully than we do.
After a while the little girl leaves and the young woman gets out of the bath, leaves the frame and returns wearing a big wool skirt and cotton camisole. She pulls on a white blouse (Catholic school uniform or standard boho-wear? Either way the intimacy of the scene is very casual and untransgressive) as her partner grabs a towel and climbs out of the bath.
In the third window, the one you have to turn your head or move the chair to see, an old European man gazes, quietly transfixed, into an empty ornamental bird cage in the foreground of his elaborately decorated prewar apartment. The walls behind him are deep green. Obviously he’s lived in them for many years. There’s a crystal chandelier above the bird cage and a warm light cuts across his face. The scene is timeless, concentrated, existing someplace outside ambivalence or emotion. We don’t see any of what the man is seeing or pretends to, but we see shadows of it across his face. It’s the most compelling, least definable of all three windows. Looking through it we’re watching someone totally absorbed by something we can’t see: a missing bird, a stranger’s past, the mysteries of aging.
Later on (maybe segueing with an erotic highpoint in Window #2 and the little girl’s arrival in the painter’s room) a woman’s face with golden Jean Harlow hair, lit ’30s style by the chandelier, leans above the bird cage that the man so intently watches. The woman is an angel or a gift that the man doesn’t seem to react to. Was she there all this time? Is his expression numbness, is it bliss? The man just keeps looking into the birdcage.
“The form of a city changes faster than the human heart,” Eleanor Antin quoting Baudelaire. The installation was a magic Cornell box, a tiny epic: all ages, modes of life, existing equally and together through the keyhole of this lost time. The installation was troubling and ecstatic.
Dick, its 10:30 at night, I broke off this morning after describing to you the first window and I’m too tired to continue now. This afternoon I went out for a walk feeling very light and clear—“Bright days,” I thought, thinking about an old movie idea I’d once had depicting the suicide of Lew Welch, the San Francisco poet, another beneficiary of the GI Bill, who walked off into the Sierra Mountains one winter in the mid-’70s never to be seen again… How perfectly this upstate winter landscape fits such a scene. I was even debating the kind of camera I would use, the kind of film, where I’d get it and the tripod, would there be another story, any actors?…when the logging road trailed off.
But I kept walking, thinking how I like winter best, along a deer trail, over ice, across a beaver fort ’til I was lost. The ground’s all frozen but there’s hardly any snow so it was impossible to follow tracks. I came up against an old chainlink fence, then left it walking what felt like south, over a stream then into a clearing, thinking High Street would be very close. But it wasn’t—there were just more woods everywhere, scraggly trees grown up over land that’s been logged and raped a dozen times in the past 150 years, deer tracks disappearing into bramble, and I realized I was walking erratically in jagged circles.
Up hill and down, I saw a partridge strut out from under a tree trunk. It took my breath away ’til I remembered I was lost. I went back and found the fence. It was mid-afternoon, a cloudy day though not too cold. Finding the fence’d taken nearly half an hour and now it was 3:30. I didn’t know where the fence would go but maybe I should follow it? But maybe not. I tried one more time to walk back the way I came but nothing looked familiar. Woods-woods-woods and frozen ground. I saw no way out, no animal markings, which in any case I don’t know how to read. So carefully I traced my way back again to the chainlink fence. I felt as though my eyes had moved outside my body. By now I’d left so many boot marks on the scattered snow I didn’t know which tracks to follow home.
I looked out in the woods and felt alone and panicky. Anything could happen. In another 90 minutes it’d be pitch dark. If I didn’t find the road by then what would happen? I thought of stories about people lost in winter woods and realized that I hadn’t paid enough attention. At fifteen degrees on a stormless winter night, was death by hypothermia a done deal? Was it better to rest under some bramble or keep walking?
Just then I heard the distant sound of a chainsaw coming from what might’ve been the north side of the woods: should I follow it? The woods were thick, the sound was muted and sporadic. Should I try to find the stream and follow it, hoping it would lead back to the creekbed behind my house? But last year’s logging’d left so many ruts it was impossible to tell which ice was streambed, which was frozen drainage. Then what about the fence? I didn’t know how far or where it led, but neighbors said the fence marks off the property of the North Country Beagle Club which owns several hundred acres of this unwanted land.
Three springs ago my friend George Mosher and the State EnCon man stood out the back of my place trading stories about fools who’d gotten turned around walking through the woods back here and gotten lost. (None of these stories as I recalled took place in winter.) George, who’s lived here his entire 80 years, says: To find your way out of the woods look at the top tips of hemlock trees because they point North. But I couldn’t tell a hemlock from a balsam tree and I didn’t know which direction the street is in, and anyway the woods were full of treetops pointing everywhere: north? east? south?
It occurred to me that there was only enough daylight left to act on one decision. If I chose wrong and was still here after dark, would Sylvère call the cops after finding me not home when he phoned from New York? Fat chance, because Sylvère says he is committed to supporting my independence, my new life. So if nobody would miss me until midnight or even tomorrow morning, what then? I had a wool scarf, my long black coat and vinyl gloves, though no matches or warm socks. Could I run in place from nightfall until 8 tomorrow morning to stay warm?
I chose the fence: walked to the left, because I knew the Beagle Club stretched down the right ending up several miles down Lanfear Road in Stony Creek. I ripped a forked branch from a tree to mark the spot. The fence didn’t follow a straight line. In order not to lose it I jumped over fallen trees, crawled through piled up branches, thorny frozen weeds.
I started running through the woods, profoundly grateful for having started taking an aerobics class. The sound of the chainsaw got fainter, further. I ran for 10 or 20 minutes, not thinking so much about death or deals with God as how many hours there’d be of night, and how it’s possible to survive it. Finally through the trees I saw a clear snow-covered slope, then farther on, a trailer.
I came out on Elmer Woods Road, a one house lane that cuts off Mud Street and walked a couple of miles down Mud Street to Smith Road. There weren’t any cars. I thought about a story told by 9 year old Josh Baker, who lives here in a trailer, about his mother walking alone down Mud Street one winter night when a demon-ghost leapt into her throat. This story, always colorful, now seemed not at all improbable.