My whole life, my parents refused to do the decent thing and pretend they couldn’t hear every step I took. I have never been trapped in a bunker or a submarine, but I have to assume there’s an understanding in these situations. These people would never survive. If I picked up the phone in the kitchen, my father’s voice would come booming from the basement, asking who I was calling. If I unfolded a blanket in the den, my mother would shout down from the top floor, offering me another one. If I passed their bedroom door, they would demand to know what I was up to. Seems harmless enough until you know that the only room after theirs was the bathroom.
Thus, the townhouse became my platonic ideal of a house. It was always grand and peaceful. It stood in the corner of the living room, covered with a tarp like a birdcage. Light from the television would be visible to any tiny people living inside. They would be able to hear my parents’ cries of “What are you watching?” as I changed the channel. But there were no tiny people beneath the tarp. No eyes to see or ears to hear. No one to tell me that I would one day live in Manhattan, where if someone follows you around, asking you who you’re calling, you can have that person arrested.
* * *
A couple of decades later I was living in a railroad apartment in Chelsea, illegally subletting it from a friend’s sister. The sister lived in Los Angeles and I never met her, despite repeated offers to meet whenever I happened to be in Los Angeles. This was for her benefit, not mine. If it were me, I’d want to vet me. But I never heard back from her. I never heard from her at all, actually. One time the peephole fell out, a thing I did not realize peepholes could do—just dislodge themselves and come thudding onto the floor like a car part. I wrote to her, explaining what had happened. No response. Eventually, I taped the receipt for a new peephole to my reduced rent check, which she cashed without a, well—you know. The second I saw her name appear on my phone, I knew I was getting evicted.
Not wanting to stray too far from home, I paid a broker to find me a place nearby. In the easiest gig of that guy’s already unchallenging career, we walked nine blocks south to a prewar building, the kind with a name engraved above the awning but none of the residents could tell you what it is. The broker unlocked the door to a 600-square-foot one-bedroom on the second floor that had been recently occupied by a boy (the clothes pole in the closet was missing). But the moldings were thick enough to double as bookshelves and the view was unreal. Tulip trees shaded a row of the private backyards of townhouses. Cherry blossom detritus drizzled in the wind. A blue jay landed on the fire escape. It was the first apartment I saw, I could barely afford it, and I took it immediately.
The West Village is a ridiculous place to call home. People with unseemly bank accounts spend thousands of dollars freshening the flowerpots on their stoops. Rosebushes, hydrangeas, pansies, and zinnias—all casually exposed to marauding vagrants. Except there are no vagrants, not even marauding ones. It’s a generationally diverse area but otherwise it’s as removed from reality as a movie set. Celebrities’ kids skip along the pavement, backpacks twice their size bobbing up and down. One of the houses visible from my apartment is owned by an elderly couple. The woman likes to tell guests how Hilary Swank used to climb a fence and exit through their house in order to avoid the paparazzi.
Down the block and around the clock, people take photos of the façade of Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment in Sex and the City. Submitting to their fate, the real owners have installed a donation box on behalf of a local animal shelter for every photo taken. These tourists’ heads would explode like a bomb full of nicotine patches if they knew that Sarah Jessica Parker herself lives around the corner. I can’t help but wonder what she feels when she walks past Carrie’s building. It must be like driving past your high school, at once everything and nothing.
I only cared about the celebrities the way all New Yorkers care about celebrities: I ignored them or, if they were especially famous, congratulated myself for ignoring them. The real draw of the neighborhood was the quiet. And not just any kind of quiet. Here, in the heart of Manhattan, was a pod of that suburban silence that had eluded me as a child. You could hear a pin drop in my bedroom—on the bed. Early mornings, I listened to the heckling of seagulls that had strayed inland from the Hudson River. On warm evenings, a cellist sat on the street corner with his case open. When it rained, water pelted the leaves outside my enchanted tree house.
* * *
And then one day the leaves dropped and Jared came out. Jared lived in the townhouse directly behind my apartment. He must have been on summer vacation or touring Europe by colonial rickshaw when I moved in. Jared was between fifteen and eighteen years of age. It was impossible to tell. I could never get a good read on his height, as his resting state was slouched in a lawn chair, watching viral videos on his phone at full volume. And I never heard him say stuff like “Looks like I can be legally tried as an adult
