Later, Stephanie would explain, in a short, sharp introduction to the book, that it all began because of her jet lag; or perhaps it was the noise, the sirens and horns and car alarms at night; or maybe it was the visions. She couldn’t sleep. The first two nights she got up and began to circle the living room, unevenly and a little bit thoughtlessly, unpacking, carrying clothes into the bedroom, rearranging the bedside lamp, setting up the bathroom, but always returning back into the living room, where she would make a pass by the windows and look down on the street below, streaked with yellow, the traffic lights with their slightly off colors—the red wasn’t quite red, and the green was half blue—changing one to the next.
Years ago a friend of hers had bought a new lens that he wanted to show off. She’d gone over to his apartment and he brought it out, a gorgeous thing to be sure, and very expensive. She did not, as a rule, have any particular feel for machinery, but lenses were different, almost like jewelry, with their perfect crystals and their interlocking parts. Isn’t it pretty? her friend had said. And so it was: a beautiful thing for capturing beautiful things. But then, what was New York itself? A magnificent machine composed of miles and miles of glass, undergirded by a machinery so intricate and complicated that no one could comprehend it all—a camera feeding on its own light, built by millions of people over hundreds of years for the purpose of capturing this very life they were building. She stood by the window, stared and inhaled, taking in the scent of it, floating above all the service and retail, the smell of light, ash and concrete, mixed with the sometimes sickly sweet odor that wafted up from the rear doors of restaurants, where they had thrown out whatever they hadn’t managed to sell. On the third night she got dressed before she could change her mind, took a camera, and went downstairs. She felt like she was wandering off the clockface, away from books, away from the day and its responsibilities, into a dark field unencumbered with landmarks.
She started over toward Fifth Avenue, listening to the sound of her own heels striking the pavement. She felt the usual vague fear, that dank uncertain glaze over everything, because it was nighttime and she was alone. But the camera was her protection, that was the worst and best thing about it: people were afraid of it. She stopped under a scaffolding and fired off a few quick shots of an empty doorway across the street just to make sure the exposure was set properly. Pop, pop, pop, she said to herself. If she was seeing, she was invisible: that’s how it worked.
Film couldn’t do this. There had never been any that was fast enough to shoot at night, not without holding the exposure for so long that anything that moved became blurred, or using a flash so powerful that every scene looked like a crime had occurred there. But these new cameras, with their apertures open wide and their hypersensitive sensors: they were owl-eyed, they could see a drizzle of photons in the dead of dark. Quite suddenly and for the very first time, the world at night had become as visible to the camera as it was to the eye, a third of the planet’s rotation now available to the photographer, where it had once been too dim to see. It was a development as momentous as Muybridge, as revelatory as color, and she was greedy for it, starving.
She watched the avenues grow less busy as she got closer to the park, fewer shops and restaurants open, none at all on Fifth, nor even much traffic, so she stood in the middle of the street for a moment, shooting first downtown, then uptown, before hastening back to the sidewalk. There was a doorman watching her: she was on public property, although being so never prevented someone from trying to stop her, and in fact he came over, palm raised, and said, You can’t do that here. She glanced at him; sometimes it was best to push back and sometimes it was best to implore, but it was her first night out and she just said, I’m OK, and started walking downtown. It was always useful to confuse them, and she’d collected a half dozen phrases—sheer nonsense that sounded enough like a response to hold someone off for a second or two. Hang on, it’s broken, that usually worked. It didn’t help if you pretended not to hear them, or not to understand: then they just got physical. You had to come back at them with some sort of authority, the more senseless the better. You could say almost anything if you said it with enough confidence. The horses are almost ready. There’s something wrong with those trees.
A cab pulled over to the corner, unsolicited; she shook her head and it drove off again. A jogger passed her on the sidewalk. There was a ghost bicycle, white as bone, chained to a parking sign. If everyone was asleep, how come so many of the lights were on in the buildings overhead? Now that she’d left the doorman behind, she panned the camera across the top floors of an office building, though from street level she couldn’t see anything but ceilings. She turned back east; on the other side of Madison there were men unloading cardboard boxes from the back of a van and stacking them on the sidewalk, and a woman in her twenties standing just inside the door of a bank, the machines behind her waiting patiently, sky blue and mute, for someone to come take her safely home. She met Stephanie’s gaze for a second, saw the camera, and turned away. To the south, the street was spotted with little lights from the stores that were still open, or had closed but left their signs lit, and from fifteen blocks away she could see two taxis swimming northwards. She liked people, she liked stealing from people.
London wasn’t the same, not at this hour. It was all so stony and antiquated; there was never the surprise of a subway letting out or police cars gunning through an intersection. At one or two in the morning, there was just the architecture, occasionally interrupted by drunken children. She had never been a Londoner. But New York at night was New York. She took pictures in bursts, mashing the button down to get five or six frames in a second, listening to the soft, swift clicking of the aperture. Her teachers would have upbraided her for failing to kill the beast with one shot, but she didn’t care. She loved this feeling, of being joined to the whole world by the tip of her finger; she was profligate, promiscuous, she could surface from a single day with hundreds of images. It was time-consuming and occasionally maddening, going through them all and trying to decide which ones to keep; all she wanted was a picture, and she wasn’t patient. But neither could she bear to lose a frame, no matter how banal. She might print one out of every hundred she shot and exhibit one out of every ten she printed, but the rest she kept stored, the memory cards archived, boxed up, and shelved. — Now here was a man in an expensive grey overcoat, leaning against the hood of his expensive car, smoking a cigarette and talking on a phone. He saw her faint smile and nodded to her, he didn’t know that she’d taken his picture before he saw her, and that was why she’d smiled. As she passed, he turned away slightly, shoulders hunched, leaning forward over the sidewalk and saying, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
She walked a few blocks south and then over to Lexington, where she started north again, slow as an army scout getting used to the terrain, not just looking for landmarks but settling into her own gait, adjusting her eyes’ saccade, glancing at the screen on the back of the camera, clocking the numbers, how much time and how much memory. She had been no one until she discovered photography, late in college: just another New York girl with a good education and invisible manners, unsure of whom to love. The camera had taught her how to look, and looking had taught her what she wanted. She hadn’t always gotten it, but she had gotten pictures of it.
She went out the next night, and almost every night thereafter. It was a demanding and disorienting schedule, she knew, but it suited her and it suited her circumstances; it was a way to return to New York, entering through the side door, unobserved. She decided that 8 p.m. was the end of the day, and she would leave the apartment just past sunset, carrying her smallest good camera, take a cab to a corner and start to walk, wandering down to Cooper Square one night, across 42nd Street from river to river the next, up one avenue and down another, walking and watching, from nightfall until the sky’s first cherub-colored note of dawn. Here there were five or six restaurants on each block, extending back from sidewalks into dark and distant rooms, excavated out of solid stone. Here there were theaters, here there were lights, here there were brownstones and here there were tenements. Here there were old people, and here there were none. Here there were white people, and here there were none.
Every so often, especially in the early hours, she would run into someone she knew on the street, though it was never anyone she knew well: a man she’d met at a dinner party in a luxurious apartment on Gramercy Park, the sister of a woman she’d dated from Memorial Day to Labor Day, an editor who had once offered her a gig shooting fashion, and had kept raising the fee as Stephanie kept declining. They looked exactly as they had a decade previously, but for some tightening around the eyes; and they dressed just as they had, the only changes being an update in a line or hem here and there, finer cloth and smaller stiches. A woman she’d worked with in a gallery on West Broadway, who was pushing a softly bouncing baby stroller with twin boys inside, and who was so exhausted she could only say Hello. An elderly man who was coming up out of the 72nd Street subway station as she was going down, and asked her, quite sincerely, how she was doing, but before she could answer a flock of hurrying passengers carried him away, and it was only after he was gone that she realized he was a friend of her parents, whom she’d last seen at her mother’s funeral.
She found blocks of office buildings and blocks of tenements, concert halls, docks; there were neighborhoods so quiet she could hear herself breathing, and others so noisy she came home with a headache; there were monuments and hospitals, chain-link fences in front of empty lots; there were drunken tourists, wandering groups of young women in nearly identical sheath-tight dresses, sanitation workers and drug dealers, men standing in front of all-night pizza parlors. But the people were only ornaments on the things, and she shot in her eccentric way. There was one night when she spent more than an hour documenting a construction site from the sidewalk, her eyes drifting across the foundation, the crane, the stacks of rebar, a single bare light bulb burning on the third or fourth floor. Long before she finished, she knew she wasn’t going to get anything she could use. The forms were uninteresting, and while banality had its virtues, they were exceedingly refined, and she’d never quite trusted her own taste in such things. Besides, the scene had an allegorical air about it, some point that it made about Erasing History or Capital, or something like that; but she had no point to make and didn’t want to be mistaken for someone who did. She looked for angles in the un-angled sky. She didn’t find them but she kept shooting anyway, working the muscles, calibrating her eye, until the memory card was full.
Another night she walked the length of Columbus, passing closed cafés and shuttered newsstands, people coming alone out of bars. She stopped at a basketball court and watched four boys, no older than fourteen or fifteen, playing hard at a game at two in the morning. She stood back from the fence and listened to the rhythm of the ball striking the pavement, holding the camera at her side with her finger twitching on the shutter release. She brought it up to her eye and tried to frame the scene as quickly as possible: she didn’t want the boys, she wanted the ball, dim and orange, sailing on its inspired arc across the dark reflecting windows of a brick apartment building, and she shot the way the boys were shooting, swiftly, casually-carefully, glancing.
On yet another night she found herself on Canal and Church, having wandered down from the Village taking pictures of the trees in their dark uniforms, shops behind rolled-down grates, the backlit door to an after-hours club, which opened every few minutes to let in someone new. She crossed into Tribeca and found a pair of subway conductors sitting on the steps of a pocket park, unwrapping sandwiches. She asked if she could take their picture and the smaller one spoke in a thick Caribbean accent: What for?
She made herself plain and said, Just for me.
OK, the larger one said. Just for you. The two of them leaned back against the wrought-iron fence and smiled.
She shot four or five, and then said, Thank you.
Him not going to come out, the smaller one said, jerking his head at the other man. You’ll get no picture of him. Him a demon.
The other made a mock-angry face and said, Stop that! Why you try to scare her, hm? He pushed at the smaller one’s head and they both started laughing. The smaller one said something Stephanie didn’t understand, but it sounded like a curse, and the two men screamed with laughter and she took their picture again. You be good now, one said as she was walking away. You make us famous.
By the time she got to Chambers, the faint pearly-pink dome of morning had just started to come down. Dawn didn’t arrive here from the horizon: it descended slowly from the sky, and the city still thought it was nighttime and the streetlights were on. This was the moment of soul’s first breath. She stood on the north side of the intersection and a woman emerged from down the block, paused on the sidewalk to check her handbag, then stood with one foot in the road, her ankle bisecting the curb like a lady in a Watteau. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, and she was facing away in heels and a tan raincoat, her hair expensively cut and then tied with a ribbon, and when she looked across the street, where another woman was getting into another cab, Stephanie could see her features, which were elegant if not beautiful, clear skin, a simple silk scarf at her neck. She began to shoot in deliberately overexposed bursts, hoping to get the exact moment it all came together, the controlled curve of her form, the lights fracturing behind her. A cab pulled over and she shot a few more as the woman moved into the street, bent down to ask something of the driver, one arm clenched around her waist to keep her coat closed, and then opened the door and slipped into the back seat. The cabbie watched Stephanie, but if he said anything to the woman in back she didn’t notice or didn’t care. When the cab started forward, Stephanie stepped back into the shadows of a doorway, and, emboldened by her great good fortune, took a few more pictures as it passed. Then she hugged her camera to her chest, happy as a child, started around the corner and hurried uptown, suddenly very tired and ready for sleep.
There came the evening when Stephanie found herself on the block where she’d grown up, scarcely knowing whether she’d deliberately steered that way or not. It came over her slowly: the streets were familiar, but the details had been redone. The trash cans were green instead of grey, there were no phone booths, no cracks in the sidewalk, no supers watching from basement railings. New York, busy being new and being New York: alone among things it got younger instead of older. Walking through the neighborhood was like meeting the son of an old friend and recognizing in him some trace of his parents, an intermittent signal, a gesture, the route his expression took from one emotion to another, the beats and breaths in his voice, the way he squinted when he thought, which together created something more subtle than an imitation: more like a condition, a syndrome. She looked up at the buildings overhead; they, at least, were still the same, they’d been there for as long as she could remember, they were the ancestors upon which this entire plot was played, and they gave the whole scene a strange-familiar feel. Here was the block where she had dawdled on the way home from middle school, stopping in her favorite dress shop to smell the perfumes and collect a piece of licorice candy from the proprietress, an elderly woman with henna-colored hair. Here was the corner where she’d bent to pet an older girl’s little poodle, only to have the creature bite her on her index finger. She remembered his sweet and sour breath, and the greasy off-white curls of his coat. There was the street-level apartment where a portly and melancholy man in a wheelchair had spent one afternoon a week for nine months trying to teach her to play the piano; and here was the broken curb where her mother had confessed, one day when Stephanie was fifteen, that she couldn’t remember what her father had said about the man now running for Congress, whether he was for him or against him, back when he was still a city councilman.
And here was once home. The building itself was not especially different from the others around it: twelve brick stories furnished with concrete cornices and sills, with a single decorative badge toward the top, and an arched door over which there stood a canopy, which had once been maroon and now was forest green. Many years previously—in another century, she realized with a shock—it had been a respectable address, if not quite a distinguished one. Some of the residents had taken generations to land there, moving from tenements on the Lower East Side or cramped apartments in Queens to Morningside Heights or Kips Bay, then at last to a prewar classic six in Carnegie Hill or Yorkville, where they dreamed of townhouses that they would never be able to afford. Even as a child, she’d known that there was nothing particularly glamorous about the place, though it must have been expensive. The residents dressed well and spoke well, they wore sleek wool coats in the wintertime; the men wore understated watches, the women elegant brooches. They had maids, china in the sideboard that never got used, theater tickets, unhappy marriages. The building had no name, or if it did no one ever used it. Names were another thing We Didn’t Do, that was a custom for the West Side; they called it by its street address.
After her father died, she and her mother had moved into a smaller apartment in the same building. She never did remember which of the larger apartments—the end doors on each floor—had once been theirs, nor had her mother ever mentioned who had moved into it, although they knew almost everyone who lived in the building, by sight if not by name. Either the sorrow of her collapsed adulthood was a rebuke too painful to contemplate, or she was trying to spare her daughter any sense of resentment or inferiority. It didn’t matter: by the time she was sixteen, Stephanie had hated the building, hated everything about it, and everything about the neighborhood, her private school with its inane rituals and ugly uniforms, where she’d felt invisibly marked, a shadow on her surname and she never talked about boys—though when her mother had offered to send her to Ramaz instead, she’d declined immediately, since the only thing worse than being different was being the same as everyone else. She hated the boutiques, the delivery vans, the little wrought iron fencing around the trees, the old ladies perched on too-high heels; the quiet at night and the emptiness on weekends, above all the fact that her father wasn’t there to leaven it with his good humor, and her mother was helpless and confused, with pill bottles accumulating on her nightstand, more of them each year, mumbling on the telephone and stumbling to the door, wearing a hopeless, squinting stare. Stephanie had just started her sophomore year at Barnard when the police called. It was a night not unlike this one, brisk and scuttering: that afternoon, her mother had walked into Central Park, taken her favorite seat on a bench by the Boathouse, and swallowed two months’ worth of tranquilizers: no one knew how many, exactly, nor what she’d meant. As the sun grew low and golden, casting long, seductive shadows across the greenery, she’d fallen into a sleep that dropped deeper and deeper, and then deeper still, stopping at last when it hit the bottom. She was only fifty years old, but she seemed to belong to another age, one full of worries and things unspoken, black-and-white film clips of troops marching down the boulevard, boiled cabbages, of unbearable losses and intolerable isolation, coupled with a will to survive that turned indolent and rank when survival was no longer threatened.
That fall Stephanie discovered that she could cry in the darkened auditorium of an art history lecture without anyone knowing. The pictures would bypass her perception and pierce straight through to her grief. Almost anything might do it: a boy by Caravaggio, a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Malevich black monochrome, the spectral smudges of Rauschenberg’s erased de Kooning, one of Eva Hesse’s skeins of dangling rope and latex. The professor would murmur, one slide would vanish and another appear in its place, and at once she would feel hot tears on her cheeks. She wondered afterwards if that was how she’d come to associate grief with beauty and beauty with grief: not every beauty, but the ones that people made, pictures, songs, poems, dances. And not every grief, but the ones she couldn’t bear, that left her astonished and skeletal, like a body from which the flesh has suddenly dropped. The work needn’t be mournful or even serious, it could be playful, even joyful, antic, knotted up, sly. But if it was well-made, it made her sad, and she was always at least a little bit sad when she was making her own. She never talked about this, not with anyone: for one thing, it was buried too deep to exhume, and for another, she considered it a failing on her part, mere useless biography, an ingredient added to a recipe which left no taste, and yet there it was.
And there she was herself, back home, as if the intervening years had been blown away on a single puff of breath. The doorman, a tall, thin man in a blue uniform, stood inside the door, watching her for a few moments, and then came out to greet her. He looked like a cartoon mortician, and spoke in a low and doleful voice. Can I help you, miss?
My mother was Mrs. Teller, in 7D.
7D is Jenkins, he said.
No, this was a while ago.
Ah, said the doorman. The brass pin on his lapel said that his name was Gerald.
She peered over his shoulder into the dark lobby, the red legatee, the last in her line, trying not to show her hand. A long time ago, she said. She thought if she could see how it smelled—that mixture of perfume and medicine—she would swoon upon time’s slope, and she felt simultaneously tempted and frightened. She couldn’t imagine her mother being anywhere but here, and if she came upon her, a shadow on the stair, what would she ask? What would she say? Are you happy with what I’ve done?
Of course I am. How could I not be?
Are you disappointed to find that you’ll have no grandchildren, even ones you’ll never meet?
A little. But just a little.
Does it frighten you to find that I love other women?
And her mother would say, Oh, honey: but I always knew that.
The doorman had darted to the curb to help a carefully groomed woman with two small children and several brightly colored shopping bags exit a black car. That would have been the time to slip past him, but she couldn’t. It was a trap, the whole thing: the draw, the difference, the obscurity inside, and by the time the doorman had reassumed his post Stephanie was gone.