Chapter 5

Rear Window

AS INTERNATIONAL CAPITALS GO, Paris is about as small as they get. Though the greater metropolitan area contains some eleven million people, the twenty arrondissements inside the ring road, or periphérique as it is called, house only about two million. This, combined with the fact that the city is a national treasure, plus an admirable determination on the part of the city authorities to maintain a low-rise conurbation in the city’s center, means that Paris is like one great big village.

You can walk pretty much anywhere in the city. The Métro, though stinky, is one of the most efficient public transportation systems in the world, and bike riding is encouraged by a comprehensive network of bike lanes all over the town. This big-city-with-a-village-atmosphere is only enhanced by the fact that under the leaden roofs and terracotta chimney pots that constitute the Paris skyline, people live on top of one another. The French call it vis-à-vis when the windows of your apartment look directly across the road or courtyard into the windows of your neighbor’s apartment. What this creates is a fantastic, citywide version of the Hitchcock classic Rear Window. It surely also accounts for low TV-viewership figures in Paris. For who needs television when they have real-life dramas played out for them every night through their living-room windows?

Having an uninterrupted view into the living quarters of your neighbors creates the bizarre situation whereby despite the fact you don’t know their names, you are acutely aware of the kind of underwear they sport, their sexual preference, the cereal they eat, how often they wash, and the state of their love life. From my living room I had the cross section of human experience on tap. And given that I was a new arrival in the city, without a network of friends to otherwise fill my extracurricular hours, I would often come home, whip up some dinner, stare out the window, and watch the drama unfurl before me.

Across the street and two floors up, behind the window boxes of carefully tended geraniums and beyond a set of red and white gingham curtains, lived the gay couple. They looked like a clone of each other and apparently had wardrobes consisting solely of white Calvin Klein underwear. Below them, and behind a set of comparatively grottier windows, lived the lesbian couple. They too had window boxes, but the plants were long dead, and the empty boxes now served only as receptacles for the butts of the cigarettes they seemed to be perpetually smoking as they hung nude from the window.

One floor down was the hetero couple. They didn’t have any window boxes or plants. But they did have a lot of sex, which I guess they figured was a better use of their time. Next door to them lived the ironing man. He was, as far as I could tell, a young single guy with an unusual obsession with ironing. I am sure he had other interests, but none that I ever saw him indulge. Day and night, no matter what the hour, he could be seen shirtless at the ironing board, throwing his sunken hairless chest and skinny little arms into the de-creasing process of a seemingly endless pile of laundry.

After a month in my new apartment, I had seen all the characters in my window-framed drama in varying states of undress—as indeed, they had seen me. Given that we didn’t know one another, and that if we bumped into each other in the street, we probably wouldn’t have recognized each other out of context, it seemed perfectly fine that we had all been nude in front of one another. Besides, the occasional flash of a bare buttock was nothing compared to some of the stuff to which I eventually bore witness.

Though I had only recently begun tuning in to the nightly window drama, it had nevertheless been long enough to discern the sexual habits of the hetero couple—who were apparently the least concerned of all my neighbors about sharing the intimate details of their love life with the wider arrondissement. They had curtains on their bedroom windows but seemed incapable—or simply disinclined—to ever use them. It wasn’t uncommon for me to glance up from my couch late at night and catch a glimpse of them doing their bit for French population growth, usually with admirable enthusiasm. As the weather began to warm and winter turned to spring, I would discover that not only was their curtain-drawing ability apparently impaired by the rising temperature, so too were their window-closing and scream-suppressing capacities. And people would marvel when they learned, after two months in Paris, that I still hadn’t gotten around to connecting my cable TV.

Two months into my Paris sojourn, my sister Kirrily and her fiancé Damion came to visit from Melbourne. One night we went for dinner in the quartier and returned just in time to see the lights flick on in the hetero couple’s apartment. Keen to share the fullness of my new Parisian life with my loved ones, I told them to kill the lights and gather round the window to take in the spectacle that I knew would inevitably ensue. Without for a moment considering how sad this made me look to my visitors (I could all but hear my sister thinking: Not only does he watch strange people have sex, but he has an entire light-switching-off routine to do it), I settled in and started up a commentary on the couple’s lives, their other endearing daily habits, and the odd position of the girlfriend’s birthmark. Suddenly, and with a twist of my head to get a better view of the two faces stuck to one another across the way, I stopped dead in my commentary tracks and took a sharp intake of breath.

“Hang on a minute. That’s not his girlfriend.”

I felt strangely affronted. It felt like he was cheating on me, refusing to stick to the script I had written and keep to the role I had assigned him in my rear-window soap opera. If he was going to cheat, I reasoned later, he could have at least closed the curtains out of deference to his better half.

As entertaining—and occasionally noisy—as my living-room-window characters were, they didn’t hold a candle to the woman who lived in an apartment opposite my bedroom window. She was either possessed of a very punctual lover, or was a very big fan of a particular TV personality who came on the box every morning at nine. For how else to explain why her very loud orgasms were so regular that you could set your watch by them? I never had to fear missing my alarm or sleeping past nine o’clock as long as she was there. One Saturday morning her yelps were so sustained and so vocal that I found myself standing incredulous at the window, in admiration, envy, and concern. Across the street four of my neighbors, similarly roused by the ruckus, stood in their respective apartment windows seeking out the source of the clamor. We acknowledged one another with a sheepish wave, indulged in knowing grins, and retreated behind our curtains to let our quartier consoeur climax in peace.

And if it wasn’t Miss Joy of Sex across the street keeping me from my slumber, it was the old couple who lived next door and downstairs. They were so old and had been in the neighborhood so long that the building had practically been constructed around them. They lived in the apartment next to mine, and also on the floor below, in an apartment directly underneath mine. This strange upstairs-downstairs arrangement was made all the more bizarre by the fact that no internal staircase connected the two living spaces, meaning they spent the better part of any given night on the communal staircase, opening and closing doors in a most unnecessarily noisy fashion.

She was a sprightly, mischievous-eyed eighty-something woman, rumored in neighborhood circles to be a white witch. She favored cardigans and tended to shuffle more than actually walk, always with her long blond hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. He was an amiable elf of a man, his bumper crop of dramatic gray hair swept back over his pate in that fashion so favored among older French men.

Dyed-in-the-wool communists—of the type you tend to find only in countries that have never really experienced communism—they had thrown rocks at police during the riots of May ’68 and protested France’s colonial war in Algeria in the late fifties, and, if the wizened face and hunched posture of Mrs. Commie was anything to go by, there was a pretty good chance they had even manned the barricades during the Revolution of 1789.

Every now and then I would pass them on the stairwell. I would be just home from my job in the service of rampant capitalism and heading out to a bar, restaurant, or shop to pay homage to the god of consumerism. They would be heading home, placards and banners in hand, after a hard day spent demonstrating against one of the myriad evils of the free market system. And given the regularity with which the French tended to strike and protest—plus the fact that a French person will join in a demo even if they have no idea what they are protesting—they usually had a pretty crowded dance card.

“Bonjour, Monsieur, Madame,” I would say as I bounced down the stairs. “You’ve been out at a manifestation again? What was it today?”

“Oh well, you know, Monsieur Corbett,” the old lady would reply seriously, in the perfectly enunciated French of the elderly. “Today we were protesting council plans to evict squatters from the building on the Rue Charlot.”

“Oh—that wasn’t yesterday’s protest?” I would ask, confused.

“Mais non! Yesterday was a protest against the declining water quality of La Seine!” she would admonish me, incredulous that I was unaware of this most pressing social crisis.

At night, apparently not worn out by hours spent footslogging in a circle outside the mayor’s office, they would shuffle endlessly from one of their apartments to the other. Up and down they climbed the stairs with the labored footsteps of the politically oppressed, pausing only to slam a door or shout at each other in heated, midstairwell philosophical debate. And if it wasn’t a midnight tirade against the state that kept me awake, it was their habit of watching television at top volume at two in the morning. Whether because they suffered from industrial deafness, or because she was using the noise to cover the sound of virgin sacrifices, the TV was always switched on at top volume at two a.m. I never had to worry about listening to the news in the morning, as the TV news bulletins would reverberate up through my bedroom floor each night.

Noisy, exhibitionist, ideologically dogmatic, and distinctly claustrophobic, my new neighborhood had all the elements I required for an authentic Parisian experience. Certainly I was not destined to get much sleep. But with all this entertainment on tap—all of these lives being busily led, barely a curtain twitch away—I was destined to be endlessly amused. But as my sister quietly but firmly pointed out, living vicariously through the snatched glimpses of other people’s domesticity was not much of a life.

“You should maybe get out more,” she politely suggested.

I had to admit she had a point.