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No portion of this novel excerpt may be copied or reproduced, in whole or in
part, with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews, without
the written permission of the publisher.
Copyright 2006, Ivor Hanson.
Published by Two Dollar Radio, 2006.
excerpted from
ONE
Showers + Binoculars
Looking out at the Manhattan skyline, I didn’t dwell too much on being just inches from a fifty-five story plunge. Nor did I fixate on the gusts of wind that could make my fall more likely; the blasts of air felt almost welcome against the heat. Instead, right before I drew my squeegee and entrusted myself to the slender ledge I now stood on, I took in my latest potential “last look.” This one ranked as a classic. Four blocks north on 42nd Street, the Chrysler Building glistened in the late afternoon sun, not quite dusk’s magic hour that filmmakers love, but close enough.
In terms of falling, I didn’t particularly relish being so high up, but I did appreciate how cleaning the ten windows of this high-in-the-sky apartment gave me ten potential last looks that were far more satisfying than what I’d seen from Sylvia’s third floor. My perch at five-hundred and fifty-five feet put me at nearly the same height as the Chrysler’s chromium-nickel gargoyles that guard the building’s upper reaches.
I squinted at the Art Deco rocket ship, but its gleaming white ceramic bricks and shiny stainless steel ornamentation proved too bright for my eyes. So much for truly savoring that view. I focused on the Chrysler’s neighboring buildings. Not surprisingly, they seemed to simply recede, admitting their lesser stature.
Having had to give up on the Chrysler Building, I sought another dramatic view by looking to my left, crosstown, at the Empire State Building, just four blocks south. The sun accentuated its steel spandrels so that a harsh band of light raced down this skyscraping pencil’s trim. I squinted and smiled at my lack of luck; my little daily doses of melodrama were being squelched. Still, I’ve never worn sunglasses out on a ledge. Apart from them possibly slipping off my face, shades leave me feeling too removed from my surroundings and make spotting streaks on the windows I’ve cleaned that much harder. And though I occasionally cover my head to shield myself from the elements, I never wear baseball caps: they make me look like Mike Love of the Beach Boys.
Seeing the Empire State Building reminded me, once more, of a famous Life magazine photo from the 1940s. The shot features a woman who fell to her death from the building, then the world’s tallest. She landed on an automobile. The sedan’s roof is crumpled, a mangled mess. But the woman, strangely, is not. She looks so peaceful, even graceful, lying on her back, a forever sleeping beauty at 33rd and Fifth. That’s how I’d like to look should a window ever best me. I looked away and got back to work.
Ignoring the sun and the wind, I felt my heart not beat, but pound. I bent my knees slightly, took a deep breath, and with my left hand, grasped the metal window frame made hot to the touch by the day’s still-high temperature. I then tested my left shoe’s grip on the apartment’s interior windowsill by slightly tensing and moving my foot. It held.
The customer had been pretty cool about my being late. But then he had asked if I would take my sneakers off to reduce the chances of my scuffing anything in his place. I wondered if this was some passive-aggressive way of punishing my tardiness. Actually, when I hear such requests I do fight back asking the client if they are out of their fucking mind. What are they thinking? But I had politely rejected his request, explaining that socks just do not provide enough traction on the sills and ledges. If he had insisted that I remove my shoes, I would have threatened to walk away from the job. I wasn’t about to die so that he could simply avoid what should be accepted as normal wear-and-tear to an apartment in New York City: if you’re going to get your windows cleaned, the window cleaner will wear sneakers or even work boots to do them.
I then tested my right shoe’s hold on the building’s exterior ledge. This I did a bit more tentatively, as the ledge was narrower than my sneaker and angled downward. I didn’t want to put too much weight on that foot. Satisfied that my “half-in, half-out” stance was safe enough, I nonetheless streched forward a little more than I would have liked to, since I sought to line my squeegee up against the far side of the glass pane I had just wetted down with my mop. I wanted to clean as much of the window’s far side as I could in one swipe. I wanted to get this job, this window, over with.
Lowering the squeegee and myself to the next wet section of the glass, I again pulled the blade first downwards and then back towards me, stopping once more at the window’s half-way point. Another dry and clean swath appeared – with no streaks to the buildings glassy skin. I repeated this motion a third time in a squat-like crouch to reach the bottom section of the window pane, making sure as I pulled my squeegee back towards me that I didn’t totter over (and down), to become a little ball of screaming window cleaner on his way to meet his maker, or, at least, the pavement. Once I’d pulled the squeegee back towards me, I took the chamois cloth from my window cleaner’s belt, rolled it around the tip of my squeegee – known as a “chamois on a stick” – and dabbed the window’s far corners and edges, removing the stray drips that remained beyond my arm’s reach. There. I’d finished half of the window. Now, just the nearer part of the pane remained dirty.
I’d never liked doing windows at the Corinthian. Curved edges and clusters of semi-circular rooms defined this striking high-rise, making its light chocolate-brown bricks seem to ripple outward and seemingly ever upward. Even now, years into this job, I dreaded the building. Whoever designed this apartment house certainly had a distinctive look in mind, but they obviously didn’t concern themselves with what window cleaners would have to deal with as a result of their handiwork: very dangerous windows. What was the point of such narrow ledges? And, why should they angle downwards? Did the architect want to assure that I experience my final moment on Earth decades earlier than I would have preferred? Didn’t he think about those who would have to cling to the building’s side as a result of his folly? What an idiot.
I’d thought my Corinthian qualms would wane as I got to know the building. They hadn’t. But I shouldn’t have been too surprised – its ledges’ widths and angles hadn’t changed either. My way of dealing with this, then, had been to turn these tricky windows – my way of both describing and denying especially hazardous panes – into a challenge. I would conquer them. Still, whenever I’ve finished a job there, I’ve always felt that I hadn’t actually beaten the windows. Rather, the windows had simply let me get away with cleaning them. I was now half a window from believing that the ten windows in this living room had let me squeak by once more. They would be giving me a pass.
Standing on the building’s ledge and windowsill, I knelt and picked up the mop beside my left foot, my inside foot, and wetted down the remaining dirt on the window pane’s exterior. Drops of water fell from the end of the mop and blew away, scattered by the wind. This high up – as high as the Washington Monument – I would never, of course, see the drips land. When I work on lower floors, much lower floors, I do like to watch the water drops complete their journey and transform from perfect spheres to ugly splotches on the sidewalk. At times, I have imagined myself falling with them. Then, I quickly recall the aplomb of the Empire State Building woman and this – she – somehow reassures me.
“Ti ti ti tisis! Ti ti ti tisis! Ti ti tis boom!”
Stop! No! Stop! Not now! I did my best to banish the new song’s drum beat. Now was not the time for it to kick in, to take over. Still, perhaps this was a sign that it was at least a little good? To get the beat out of my head, I simply looked down. And joked to myself.
Were I to fall, what should I take out? Crumpling a car had been done already. Besides, the Corinthian was set so far back from the street that hitting any vehicle was out of the question. So, how about a hedge? Or a large pedestrian? Or a yapping dog?
My Corinthian Fear should not be confused with my daily and essential on-the-job Fear. That feeling, that pit in my stomach, that wariness I’ve experienced since my first day of window cleaning, I had come to regard as a companion, a life saver. We have a simple bond, really, a clear understanding between us: Fear has kept me aware; being aware has kept me alive. And we’d been true to each other thus far. I’ve remained scared and on the ledge, not fearless and, well, dead. Surprisingly, the first time I experienced a close-call, wry resentment flashed through me: so this is how it ends, dropping off a damn window ledge. But then pure appreciation quickly followed, and I relished touching the window frame’s belt hook.
After a close call, I’m simply glad not to be splat on the sidewalk beneath me. Like status, with this job I’ve learned to take delight where I can find it and when I have the chance. Call them low-key epiphanies.
Man, did I wish the Corinthian had hooks.
I wiped the window’s midsection, and then had to mop and squeegee the pane a second time, as my angle hadn’t been quite right. This happened sometimes. Why hadn’t I simply refused to work in the Corinthian? An easy trinity answers that question: I didn’t want to let the windows “win”; I didn’t want to let down my customers who live there; I needed the money. I squatted once more and squeegeed and chamoised the last third of the pane. There, I’d finished the window, completed the job.
Rising from my crouch, I stood again, half-in and half-out, and looked at the now clean window a final time for streaks and missed spots. Though washed panes are not mirrors by any means, I did catch a muted reflection of myself in the glass. Then I looked beyond me, continuing my search for splotches, for mistakes. I don’t like seeing myself out on Corinthian ledges. Doing so means I can’t deny what I am doing.
I looked up from the clean piece of glass. New York seemed so peaceful fifty-five stories up, so manageable. Being that high, above the sidewalk and the people strolling or jostling, above the trees, grass, and bushes, above the taxis and buses and cars, above plenty of other buildings for that matter – above the world – hassles and worries fall away for the moment. They’re all down there, irrelevant. But height alone does not prompt me to feel this way. My work does its share as well. Cheating death by standing out on a narrow ledge burns away the superfluous, leaving only the essential: I am alive.
I turned away from Midtown and came down from the ledge. The time had come to put things back in place on the sill. A few books and a lamp reclaimed their spots, as did a telescope and a pair of binoculars. The farther up people lived, it seemed the more often they had their spyglasses out and at the ready.
As I repeatedly wiped down one section of the window sill, doing my best to remove some slight markings my shoes had indeed left, I looked about the room and silently decried this customer’s taste. He was no boyfriend of Sylvia’s! His couch was simply a blob of black leather. The bookshelves were a deep, dark red, while the coffee table was made of grey steel flecked with black paint. I might as well have been in somebody’s low-budget office, except I’m sure this guy had spent a lot of money on this junk. While I do enjoy seeing how other people live, working in tacky surroundings does lessen the pleasure I take in my job.
I looked back down at the smudges and after conceding that the marks would not disappear, I discretely placed a few magazines on top of the spots, and then turned and addressed the customer. His reflection in the glass had let me see him walk into the room and stand at its doorway. He was a largish man in his forties, with a balding head, a clipped beard, and wire-rim glasses. I motioned to the telescope to distract him from inspecting the windowsill.
“See anything good lately?” I asked in an off-hand way.
The man laughed, and his face turned slightly red.
“Oh, that thing. No, not really. Not in this neighborhood.”
Now it was my turn to chuckle.
“Come on,” I said, making a point to sound light-hearted. “You must see all kinds of things from this high up.”
The customer paused.
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I take a look around every so often. But, really, people have blinds and even when they are up, most everything is so far away.”
“That’s true,” I said, nodding my head in agreement. Many times when I’ve checked out people with telescopes, their acts, be they vacuuming or having sex, have seemed remote and out of context; albeit up-close, there’s no connection.
“May I?” I asked, pointing to the binoculars.
“Oh, sure.”
I picked up the lenses clad in heavy black metal, looked down and brought into focus a five-story brick building a few blocks south on 35th Street. Few of its windows had shades. Some men and women in their teens and twenties came and went through the building’s front doors, or chatted on the sidewalk near the entrance.
“That place down there could be interesting,” I said. “I mean, I’ve just noticed a bunch of young people hanging out in front of it.”
“Yeah,” the customer replied, “You’d think so. But, no, not really.”
I smiled to myself. I had lived in the building some years earlier. Indeed, I’d been living there when I first started cleaning windows – with blinds that were rarely drawn. Now, however, curtains prevented me from seeing into an ex-girlfriend’s place. But I didn’t mention this, preferring to enjoy my secret. Besides, telling him would have only put him on the spot and embarrassed him – and possibly cost me a tip. So I kept my mouth shut, put the binoculars back down, finished making the windowsill presentable instead of harrowing, and then went to the kitchen to rinse out my tools.
My first day of window cleaning now seemed so long ago, and not simply because it had been long ago: my embracing so many aspects of the job that had at first thrown me had also added distance. Over time, I had come to know how to handle a squeegee, how to handle myself on a ledge, and how to handle customers. I know how much to charge for any given window: $8 and up, depending on type, size, and difficulty, with a minimum charge of $42 for a job. Moreover, I had also come to appreciate the risk and voyeurism that accompany the work. The heights and sights were unknown elements that now I saw as near-essential perks.
On my first day, I found it strange to be walking about in a stranger’s apartment, having the run of it. This wasn’t like when I’d delivered newspapers down in D.C. as a kid and stood in the hallway, or perhaps sat on the couch, and waited to be paid. Those once-a-month stops would prompt only occasional glimpses, random clues.
At one house, I recall that while an elderly customer searched her purse for a pen, I saw that since my last visit, an American flag folded neatly into a triangle had taken the place of her husband in his reading chair. When the woman saw me glancing at the Stars and Stripes, she quietly began to cry. I left a few minutes later with a smudged check written out to The Washington Post.
During my first day of window cleaning nothing so sad had taken place, but revealing moments occurred regularly along the way. At the first job, a tony duplex on Central Park West, my boss, Pat, had encouraged me to take a look around, as the customer was not home, just the maid. I felt like an intruder going from room to room. But I did have a reason to be in each one: I had to count how many windows there were to price the job.
Later, Pat pointed out a stack of boxes containing Amway household products that lined the customer’s kitchen wall; they had not been there on his last visit a few months earlier. Since the cartons were still full, and since the maid had not been using any Amway cleaners that morning, Pat guessed that this customer had fallen on hard times in some way and was now considering selling Amway as a new livelihood. As Pat wrung out his chamois in the sink, he wished the customer luck since this expensive pad of theirs would be hard to hold onto. A few months later, Pat and I spotted the apartment listed for sale in the back of The New York Times Magazine. We recognized its staircase in the photo. Had Pat been correct? We never found out. The customer never called us again, but a doorman in the building did tell us that this tenant had indeed moved.
The next job that day found me and Pat at a much more downscale dwelling, a modest one-bedroom rental in a plain modern building on the East Side. The schoolteacher who lived there talked with Pat as I acquainted myself with my squeegee, learning my novel mantra of “mop, squeegee, chamois.” By the job’s and their conversation’s end, Pat had learned that years earlier the woman had dated the acerbic comedian and actor Dennis Leary. Deep in reverie, the woman said that Hollywood should really cast Dennis as a romantic lead. The public hadn’t seen that side of him, he could really be…. Her voice trailed off and I had an unkind thought. Had they broken up because she hadn’t been cool enough for him? I then realized, that, though my question didn’t matter, I did enjoy what prompted it: hearing her story. Knowing this bit of her life helped to make up for my now exhausting mantra, my raw hands, and my dirty clothes. I had naively worn a white collared shirt that day in deference to being in upscale surroundings. It was now ruined, and we still had one more apartment to do. I began wearing my all-black ensemble the next day. It wasn’t a stretch. I’d been wearing essentially black jeans and black tee shirts ever since my junior year at Vassar, the look of the artsy crowd I floated in.
Pat and I had concluded that first day of mine at another duplex, an ornate penthouse on Park Avenue. There, I quite willingly went from room to room to count the windows, taking my time to admire the grand piano in the living room, the marble staircase that spiraled upwards to the second floor, the billowy canopy bed in the guest room, the brass-plated bathroom fixtures, the view of the Armory across the way. The maid in her gray and white uniform made sure we took note of the new raw silk curtains in the dining room. In a thick Russian accent, she had both informed and warned us that we were to get no water or dirt on them, or to harm them in any way. That would upset the lady of the house very much.
It turned out that Pat and I upset the lady of house the moment she stepped into her home simply by our presence. She had wanted us to be done and gone by the time she got back. But we had been running late and so had not yet departed. She chewed us out while Pat prepared to go out on a dining room window’s ledge.
As Pat pulled himself up and out of the window, the lady of the house suddenly interrupted her rant with a sharp yell: “Be careful!” This outburst of humanity surprised and pleased me. She wasn’t so horrible after all. Then the lady of the house finished her sentence: “… of the drapes!” Oh. We hadn’t brought out the worst in her, just the truth.
I looked up from my bucket as I finished placing my now-rinsed tools back into it, and called out to the bearded Corinthian customer that I was done. Time to get paid, time to finally be on my way to the studio. He entered the kitchen as I wiped down the counter.
“So, how much do I owe you again?” he asked, pulling out his wallet.
I smiled, as that meant cash.
“Oh, same as last time,” I said. “We charge ten dollars a window here and I cleaned ten windows, so that’s a total of one-hundred dollars.”
“Are you sure?” the man asked. “That sounds kinda high. I thought it was nine dollars a window.”
“Ah, well, actually,” I said, stalling as I gauged how blunt I would be. “We’ve been charging ten per window here for a while. I mean, your windows are outright dangerous.”
I was not about to haggle over Corinthian windows. In fact, I felt insulted that he had questioned the price. Indeed, if I could have, I would have charged more for these panes.
I waited in silence. Was he going to acquiesce or be a jerk?
“Oh, right,” he said after a few seconds. “Of course. Here you go.”
He counted out five twenties.
I thanked him as I took the money and put it in my wallet. Damn! No tip. Cash can work against you when customers have expected to pay less, and so see more money leaving their billfold than they anticipated. Plus, it wasn’t, say, $102, a number he could have responded to by giving me $110 and telling me to keep the change. Also, he may have mistakenly thought that I would pocket the entire amount for myself, “off the books.” Or perhaps he’d come across my sneaker marks? No, I’m sure he would have pointed them out. But it wasn’t for me to find out the answers to such questions. And, of course, he didn’t have to tip me. Still, I did wonder what this guy would charge if he were about to go out on the ledge and clean some Corinthian windows.
I picked up the in-house phone and called the service elevator, telling its operator that I was on the fifty-fifth floor and waiting for him. I then picked up my bucket and the rest of my gear, and bid goodbye to the customer.
“Enjoy the view,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said as he closed the door behind me. “I’ll enjoy it even more now.”
I pictured the guy walking over to his telescope and binoculars. I just hoped he didn’t move those magazines.
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