Everyone is Watching (18 page)

The reporter has tracked Robert Moses’s daughter down to a bench in Central Park. It is 1963. He sits down beside her and looks for the likeness of the father. He looks
for the formidable man.

I thought it was strange for us all to get in a boat and sail from our home on Long Island, she says. I pictured every island going east getting smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a
grain of sand. I thought of the country as a whole, how big America is. People told me my father was rebuilding New York. My father was going to save this city from itself, they said. They told me
he knew where to put things. They said he liked things to be kept moving so he built the roads to get the cars moving, and he built the parks to get people moving. When we had a holiday we were
always on the move. First into the boat with our luggage then sailing across the ocean to Fire Island. When I thought about it I thought of it ablaze, and when I saw it, I imagined the fire
spreading from shore to shore along the strip of sand, and what would I do if I were there and trapped – well – Daddy would find a way to get us all moving. We camped on the beach. When
the weather was bad we stayed in an abandoned beach house. We laid mattresses on the floor. We slept together in one room and we lit a fire in the hearth. We went out for long walks on the beach.
There were shipwrecks on the shore. I remember playing hide and seek. We cooked fresh fish over the fire and we lay in the sand. We looked up at the stars. We were packed off to bed, the children
and Mom, but he never went to bed. When everyone else was asleep I watched him come into the room then turn to leave again. I followed him. I watched him walk along the beach. I watched him
unbutton his shirt and step out of his clothes. I watched him stride into the ocean. My father loves to swim. Did you know that?

Jane takes her seat in the front row of the conference room in 1961. Everyone is waiting for her to speak. She knows there are things beyond this city. She reminds herself she
was not born here, but one can grow attached to things.

Jane, dear Jane – thank God you’re here – have you seen the entourage?

Her friend points to the men sitting on the stage.

Her friend’s bottom lip is trembling. Jane wants to tell her to get a grip. These are just men. They think this meeting is a mere formality. They have their speeches already prepared. They
have planned to be out at lunch in half an hour. But their confidence is an advantage. Arrogant men never think they can be beaten.

How will you do it? Oh, how will you do it, Jane?

Jane pats her arm. There, there, she says. There, there.

What these men don’t know is that Jane has already been to City Hall and she has already seen the expressway plans. She has recorded the dates of their proposals. She has made copies of
these to hand out to the audience. The documents explain that the things they are about to say are lies. The men will say that there is nothing these people can do, that time has already passed and
it cannot now be reclaimed. They will say that the moment for protest is already over. They will claim that these people have no right of appeal. This is all fiction, of course. The time for
protesting is not yet over. These men won’t receive official authorization for another six weeks. They are planning what is known as premature severance, a way to nip the problem in the bud
before the protesters become aware of their rights and organize themselves. They are counting on the fact that most people believe what they are told, particularly by men in suits.

Jane will not get up right away. She will allow them first to say their piece. It pays to be level-headed in moments like these. It pays to understand the possibilities of time. The women all
around her are fluttering like birds but Jane is as calm as a stone. She has met this type of man before. They are nothing compared to her. Jane waits patiently for it all to begin.

Patti Smith is sitting on the floor of a white room in 2006. She is refusing to leave this room until the filmmaker has finished making his film.

She has barricaded herself in with all her possessions. They are relics. Objects build up over time, she says. These are just the things that are left.

She takes a tambourine from the wall.

Robert made this for my birthday, she says. But you don’t want to know about this; you want me to talk about New York. I slept in parks and subway stations. I looked for jobs in
restaurants and stores. I wasn’t in danger because no one paid me any attention. No one was looking at this skinny kid walking around Manhattan. I used to pretend I was being filmed. I posed
in the reflections of store windows and in the reflections of moving vehicles streaming up and down the avenues of the city and in subway car windows. I knew every pose of Modigliani’s
models, those pale, skinny women who were also his lovers, their narrow eyes and long jutting limbs, because they looked a lot like me.

It was a different world back then. You didn’t think about being molested. People were happy to be in the city. People looked out for one other. People were watching when it counted. Kids
complain to me all the time. They say, How do
I
do it, Patti? The city’s too expensive now. I can’t do what you did then. I say, Find a cheaper city. Move someplace else. Save
up money to buy the time to make your art.

Patti opens a small wooden box beside her and pulls out a Polaroid of her and Robert Mapplethorpe standing in Coney Island when they were both young. She has a scarf around her head. She is
dressed in white and squinting against the sun. Robert is dressed head to toe in black with a white scarf around his neck.

We all want souvenirs, she says. We want relics. I guess it’s a Catholic thing. Objects take on the power of moments. This Polaroid became that as soon as I held it in my hand. All of the
objects around me possess this power. That’s why I don’t ever have to leave this room.

She takes out an urn from a cabinet and holds it up for the camera.

I think the urn is Persian, she says.

She struggles to open the catch. She tips the grains into the palm of her hand.

These are Robert’s remains, she says.
They look more like pieces of shell. See how they catch the light? I take him with me places. We travel together. This is all that’s left of him
now. This is just a small part. Most of his remains are with his mother and father. You know, T. S. Eliot said that every generation translates for itself. You have to respect history whilst also
breaking it apart. I think you have to learn to control it. This means forcing yourself to see. Is this what you’re doing with your film?

Steven imagines Patti’s bus drawing into Manhattan on her arrival. She looks at her reflection in the window as the bus moves on. She watches her own reflection as the city moves behind
it.

We’ve all made a decision like that once in our lives, she says. You just need to do it and then it’s done. All the hard work lay ahead of me then but what did I care? I was young, I
was free. I had arrived. I had a vision of the future. That’s how I’ve lived my life. That’s me.

Steven once filmed Patti taking a rubbing from Allen Ginsberg’s grave. The sheet of paper was a copy of a symbol that described a life. The charcoal dirtied her fingers. She brushed her
fingers on the side of her pants. She took a photograph of the grave. This was another duplication.

Steven is recording everything because he doesn’t know when the crucial scene will come. He has been doing this for ten years. For ten years he has been filming Patti Smith. He has found
that she never veers off to the side and she never pretends. Sometimes it is as if he can see right through her to the other side of the room. Sometimes he thinks she can see into him. Love pours
from her like light.

Al Smith visited Central Park Zoo after it closed up for the day. He entered through the side gate using the key that Moses had given him. He walked to the sea-lion pen. He
looked at the sea lions swimming in the water, swimming without any urgency, just floating there. The pathways were clear. Night was descending. The animals dozed in their pens. A low hush fell
over the park. He shouted at the penguins but they did not look at him. He roared at the lion. He knew a thing or two about them. You put your head right into the lion’s mouth every time you
stepped into City Hall.

Al Smith was appointed President of the Empire State Building in 1928. When the building was completed in 1931, Smith stood in his empty office one thousand feet up in the air.
The corridors and offices of the building remained empty because no one could afford the midtown rent. Al Smith had become the president of nothing. He looked down at the city from his high window.
As governor he had presided over millions of New Yorkers and then suddenly he governed just one hundred and two storeys of empty space. He sat in an empty room. He looked out across Manhattan. He
wondered where all of the people were. He used to walk the city’s streets. He knew everybody’s names. But now he couldn’t even make their figures out.

A young woman sits on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. A man is playing ragtime tunes on a grand piano. An old man is lying on a bench. Tourists are looking through shopping
bags. A teenage girl is talking on a cell phone. The young woman reads back what she has written in her notebook then crosses it out.

The young woman walks to a cafe beside the park and takes a seat in the window. She takes out the notebook from her purse, opens it out flat on the table. She takes out a pen
from her purse and begins to write. She stops writing, distracted by a woman breastfeeding a child at a table outside. The woman has covered the baby’s head with a scarf but the young woman
can see the baby’s cheek puff out as its mouth fills with milk.

The young woman walks west to Broadway. At the Strand she stops to look at the discounted books. The yellowing pages of the books are tattered, the covers bent. The subjects
are not ones she is interested in. She wants to discover a book that will change her life. She looks through the stands thoroughly, and when she gets to the last stand, having found nothing, she
turns around and looks through them all again. She will not go inside because she cannot afford to. She looks through the window at the merchandise. She has many books at home that she could trade.
She sees the staff looking through old boxes of books.

To save the subway fare, she walks to the New York Public Library. She allows the guard to search her bag. She climbs the staircase, pauses to look at the etchings on display
– ink drawings of Thoreau’s Walden Pond – then continues the climb. The space echoes with the sound of heavy doors swinging open. Tourists in canvas shoes stand like cows. She
walks past the issue desk and into the reading room. She chooses a desk and sits down. She opens her notebook and takes out her pen.

She eats her sandwich in Bryant Park, sitting on a step beside the fountain. Before her a great screen is being erected for an outside movie festival that is starting next
week. It casts a shadow across her.

In the library she writes a series of passages describing the noises she can hear as she sits at her desk: the squeak of shoes on the polished floor, the slamming of books,
fingers tapping keyboards, the clearing of throats, a wayward child running away from its guardian. This is not a story. It is not what she had planned to write. But this is all that is in her
mind. She can hear the traffic out on the street. The windows are open so this is easy. Sirens wail. There are too many locations. If she moved to a different place she would hear other sounds,
people playing sports in Central Park, traffic congestion at Columbus Circle, and so on.

She meets friends in a bar below the High Line in Chelsea. They stand outside the bar to smoke. She listens to her friends talking but she says little herself. She sips her
beer. When a next round is called for she pretends she hasn’t heard. She is approached by a woman she has never met before. The woman tells her that she has moved to the city from Vermont.
She is an artist but she doesn’t know what to paint; she needs to find herself first. She is certain inspiration will come now that she’s moved to New York City. She is living in
Greenpoint in Brooklyn. She wants to move to Manhattan. She has taken a receptionist job at the Guggenheim. This will be good for her art. But she needs more money so she can move to Manhattan.
Somewhere cool, she says. Like the Meatpacking District or the Lower East Side.

The party moves to a bar on West 23rd Street. The young woman smokes a cigarette outside. She is looking at the neon sign of the Chelsea Hotel. The couple smoking next to her
are discussing art. The man has just had his first exhibition and he is complaining about the criticism he overheard in the gallery. The woman beside him is trying to calm him down – at least
you’ve
had
an exhibition, she is saying. Stop being such an asshole. He storms into the bar.

He is an asshole, the woman says. He thinks he’s the only person who’s ever tried to express himself.

The young woman explains that she has come here to write.

That’s cool, the woman says.

The two women arrange to meet at a cafe in Harlem. The young woman arrives half an hour early. She walks up the block to waste some time. She passes a congregation exiting a
church, white suits and hats, newly polished shoes. She has tried to look casual as if this meeting doesn’t matter: baggy jeans, sneakers. But she has brushed her hair and pinned it up and
she is wearing lipstick. She turns and walks back to the cafe. The woman is not here yet. She goes in and takes a window seat. She opens her notebook. She looks for a long time at the blank
page.

No good? The woman is standing before her.

No, she says.

Give it time.

They order coffee. They talk about everything. The new friend wanted to be a reporter but she’s fallen off that path and ended up in environmental campaigning.

Some things have become more important, she says.