My Oval Window in Manhattan
A window, a coincidence, a destiny
Manhattan. Area: 22.83 square miles. Population (1998): 7.4 million. Total length of streets: around 640 miles.
There are coincidences that perplex, there are trivial coincidences we instantly forget, and there are coincidences we celebrate. These serendipitous events may even appear to intimate our destiny. Such a coincidence, one central to the course of my life, I will always treasure even if—true to the nature of coincidences—it defies reason.
A while back, in the late nineties, a film I’d recently directed playing at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in Lower Manhattan to acclaim from the press, I thought it time for my first visit to New York from my home in London. The generous brother of a friend offered me accommodation in his loft apartment on the Lower East Side, close to the Papp Theater. My agent, on hearing of my plans, set up a midtown meeting with a studio exec. All was propitious—although I couldn’t have known then just how propitious it was to be…
I’d previously traveled to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Here were the backdrops of so many movies and so much TV. Familiarity did not breed contempt but relief — I was no longer distant but in the midst. No longer apart from, but a part of. The space, the light, the optimism, the Pacific at Santa Monica and Malibu, eggs, bacon, and maple syrup-soaked pancakes served on the same plate, the land of the Beach Boys, of Arthur Lee's band Love, an ever bluer than blue sky — what, I wondered, had I ever been worried about, and how could I ever again be downcast?
Manhattan, I discovered on my arrival, was different, was full of contradiction. Bustling, densely urban, scary yet energizing, its striations of shadow and light beckoned now the ominous and the oppressive along its mean streets, now the thrilling and liberating in a monumental grandeur reaching from sidewalk below to dizzying sky above.
Unlike in LA, I could walk… take the subway… move around among New Yorkers… pretend to be one myself — which I could never imagine I would be. So I tried to see as much of the city as my schedule would allow.
It was after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in Central Park when, in ambling along a cross street from 5th Avenue to Madison, I noticed a window. Like no other window in the street, nor any I could recall seeing in any other street during my brief time in the city, it bore a unique geometry that drew my attention. This window was oval-shaped, an oval on its side, its curves defiant in a city of otherwise straight lines.
This window seemed unique. I stopped in my tracks.
Who, I wondered, lives there? In that townhouse? Behind that window?
Why did I ponder such a question? What connection was there between the window and its shape and my curiosity as to who might be resident behind it? Why even, in the hurly-burly of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, had I paused to ponder anything related to a window at all? And to that window of all windows?
Moments later and it slipped my mind — or I thought it had. I continued to Madison and my next destination…
Where’s this leading, you might ask? What could be so significant about a window, not even a large window but one perhaps two to three feet across at most?
Before I go any further, there comes a point in a story, in its telling, as I might posit in one of my classes, when the writer is tempted to let the cat out of the bag. To reveal all. This though is the best step in a narrative to leave the poor creature confined, the optimum juncture for the greatest suspense. This is when we might take note of the words of Victorian novelist and pal of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, who commented that the writer should make the reader laugh, make them cry, but most important of all, make them wait…
Not sure I’ve made any reader laugh, unless it's at my naïve optimism in the face of sunny Los Angeles, as tough a conurbation as any for those less fortunate here, and getting tougher by the day. Not sure that I’ve caused any reader to cry unless it’s through pity over my obsession with nothing so much as a window…
As my digression indicates though, I haven’t resisted the instinct to make the reader wait…
There’s a term philosophers use, contingency that relates to chance, the arbitrary, the accidental, the fortuitous perhaps and openness to it. With chance can come coincidence, to which, after my brief deviation, I now return…
Several years after that first visit, I was in a taxi from JFK airport with my partner I had met in LA. She was bringing me to her apartment in New York City. When the taxi drew up to the curb by her home, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was looking at the very same oval window in the very same Manhattan townhouse I had come across as I walked from the Met to Madison on my initial trip to New York…
As we entered the building, as we climbed with our luggage the steep stairs to my partner’s second-floor apartment, I found myself, on the first landing, seeing the window for the first time from the inside and knowing not only who lived there but who would now be living with her…
This house, it was to transpire, was where we were to be married.
Of all the streets, of all the homes, of all the windows in Manhattan!
Had I been clairvoyant? Had I experienced a premonition? Was there meaning in this? Was there significance and if so, what could it have been, or be? Was it an indication of teleology in the universe, of purpose, predetermination, a plan for me, for us all? Was some unknown intelligence telling me something? And if so, what?
Or was the coincidence nothing but the random coming together of disparate factors? My walk years before. My question to myself. My meeting my future wife in LA. Her residence in Manhattan.
Only connect! English novelist E M Forster said in reference to story construction. When we find connection it suggests that life makes sense, or something in it perhaps might.
As chance would have it, a further chance, the building’s owner, who lived on the ground floor, was a Freudian shrink who in her early years had studied under Freud himself. I never mentioned my story to her, although I wish I had. She might have provided insight, not into the coincidence itself maybe, but what it said about me. Were she a Jungian shrink, she might have had further thoughts, about some message it was offering me perhaps. Something, even, about my marriage and the imprimatur for it vested in this instance of synchronicity.
If this story were fictional, the window might be considered a symbol of love, of the connection between two people, myself and my wife. It’s not fictional but the image of that oval remains with me and whether my original encounter with it was planned or arbitrary, saying something or saying nothing, it makes my day whenever it comes to mind.
The midtown meeting my agent had set up was canceled by the exec at the last moment with minimal explanation, and it was only in the telling of this story that I’ve recalled the irritation I felt. The story of the coincidence though, has remained with me, never to fade, always to resonate.
Walk down that street and you won’t see the window now. It was lost after we moved out, when new owners, oblivious to its significance, replaced the facade and covered over the frontage to the landing on the stairs the window had overlooked.
The townhouse, to my mind, is the less for its vanishing since the coincidence it beckoned cannot occur again to anyone else.
There can be no coincidence of my coincidence, no double coincidence as it were, unless of course, in the years before my initial trip to New York, at some point in the decades since the townhouse had been built in the 1890s, some other unsuspecting person had made their way from Central Park to Madison Avenue and noticed that oval window and wondered who lived there — only to discover later who did.
Peter Markham
December 2024
Author:
- The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen (Oxford University Press) 10/23
- What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
