What secrets?
I am to write about what cannot be seen. It is difficult.
To take our measure.
All right, yes, that. When I found your address I looked at your house with its black shutters. In Europe we have shutters for the windows, not here so much I should have thought. In France, in Italy, in Germany, the shutters are because of our history. History makes it advisable to have heavy shutters on the windows, and to close them at night. In this country the homes are not hidden behind walls, within courtyards. You have not enough history for that. Your homes confront the street unafraid, for everyone to see. So why do you have black shutters on your windows, Homer Collyer? What does it mean for the Collyer family to have the shutters closed on a warm spring day?
I don’t know. Maybe there is enough history to go around.
With your views of the park, she said. Not to look out? Why?
I come out to the park. As now. Must I defend myself? We’ve lived here all our lives, my brother and I. We do not neglect the park.
Good. In fact your Central Park is what drew me to New York, you know.
Oh, I said, I thought it was me.
Yes, that is what I am doing here besides meeting with strange men. She laughed. Walking in Central Park.
At that moment I wanted to touch her face. Her voice was in the alto register — a smoker’s voice. When she had taken my arm, from the feel of her sleeve on my wrist — the material might have been corduroy — I had the impression of a woman in her late thirties, early forties. As we had walked across Fifth Avenue I thought her shoes might be what were called sensible, just from the sound of the heels hitting the ground, though I was no longer as confident of my deductions as I had once been.
I asked her what she hoped to find in the park. Parks are dull places, I said. Of course you can get murdered here at night, I said, but other than that it is very dull. Just the usual joggers, lovers, and nannies with baby carriages. In the winter everyone ice skates.
The nannies as well?
They are the best skaters.
So we had a rhythm going, making the kind of conversation that brings out one’s competitive intelligence — at least it did mine. Or was it simply flirtation? How refreshing this was. I had a certain class. As if I had been flipped to a different side of myself.
Jacqueline Roux could laugh without losing her train of thought. No, she said, despite what you say your Central Park is different from any other park I have walked through in my life. Why do I feel that? Because it is so organized, so planned? A geometrical construction with such rigid borders — a cathedral of nature. No, I’m not sure. Do you know there are places in the park where I have had an awful feeling? Just for a moment or two yesterday in the late afternoon with its shadows, and the tall buildings surrounding on every side — nearby, and in the distance — I had the illusion that the park was too low!
Too low?
Yes, right where I was standing and everywhere I looked! It had rained and the grass was wet after the rain, and I for a moment recognized what I had not before seen, that the Central Park was sunken at the bottom of the city. And with its ponds and pools and lakes as if, you know, it is slowly sinking? That was my awful feeling. As if this is a sunken park, a sunken cathedral of nature inside a risen city.
How she could go on! Yet I was enchanted by the intensity of her conversation — so poetic, so philosophical, so French, for all I knew. But at the same time it was all too fanciful for me. Good Lord — to look for the meaning of Central Park? It was always across the street when I opened my door — something there, something fixed and unchanging and requiring no interpretation. I told her that. But in reacting to her idea I was yoked into an opinion of my own that was certainly a degree up from my nonthinking life.
I am relieved you know you suffered an illusion, I said.
It is too crazy, I grant you. I go back to my first impression — the design, made by artisans with picks and shovels, and so my thought is everyone’s first thought — it is simply a work of art constructed from nature. Well that may have been only the intention of the designers.
Only the intention? I said. Is that not enough?
But to me it suggests what they may not have intended — a foretelling — this sequestered square of nature created for the time coming of the end of nature.
They built this park in the nineteenth century, I said. Before the city was there to surround it. Nature was everywhere, who would have thought about it coming to an end?
Nobody, she said. I have been shown the underground silos in South Dakota where the missiles wait and twenty-four hours a day the military sit at their consoles ready to turn the key in the box. The people who made this park didn’t think about that either.
AND SO WE CHATTED away at what I realized was a level normal to her. How remarkable to be sitting there, as if at a sidewalk café in Paris, in conversation with a Frenchwoman with an alluring smoky voice. It was no small matter to me that she deemed me worthy of her thoughts. I said: You are looking for the secret. I don’t think you have it yet.
Maybe not, she said.
I was glad she wasn’t trying out her ideas on Langley — he wouldn’t have had the patience, he might even have been rude. But I loved hearing her talk, never mind that she had bizarre theories — Central Park was sinking, shutters were un-American — her passionate engagement with her ideas was a revelation to me. Jacqueline Roux had been all over the world. She was a published writer. I imagined how thrilling it must be living such a life, going around the world and making up things about it.
AND THEN IT was time to go.
Are you walking back? she said. I will walk with you.
We left the park and crossed Fifth Avenue, her arm in mine. In front of the house, I felt emboldened. Would you like to see the inside? I said. It is an attraction greater even than the Empire State Building.
Ah no, merci, I have appointments. But sometime, yes.
I said, Just let me get an idea of you. May I?
She had thick wavy hair cut short. A broad forehead, rounded cheekbones, a straight nose. A slight fullness under the chin. She wore glasses with wire frames. She wore no makeup. I did not think I should touch the lips.
I asked her if she was married.
No more, she said. It made no sense.
Children?
I have a son in Paris. In secondary school. So now you are interviewing me? She laughed.
She would be back in New York in a few weeks. We will have a coffee, she said.
I have no phone, I said. If I’m not in the park please knock on the door. I’m usually home. If I don’t hear from you I’ll try to get run over and there you will be.
I felt her looking at me. I hoped she was smiling.
Okay, Mr. Homer, she said, shaking my hand. Until we meet again.
WHEN LANGLEY RETURNED I told him about Jacqueline Roux. Another damn reporter, he said.
Not exactly a reporter, I said. A writer. A French lady writer.
I didn’t know it had got as far as the European papers. What were you, her man-in-the-street interview?
It wasn’t like that. We had some serious conversation. I invited her in and she refused. What reporter would do that?
It was hard trying to explain to Langley: this was another mind — not his, not mine.
She is a woman out in the world, I said. I was very impressed.
Apparently so.
She is divorced. Doesn’t believe in marriage. A son in school.
Homer, you have always been susceptible to the ladies, do you know that?
I want to get a haircut. And maybe a new suit in one of those discount places. And I need to eat more. I don’t like being this thin, I said.