There are two kinds of overheard conversations: the kind you try to avoid and the kind that inspire eavesdropping. I’ve been tracking that second species all my life; I still remember good lines from Paris, in 2019 (“I don’t care what the blood test says—he’s my son”) and Albuquerque, in 1992 (“So the mayor goes, ‘How was I supposed to know he was a convicted felon? Don’t all hot-dog venders look like convicted felons?’ ”). But few places can match the overheard conversations of New York, which, before the pandemic, had me eavesdropping as assiduously as Harriet the Spy at the luncheonette. East Village, 2009: “Most ophthalmologists are schnooks.” Seventh Street, 2014: “He has a passion for pizza, and I’m not going to argue with it.” Smoker outside of a downtown bar, 2015: “Nobody can ever Google me, because there’s a million hits for the political prisoner with my name.” The best lines provide several little thrills at once: a sketch of character, a hint of story, the joy of feeling like you understand the rest. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, they’re obvious yet mysterious, conveying too much and too little in a single moment.
Last spring, eavesdropping, like everything else, changed; I associate that change with a line I overheard from my sofa. I live in the back of a walkup building on a quiet street in the East Village, with a “Rear Window”-style view. Aside from the occasional helicopter or power saw, it’s surprisingly tranquil for Manhattan—unless people are loudly having fun, in which case all bets are off. A few pubs’ patios and neighbors’ courtyards feature group yelling during the temperate months; last March, on that ominous post-awareness, pre-lockdown St. Patrick’s Day weekend, a raucous, fiddling-while-Rome-burns gathering could be heard by those of us cowering indoors. The voice of a neighbor in a high window rang out in the chaos: “WHY ARE YOU IDIOTS PARTYING?” he yelled. “THERE’S CORONAVIRUS EVERYWHERE!” The hubbub seemed to dull a bit, and then carried on. But the yeller had provided a strange comfort: the cautious weren’t alone.
When quarantine began, I remained in the East Village, experimenting with fire-escape home-office action and taking daily walks around Tompkins Square Park. Outside, it was hard to hear people: masks muffled conversation and we kept far apart. But, at home, via windows, air shafts, and prewar construction, eavesdropping was unavoidable. I heard noisy arguments between couples, snippets of dialogue, phone calls conducted in hallways. During the seven-o’clock-shout era, one of my favorite neighbors, a four-year-old who lives downstairs, took the conceit further, hollering out the window when he saw an opportunity to chat. One afternoon, a muscled young guy across the way burst into his building’s empty courtyard to do some aggressive shadowboxing. “HI! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” my young neighbor called out. “UH . . . EXERCISING,” the guy shouted back. The next day, the man emerged with a trash bag, and my neighbor greeted him again. “HI! ARE YOU TAKING OUT THE GARBAGE?” he yelled. The guy looked up. “YEAH!” he said. Then, sensing that he owed more to a friendly four-year-old, he added, “IT SMELLS PRETTY BAD.”
In late May, after the murder of George Floyd, a new era of outdoor community emerged; suddenly, people were in the streets, masked but making noise. At a protest in Union Square, I found myself kneeling and chanting alongside others doing the same, with our fists in the air. But I also found myself eavesdropping: I spotted some wary-looking police officers talking to each other on the periphery, and, curious, wandered within earshot. First cop, white, female, agitated: “They want our heads on, like, sticks! . . . They are defunding us!” Second cop, Black, female, pausing, then smiling a little: “Change is coming.”
Eventually, I could overhear the pandemic changing, too. After covid rates in New York improved, people started to move into apartments that had emptied out. Above me was a subletter: a man, living alone, who sang prayers in Hebrew. It startled me at first—loud, intense singing, several times a day—but I grew to like it. One day, hearing noise in the hallway, I snooped at my door’s peephole. A smiling young man in a yarmulke stood on the stairs above, chatting with two young women who had just moved in, as grunting workmen coaxed a new couch into their apartment. The subletter bid them welcome, gestured grandly at the couch, and said, “Enjoy it in good health!” This struck me as so bizarrely wholesome that I could only be delighted. Later, he invited one of the women up for a drink. I heard the awkward invitation, the awkward assent, the feet going upstairs, the feet above my head. There was nothing objectionable about any of it, except for the secondhand social anxiety it gave me; for this reason, and many more—including a former neighbor who could be heard not just having sex but yelling “Daddy!”—I have noise-cancelling headphones.
What a thrill, then, to return to the other kind of eavesdropping—lighthearted and on the town. After the C.D.C. relaxed its guidelines for the vaccinated, the city seemed to light up with energy and conversation. The other evening, scurrying down my street at the going-out hour, I passed two people on their phones who seemed to be narrating the cultural moment. “Bro, it was good,” a guy with a man bun said. “A good mix of chillin’, partyin’ . . .” Nearby, a dressed-up young woman strode along, saying, “It’s summer, people haven’t been out of their house in a year and a half. . . .” It was one thing to talk to friends about their teens’ high-school experiences, at a dinner party in Riverdale, and another thing entirely to overhear some actual high-schoolers—shirtless, aggro boys—at the Metro-North station that night. “So are you meeting with them to talk about your cheating?” one said. “They’re like, ‘This is not academic integrity,’ ” another replied. “Should I say the same shit I said for my English?” On the Met museum’s roof, I overheard people admiring the views (pointing, white-haired woman: “Is that the Ghostbusters building?”) and the art (little girl in cat’s-eye sunglasses: “You’re crazy, Big Bird! He changed his colors!”).
For eavesdropping veterans, there are new frontiers to explore. On Little Island, the whimsical park now hovering over the Hudson, New Yorkers were recently frolicking like mad; joie de vivre could be heard all over its winding ramps and tulip-shaped feats of engineering. People lounged in the bright-green grass, doing headstands for fun, or calling out, to a hot dad playing catch with his son, “Is that, like, an Aussie-rules ball?” (No response; embarrassed shrug.) I made my way around, admiring the view and collecting intelligence. Fashionable young women, laughing: “I’m the d.j.!” “No, I’m the d.j.!” Fast-talking man drinking iced coffee: “He gets his Sunday scaries, like, on Saturdays? But he, like, loves high-baller status.” Man in Hawaiian shirt, looking at Hudson River sunset: “She was, like, ‘That’s really pretty—but it’s New Jersey.’ ”
Since moving to New York, twenty-one years ago, I’ve often thought of two things: the great Dinosaur Jr. album “You’re Living All Over Me,” whose title says it all, and the David Foster Wallace essay “E Unibus Pluram,” about sensitive, observant types—fiction writers, mostly—who “tend to be oglers,” and thus may seem “creepy.” “The lonely, like the fictive, love one-way watching,” Wallace writes. They don’t want to bear the “psychic costs” of engaging with other humans, but they also crave company, so some are soothed by TV. I often return to this idea because I, too, occasionally enjoy a mediated human experience, with layers of separation between me and whatever’s going on. And living in New York offers a zillion opportunities to observe, in fascination or repulsion, without actually having to interact. When I recently left town for a week and then came back, I was struck by the zippy energy of conversation with smart, funny friends—but also by the randomness and speed of city life, the efficiency of aural information coming at you, the sound of people saying things you understand and relate to, and also saying things you absolutely don’t.
It felt like things had come full circle when eavesdropping returned to Tompkins Square Park. My neighbors and I had been there all year, ogling or ignoring one another; now I could hear them again, and people were saying all kinds of funny shit. As a leathery character in a skirt bragged about fistfighting, a woman on the bench next to mine lit a cigarette and said to her friend, “It’s very sad. Apparently no other hedge fund wanted to buy them.” On my other side, a young woman holding a tote bag was saying, “I was at one point in a psychotic-hardcore band. . . . It’s not even that I was so devoted to hardcore as a genre. . . .” I moved closer, straining to hear. “I guess all my friends have just become extremely famous, or famous in a weird tertiary way. . . .” she went on. By the basketball court, young mothers with babies in strollers played a radio, had a picnic, and observed a nerdy little fellow with a fanny pack attempting feats of yoga. At one point, he did a handstand. “Yo, one more time!” one of the mothers called out, and he did another. “Work! Work! Yay!” the moms yelled.
You don’t want to befriend all of these people, but you’re glad to have them around. Slowly, we’re reuniting not just with loved ones but with everybody—the people we don’t know and may never know but have been missing just the same. These thinner threads of contact, though they form and fray in an instant, create our sense of being both of and apart from a place; they also help put our own lives in perspective, which is especially welcome after a year when perspective has been hard to come by. Years ago, near Port Authority, I saw a woman get off a bus, look around, and exclaim, “So this is New York City!” It was funny to me then, like the beginning of a musical—but lately I keep thinking of her, and I hear what she’s saying.
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