The City’s Laughter
Lisa Couturier
It is hard to set nature apart in the city, and everything, inside and out, takes on the frame of a relentless housekeeping.
—Elizabeth Hardwick
A city mouse dusted with the ancient soot of Manhattan runs across a sidewalk that, should the mouse decide to follow me, would lead the two of us to hundreds of mice playing in the train tracks of the Astor Place subway stop near where I attended graduate school in Greenwich Village, and where, in philosophy class, my professor once declared: “New York City is Nature! Capital N!” This was not the first time he’d emphasized a word in such a way. Actually, he preferred not to use the word nature and asked us to excuse him when he found it necessary to fall back on it, believing, as he did, that its use set up a dualistic way of thinking about the world: nature versus culture, that is. Which is a similar line of thought to that of Native Americans, who flourished not in nature, per se, but in a world of beings, of subjects, in a landscape of spirits, entities: others and self as part of a vast and exquisitely related world community. Nonetheless, we understood that our professor’s declaration and emphasis meant something akin to god with a capital G or love with a capital L: the real thing.
“Skyscrapers, Korean delis, miles of roads and highways, restaurants, apartment buildings, the subway system, the entire city—all of it,” the professor continued, “an anthill!” Noticing our perplexed faces, he rubbed the white whiskers of his chin, somewhat irritated at what he sensed must be our ignorance or our close-mindedness, and asked: “Do you really believe you are separate from Nature? New York is no different from a community of ants. Anthills are small skyscrapers, the ants’ social system is one of workers and leaders. How ‘bout that?” We paused respectfully, then denied it—“Ants? Hey, who has seen an anthill lately? Nobody. Capital N!”
On my way to the subway station, I try picturing eight million ants, which is the human population of the city, though the image is interrupted by several extra-round roaches scurrying along concrete and under the bench that cradles a sleeping homeless man, while a bold mouse darts from the alley beside Mia Pizza on East Broadway, a slice of pepperoni dangling from its mouth.
It is imperative to stand at the very edge of the subway platform if you want to see subway mice. It’s not a place I used to wait, out of the somewhat valid fear of being shoved into the tracks. But soon into my seven years of living in a sunny and charming shoebox on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, I learned quickly to pick and choose between that which is and that which is, mostly, not true about New York. I learned, too, that the city had a way of speaking, and this changed what it was I began hearing and seeing. Distant dots of the subway’s headlights shining down long black tunnels were, for instance, new stars in my life, only closer. For those a long time in New York, there is, I believe, truth to their claim of hearing the slight rumbling of the train’s engine much before the headlights are spotted by the city’s newer residents traveling the currents downtown to uptown or crosstown. Indeed, much of the initial joy of living in New York is sailing on these currents—by cab, train, bus, or foot—from one location to the next, one person to the next, one event to the next; and it is invigorating, salubrious, in a salty and rough, high-tide way. Actually, describing the city as one giant starfish—each borough a starfish’s leg, each person one of the countless tiny tube feet moving independently beneath the legs of the starfish, and the entire organism constantly, almost happily, in flux, searching and devouring what is found along the seabed of streets—is not necessarily a silly analogy, though it might seem so, comparing something so obviously of nature to something so seemingly not nature. This, though, would be the professor’s point—to see the surface but to know that, below, there is a force pulling in the opposite direction of what we might imagine. There is an undertow here, in New York City.
If you visit Manhattan and don’t yet trust the guidance of your senses because of course you are bombarded as soon as you hit the streets—bombarded by the morning air of bus exhaust, freshly applied perfumes, and coffee and toasted, buttered bagels; by the afternoon sparrows nipping at your breadbasket at the café, cigarette smoke, and packs of private-school kids running you off the sidewalk; by the East River or Hudson River walkways edged, as they are, with speeding cars on one side and, in spring, splashes of delicious flowers on the other—then get away, go to a subway station to acquire a new sixth sense, which is possible if you watch the subway mice. They know. Even as they chase one another—wildly, playfully, as though popping out from under dirty tissues is popping out from under golden leaves of corn—they are on alert for the trains. A mouse’s acute sense of hearing and sensitive whiskers are so finely attuned to their environment that they sense oncoming trains much before trains are seen by lesser mortals. Alongside the steel tracks of the subway are the scent tracks of mice, tracks they travel, bumping into each other, sniffing, jumping, and talking in high-pitched squeaks, which, if it is late at night and you venture close to the platform’s edge, can be heard. Often, someone tosses a candy bar, a hot dog, or a doughnut into the tracks, and the mice jostle closer to the platform, where I wait for them—wait because who can resist looking into the black orbs of eyes that belong to mice, city mouse or country mouse? When suddenly the mice abandon the doughnut for no obvious reason and duck into darkness, the subway is soon to arrive. Think of it as learning a kind of subway ecology. Spying on mice—their patterns and their interactions in an environment of trains and trash—I’m tempted to believe that nature in a New Yorker’s life certainly revolves around a story of diminishment. But it is also a story of perception: What might we see if we shine nature’s spotlight into the city’s blacker seas of outcasts—the mice, roaches, and pigeons?
In environmental philosophy, we read the thoughtful words of nature philosophers, as well as the more renowned Emerson and Thoreau. But it is Practice of the Wild, by Gary Snyder, that is surprising and is clearly the source of my professor’s claim that New York is Nature, capital N: “Science and some sorts of mysticism rightly propose that everything is natural. By these lights there is nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or atomic energy, and nothing—by definition—that we do or experience in life is ‘unnatural.’” But a question, he alludes, is not necessarily, What is natural? or, What is Nature? But, What is wild?
Wild, as one might assume, describes the red-tailed hawks living uptown near the Metropolitan. Wild might describe the woodsy Ramble in Central Park, where colorful migrant songbirds can be found passing through this homeland of pigeons, starlings, and sparrows. Of course, afternoons have been spent searching for such creatures, waiting for them to fly over the meticulously manicured Great Lawn near where Pavarotti has sung. All of that is the fancier face of nature in New York City, which makes it more difficult to swim in darker waters, to float by the exiled, to be buoyed by the outcasts.
This does not mean there are no outcasts where I used to live on the Upper East Side, in the grander zip codes of 10021 or 10128, though they are perhaps more efficiently exterminated and, overall, less noticeable than the mice and rats daring daylight downtown. Besides, other neighborhood treats serve as distraction: four-star restaurants, exceedingly fancy shops, museums, and so many fountains spouting crystalline water—fountains in the circular driveways of expensive buildings, fountains in front of museums, fountains in playgrounds. It is as though whales swim below us; and, I imagine, the fountains are where whales surface to send up their steam. Then, in springtime, the thousands and thousands of pink, yellow, orange, and lavender tulips like exotic tropical seashells washed up in the median strip of Park Avenue.
My old apartment, in a building off Second Avenue, was far away from any whales and seashells. Still, it could be described as charming, which means outrageously small, maybe four hundred square feet, and, usually, sun-filled, which made up for the smallness. It was a quality-of-life issue: sunlight, considered so valuable in Manhattan as to be a completely acceptable reason to hike up the rent. Proximity to sunlight is another way New York speaks, and it alters not only how you see and hear but, more importantly, how you feel. This is said with some degree of experience, having lived, like many New Yorkers, in a dark cavern or two.
The rental of my first cave, on Thirty-fourth off Park, cost $1,000 for the one month my boyfriend and I survived it. Roaches lived in the cracks behind the toothbrush holder tiled into the wall, roaches crawled on the toilet seat, they slept in the plastic egg containers on the door of the fridge. “All them roaches?” the superintendent laughed, walking away from me after I’d stopped him in the soot-stained hallway to complain. “Hell, girl, it’s nature here. You from the suburbs, ain’t ya?”
I was. I had naively rented the flat over the telephone, from my then home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where as an undergraduate I was used to paying $300 a month in rent. A thousand dollars—how elegant, sophisticated, and wonderful it must be, I thought. Talking on the phone, the rental agent suggested that the apartment resembled everything a Manhattanite dreams of: floor-to-ceiling bookcases with a sliding ladder in a goldenly lit library, French doors, ample natural light, old wood floors, a fireplace, a separate kitchen, plaster rosettes centered in high ceilings. The word I missed in the conversation was resemble; neglecting, as the agent had, the truth that everything she described was what the building had looked like in its heyday.
On move-in day in December, my boyfriend and I drove along Thirty-fourth Street as Miracle on 34th Street, the only Thirty-fourth Street I knew, replayed in my mind. Crossing town, we passed Macy’s; the Salvation Army Santa Claus ringing his bells; and the sidewalk vendors selling roasted chestnuts, the smoke from which mixed in the air with car exhaust and the winter breathing of thousands of Christmas shoppers. When finally we pulled up to what I’d imagined would be my own “Edith Whartonian” row house, it was clear things would be otherwise. The building had indeed once been a single-family home, but somewhere along the way all exterior details had been painted over in a dull gray. The main floor living room window was now the window of a liquor store, and, out front, splashed on the pavement, were men who were not Jimmy Stewart. This would not be our beautiful house.
Things picked up when, inside the apartment, I noticed a high ceiling with a centered plaster rosette; but a switch of the light revealed hundreds of roaches enjoying the high ceilings themselves. After the first week of job searching during the day and “Raid-ing” at night, we stored all our food and utensils in plastic bags and sat with our legs crossed and up off the floor. After two weeks, we gave up, stayed out all day, ate out for every meal, and returned at night to the walls of our battleground, walls that appeared to move with battalions of roaches. Nothing we did helped us win the daily war, and so at bedtime I pulled out the only ammunition I had left: long underwear and socks, cotton stuffed in my ears, and my boyfriend, atop of whom I slept all night, as though on a two-by-four over water. I moved out wondering if these roaches were in fact nature or the wild gone, in a way, AWOL. In other words, something natural was absent from where it should be, where it once was, but not all parties were intent on deserting completely.
For the longest time there were no roaches in the apartment we later came by, the sunny, charming, shoebox apartment. But as time passed we noticed what New Yorkers euphemistically call “transients.” These are roaches that are passing through your place (you are completely convinced despite any hard evidence, which, after all, you have no interest in gathering) on their way to someone else’s, someone who is messier, smellier, an Oscar instead of a Felix. My friend on Madison Avenue had these transients, though she called them “water bugs.” It’s a form of denial that sounds better to guests when, on a trip to the loo during your elegant dinner party, they see a brown, leathery, oval-shaped . . . arthropod! . . . moving across the floor and return to the table unexpectedly soon. The going knowledge on the subject is: if you have rather large transients then you don’t have roaches; but if you see tiny roaches then you have baby roaches and, alas, you therefore have roaches for real.
Cockroaches—primitive and ancient—have remained virtually unchanged for some 300 million years. If they live their allotted lifespan of four or more years, females can produce more than a thousand eggs. Chances are excellent that she will produce her thousand children, due to the vibration-sensing organs nearly covering her body, organs that assist a roach in befuddling its human predators. Anyone who’s tried killing a roach knows the intense frustration of getting just close enough and then, boom, missing the mark. This results in the diligent and patient practice of learning to approach a roach from just the right angle, all the while believing this tiptoeing onward toward the target and then hesitating at the slightest lull in the roach’s movement is a roach’s masterful harassment of humans. It’s best, I know now, to storm in from the top by dropping something that, being heavy, moves fast.
I gleaned my roach anatomy trivia from another of my favorite professors—my animal-behavior professor—who, in her apartment across town on the Upper West Side, had been in the midst of performing her own private experiment to determine if roaches liked tuna or beer best, seeing, as she did, more roaches than usual on the mornings when dishes left overnight in the sink had upon them scrapings of tuna or the sticky film of beer. Because I truly considered her quite a brilliant woman—she could recall studies from obscure ethological journals, she could predict the outcomes of certain tests—I believed she was caught up in her own genius and in need of some common sense advice: Perhaps washing the dishes would help, I offered. But the situation presented itself as a fascinating and insistent question: beer or tuna, beer or tuna, which is best loved? Repeated trials proved, come morning when results were tallied, that more roaches were stuck to the double-sided extra-strength tape on, as I remember, the beer bowl, which, we pondered, could be meaningful research for fraternity houses.
Eventually, my boyfriend and I decided we had roaches for real, and the source of the problem was a very old woman, the superintendent said, living directly two floors below us. She had yet to sign up for the monthly extermination service, and her roaches were multiplying furiously and crawling through the walls and pipes and floors up to us. It became necessary, therefore, to march downstairs, intending to demand of a woman I had never actually seen or met the acceptance of a service she had, in the past several months, at least, forgone.
I knocked on her bare brown door and knocked again, hard enough that the door rattled and I jumped back to remove myself from the dozens of roaches of all sizes and several varieties that seeped from the edges and scattered across the face of the door. Slowly, a lock was unlocked and unlocked and unlocked, the typical three or four locks on a New Yorker’s door, and a woman in a nursing uniform answered sleepily. I peeked into the tiny place and saw an old, white-haired woman, her eyes buried beneath wrinkles, as she slept and wheezed heavily in the beige, dusty air of the place that smelled like trash and stale perfume.
“Can’t sign up,” said the nurse.
“Why?”
“Can’t have that poison around . . . not good for her breathing,” she answered, looking briefly at her patient. “She’s almost dead,” she added, dispassionately. “You know, she was born in this building, two floors up.”
That would be my apartment, I wanted to say, but did not, realizing I was caught in the middle of two of nature’s life forces: 300 million years of the paradoxically repulsive yet enduring roach; and three months or weeks or days or hours of what was left of the old woman.
Back upstairs, sitting in the sunny yellow light on my bed, I stared, hopelessly, at the roaches crawling up the steam pipe that ran inside the building; and I imagined the old woman as a baby brought home to this room, ninety-odd years ago, when the bathtub was still in the kitchen. I imagined the baby crying, imagined her growing and taking her first steps here until she became strong enough to run up and down five flights of stairs. I saw her playing in the sunny living room where my cats were lounging.
Then, in my own askew mind, in my own feelings of going AWOL, I guiltily wished the old lady would hurry up and die.
It’s tempting to call them Pigeon Ladies, preferring, as they do, the friendship of pigeons that come to their soft, old bodies with the loyalty and discipline of homing pigeons coming home from wherever they may be in the city—on ledges, in ventilation holes, atop hard worn balconies and roofs. In warm weather, usually, pigeon ladies, and sometimes men, sit on park benches in modicums of quiet, where city sirens and horns are mere whispers through summer’s leafy trees. A withered woman, her shoes hanging off her heels, taupe-colored knee-high stockings at her ankles, white legs bulging with blue veins, her drooping and torn brown coat, her shoulders teetering with pigeons, her gnarled hands stroking three cooing pigeons on her chest, while other pigeons hover around her, landing in and flying out of her ratty white hair teased into a cascading nest that drapes down her wrinkled and fair face—this vivid memory of a pigeon lady shot through me suddenly when, looking with my three cats out the window of my fifth-floor apartment, I noticed an elderly white-haired woman, with her cats, waving at me from the window of her fifth-floor apartment across the street. We met for the first time like this, with cats in sunlight, not knowing we would wave again and again for two years, not knowing we would come to look forward to the wave.
It’s a habit I’ve had since childhood, gazing out windows. And when New Yorkers are acting like New Yorkers—which is not necessarily brash, mean, and underhanded, though there are sometimes those qualities—people-watching out your window carries with it the distinct possibility of lunchtime theater. Such was the case of the woman I came to call St. Francis, dressed in expensive black clothing, black pumps, a black leather briefcase, a black coat, and a folded black umbrella, which she carried on days it was not raining, leading me to assume she might use it for protection from the sun, which led to the further thought that she must be somehow fragile. In every way except perhaps the fragility, she was someone I would have expected to see on the Second Avenue bus heading to midtown on the way to work in the morning, when I was working, that is. But at the time I was in graduate school, and often I was home studying, which involved a certain degree of staring out the window. And so St. Francis walked down my street nearly every day over the period of six weeks or so, at lunchtime.
For some unknown reason, as my block had as many pigeons as any other block in Manhattan, this woman chose the sidewalk in front of my building as the perfect place to throw generous amounts of bird seed, for pigeons, I assumed. Although as I started to monitor Francis more vigilantly, it was not clear for whom the seed was meant. She did not stay and wait for birds to swarm her, as did other pigeon admirers readily available in the city, people I had once believed acted out of sympathy for the birds, as if in a just world even outcasts deserved something of our care. But I have watched, from old green painted park benches, pigeon people involved in more than sympathetic seed tossing. People, who, with gentle hands and warm chests, stroked their full-bodied, mild-mannered, and gentle-voiced pigeons, as though pigeon and person nourished each other, as though they understood each other’s longings. Call it what you want, but consider: those believed to be sane among us show similar devotion to our dogs and cats. As domesticated pets do for domesticated people, wild pigeons do for wild pigeon people: make them happy. And peaceful, it seemed.
St. Francis, though, just threw and threw and threw, fistfuls of seed, quickly, and then, before pigeons swarmed down from their sooty, dark ledges, she left, her umbrella poking the concrete alongside her strident footsteps.
How kind, I thought, at first, when she began spreading her seed. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the seed drew to my old, black iron fire escape the pretty purplish-red-headed house finches, and, occasionally, the otherwise-located Central Park birds. But word spread among pigeons, as it will, and among rats, too. And so there were at this point kind requests from various people on the block that Francis stop what she was doing. Patient-sounding requests spoken haltingly and carefully, which is another way to describe New Yorkers, and how I most often think of them, as though we all lived, friendly and concerned, in a small village delineated by dry-cleaning establishments and Korean delis.
The requests to Francis sometimes worked, and a few days would pass without our urban saint. But she would return later in the week, the sound of her umbrella rapping the sidewalk. Until one man could no longer stand it and detailed for Francis the pigeon waste he walked through every day, not to mention the extra rats now vehemently riffling through our garbage cans. He demanded, loudly, meanly, and in her face, that she leave, find another sidewalk, maybe one in front of her building would be a good idea. This was when Francis finally spoke, in long breaths of gibberish, as she opened her black briefcase, pulled out her bag of seed and showered the man with a wild throwing.
This, anyone could see, was of course upsetting the man terribly. One might guess the man would retreat in the face of St. Francis’s insanity. Instead, he became more agitated, trying to speak to a woman who could not speak to people; and all I could think of was how much Francis needed the pigeons she never waited for, the mild, soft pigeons this city offered, as refuge, as nature in its, if not wild, then outcast form.
The old woman in the fifth-floor apartment across the street has not waved in a couple of days, which is unlike her. Nearly every day for the past two years she has at some point during the day sat at the window, her five cats on or around her lap, watching me and my cats, or the street, or sky. This disconnected peering at each other has been our sole connection. Once, when she saw my calico jump up to usurp my Siamese from the coveted, southern-exposed windowsill, she opened her mouth in surprise and then pointed at her calico, as though we were living parallel lives.
It was now a week without the waving woman, and since I have not seen lights in her apartment at night, I surmise she has died, though I look for her over and over again. This is when, one afternoon, I see a pigeon thrashing against her window from inside her apartment and decide to go across the street and free the bird. It is easy, in our less-expensive buildings that have no doormen or guards, to buzz the intercom of a resident and claim you are the Chinese-food delivery person needing to be let in. This is what I do.
Her apartment door is open, swinging in a breeze originating inside. I walk in and am suddenly covered in pigeons, pigeons landing on my head, pigeons crashing into my chest and crawling up to perch on my shoulders. I hear the scuttle of their feet crossing the old wood floor and the cooing of those gathered around my legs. It is as though I’m a sculpture of some goddess they’ve been expecting. I shake them off. Pigeons, feathers, dust, bird excrement. Filth is everywhere, and I think, predictably, that this is what killed my old waving woman. In the living room—the room from where she sat and watched me—stained wallpaper hangs loose near the ceiling, which is cracked and which, in one corner, has opened into a hole in her roof, an entrance to the sky. On the floor underneath the ceiling sits a bucket partially filled with rainwater. In the hallway leading to her bedroom, an old gramophone and a stack of 33 1/3 rpm records cover a table. Her mattress is folded on the floor. There is no bed frame; the bedroom window is shattered. I hear baby pigeons squealing, their unmistakable cries like ungreased wheels endlessly turning, and I follow the sound to the kitchen. Above the cabinets are pigeon nests. On the windowsills are pigeon nests. Every available ledge has upon it a pigeon nest. The woman has not been gone long enough for all of this to have taken place since her departure. She has been living, who knows how long, with dozens and dozens of pigeons, monogamous mates raising their young together—the male pigeon incubating eggs by day, the female by night—here in an apartment on East Seventy-third Street. The woman has slept alongside the secret births of pigeons, secret because the sight of baby pigeons in city streets is rare. Find your way back behind the fancy brownstones, row houses, and refurbished tenement buildings of Manhattan to the sooty, forgotten, and mostly inaccessible spaces of concrete, soil, bushes, and trees, and you will find the refuge of baby pigeons. They grow there, in the shadows of buildings, backstage, until they are strong enough to conquer New York. Conquer the skies with their powerful, skillful, and beautiful flying. Have you ever noticed sunshine glowing behind the feathers of a flying pigeon’s outstretched wing, as though the bird rides sunrays? Bashful does not describe city pigeons, hovering, as they do, around your café table during alfresco luncheons. They know—from excellent vision inside their fiery eyes—where you are. Think of them as always watching. Think of their ardent coos as songs at the windowsill.
As I stand in the sanctum of this woman, among the hundred or so pigeons she once knew, I realize she was the memory of the woman in the park, she was the one with the cascading white hair and bulging blue veins. For my waving woman, nature, quite literally, meant an exquisitely related community consisting of herself and these birds. Pigeons meant home.
I imagine that in the weeks before the woman died, she held these baby pigeons, as well as broods from the months before, and those before them, nurturing generations, as would a grandmother. That she listened to the birds and knew something of their intelligence; that she witnessed their days, their flights to and from her roof; that she knew the intoxicating colors of the birds’ flashy neck feathers—tropical garden green, cabernet red, turquoise blue; that she walked to the park and above her flew her birds, her cloud lined with silver wings, until she arrived at her bench, where birds landed in her lap—how could all this not have been?
Manhattan. There are many languages spoken there. And though one of them is not “wildness” in the way it may typically be defined—as nourishing nonhuman diversity—there are, nonetheless, remnants, sparks, holdouts, representatives, entities, beings, subjects from the wild, species clinging to this landscape. The streets of New York City are not wild with a capital W, though perhaps wildness is seen mostly by those who behold it regardless of its beauty; by those attempting to reconcile the great loss of diversity in one moment and, in the next, praying that further development remains within the paved boundaries we already have constructed. Maybe it helps to imagine the city as a starfish, or to appreciate, on some level, the sensuality of pigeons, the eternity of roaches, the antics of subway mice. Maybe not. “Earth laughs in flowers,” said Emerson. In Manhattan, perhaps Earth laughs, a bit sarcastically, in its dark, natural, and wild outcasts.
Lisa Couturier writes about nature in the urban landscape. Her essays weave together the fields of biology, psychology, spirituality, feminism, and philosophy to explore the complexities of the human relationship to the nonhuman. Couturier holds a master’s degree from New York University. She has worked as a magazine editor and an environmental journalist. Her work has appeared in the well-regarded American Nature Writing series, as well as in Orion, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, and in National Geographic’s Heart of a Nation: Writers and Photographers Inspired by the American Landscape. Couturier writes and teaches in the Washington, D.C., area, where she lives along the Potomac River with her family. The Hopes of Snakes and Other Tales from the Urban Landscape is her first book.