Glass house

When you live across from a glass house, you know far less than you think you do. And when you're in the glass house next door, you probably let on far more than you realize. Crumbs on your face. Rubbing your nose. Staring out at the pink-lavendar sun sinking into New Jersey like a smelter on fire.

I don't live in a glass house. I just have a side job for someone who does, at 165 Charles Street. Once a week I come here to pay bills in the evening. When you're inside the apartment, it's rather an optical illusion; you feel like you're cantilevered right over the West Side Highway and that, if you stepped out onto the balcony, you could walk right into the river.

So it's a strange sensation. To be in a house where I can see everyone around me through their floor-to-ceiling windows [though it usually seems that people who can afford to live in glass houses are seldom actually there]. To be so utterly revealed and, simultaneously, be under the complete illusion that I am utterly alone. Just me and the yellow lab at my feet. I can look across the street and see right into someone's kitchen. Watch the whole family walk around, setting a table for dinner, corraling a series of children, and chatting away. After the dishes are cleared away, the dad--always in a white T-shirt and black running pants--goes to sit at a desk and tap away at a computer, his face lit in the glow of a lamp just like mine. Though, chances are, he owns his lamp. I am merely the interloper. The hired help. If I were carrying anything heavier than my handbag, I'd be using the service entrance.

But today, after night has fallen, there's no light around except for the one I'm standing in; no one else is indoors. There's a twinkling of lights across the Hudson, the moving glow of a vessle gliding on the water, the hot-white-holy pillar of the Empire State Building that looks so close I could touch it. Maybe when you're in a glass house, it's easiest to think that you're the only person at all in the city--and that it's all for you.