The Living Room

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More than the movies, more than photography, more than TV. Which maybe sounds counterintuitive, but the idea is that because your imagination is a bottomless resource. The visual experience you get here is way more immersive and vivid and lush, and has better special effects than any film studio could ever. Just financially, logistically, produce. Who knows if that's always true? But I will say the story that has stuck with me visually the most over decades of listening is the one I'm about to play for you. It's called The Living Room, and it actually comes to us from another podcast it's been around for just about 20 years, called Love and Radio. If you haven't heard of them, they make beautiful, sound-rich stories, sometimes a little dark, always special.

And this episode, it is about bearing witness to something that maybe you weren't supposed to bear witness to.

The images from it, I literally have never been able to get them out of my head before I play it. Two quick notes one. Whereas we usually try to talk to everyone involved in a story, this episode is based on one person's vantage point. We did fact check it to make sure the key elements did in fact, take place. But, you know, take it as one very powerful sliver of a complex situation. And, secondly, warning adult themes ahead.

Probably not the best one to listen to with kids, all right, let us slip into the living room from love and radio.

Rewind.

So I'd been living in my apartment about 15 years. And one evening, I walked in the living room, which has three bay windows, which face the gardens in the back and over half a block of gardens. And across a small street. There was this bright window that I'd never noticed before, but it's at the exact eye level of my third floor apartment. And after a while, I realized that I'd never seen it. Because there had always been curtains, and so it was always, I think, dimly lit, the curtains were often closed.

And all of a sudden, there's this bright light and no curtains, and it was like a movie screen.

Fifteen years and that window has meant nothing. I haven't even noticed it, and now it's all I think about.

There were new tenants and it had always been a living room, and now it was suddenly a bedroom. And there were these two people in there. And they were naked, this young couple in their 20s, they were really lovey-dovey and they were always naked.

It was really uncomfortable. My husband and I were still adjusting to parenthood and it wasn't the most romantic time in our lives. My son was probably three. And when you're new parents to a toddler, especially because he sleeps in bed with us too, so he's like, literally right between us. The last thing you need is a couple of hotties, getting it on across the window, reminding your husband of everything he's not getting. So to have this really beautiful young woman that was really thin and naked all the time, really, you know, it was very frustrating, and you know, she had this beautiful, tall, lanky, well-built boyfriend.

And so at first, I just because I felt like my husband was going to be staring at this naked woman all the time. I started closing the living room curtains, which is really kind of silly, and it made our room really dark and we never closed those curtains. And so that didn't work. So I thought about like, making a really big sign that said, like, close your curtains or buy curtains. They didn't even have curtains, buy curtains. We can see you, and I thought about going by their building.

I had no idea what their unit was. And leaving a note. And then I started thinking that was really silly and prudish, and started realizing that they were just young. And I had to just get over it and live with it and move on, and so that's what I did.

We got really used to them and they became sort of this symbol of what we used to be, you know, in our 20s. And they were living this really carefree time. And that's another thing that it was kind of hard not to. Sometimes when you're in early parenthood, you get a little bitter. I think about some of those freedoms. And we'd watch them sleeping till 11, while we'd been up since 5 with our toddler. And we saw them eating breakfast on the roof together. So we got used to it and we would notice, like, Oh, look, they got a new, you know, plant in there. And they became sort of part of our lives, you know, because they were just always there and never, ever bought curtains.

It's funny, I think, that the way that we're positioned, because all of the buildings around us are different sizes, and our building is the tallest one on our block. But it's exactly at the right level to see their windows, I have a friend next door and then a friend across the way. And all of them have windows facing the gardens, but not all of them are blocked. And I look at the other windows of the buildings around us, and I don't think anyone has this perfect level view. The irony is that I'm such a private person and I don't know am I supposed to have maybe respected their privacy and just looked away? But it's impossible, because that's the way the chairs face.

They face the window. I couldn't, I couldn't not see them if I wanted to, but I guess I could have not gotten the binoculars.

So time went by, and this is maybe a year and a half later, two years later. And I remember seeing their room and the light was on, but it was empty. And I thought that was strange because it was five o'clock in the morning and they never went anywhere early. And it was like that for like a whole week. It was just this empty room with the light on, and I thought that was strange. They didn't seem to be there as often, or maybe just she would be there, and he was gone for long periods of time.

And we just kind of forgot about them, you know? We just there were. There wasn't as much action going on and they weren't as present, and so we just kind of lived our months.

At the end of last year, in December, there was this night when my husband and I separately, had both seen this woman naked sitting in the window. Kind of chubby, slump-shouldered woman who was just looking down at the street. And we both thought it was so strange, just couldn't figure out who she was and what she was doing and why she was naked. And a few nights later, there was this young man standing right at the window by the bed, and he was skeletal.

He was so thin and he was bald completely.

And we realized it was the same couple, they had completely changed.

He was sick, there was something serious wrong with him.

After that, I just watched the window all the time.

Okay, we're gonna, we're gonna pause right here, let's just we'll be right back.

Period.

And he would sit all day, he was there because I work from home, and I would see him all day in the bedroom, either lying down or sitting at the computer. And then after a couple of weeks, he was just lying down and he was just there.

And his bald head would be up against the pane of glass all the time. And she would be there, and she'd come in and she would bring him things. But mostly it was just him there by himself, and sometimes he would have his knees bent. And you could just see how skeletal they were.

They were just bones, and sometimes he'd kick off the blankets and he was just lying there, naked and emaciated.

And then, after a while, he was just always burrowed under the blankets.

I found myself thinking, like, well, maybe he's been through chemo and he's recovering, and you know, he's going through this sick phase before he gets well. Because he's so young, he's just such a young guy.

And so we had to go to Colorado to see my family for Christmas.

And I worried all the time I was there, I thought about them, and I worried that he wasn't going to be there. When we got back, I worried all the time about it. When we got back about 10 days later, he was still there, but his head looked so much smaller and there were a lot of people there.

And then I got out my binoculars, I got my birding binoculars. I'm not proud of it, but at that point I felt so invested.

It looked like people coming to say goodbye, and there was this sort of short, blonde, midwestern-looking woman who I guessed was his mother. And then there was this young guy who just kept pacing the halls, you know, you could just see there were two doorways leading out of this room. And you could just see him go down one side and through the other, and then back and forth, and back and forth. And I figured he was the brother.

And it looked like the girlfriend's sister was also there. It was just a guess it looked like her.

I remember there was just this little gathering going on in the living room right below. The neighbors were standing around and having drinks and they had no idea at all what was going on right upstairs.

I would watch people come and go. Then after a while, everyone left, except for the girlfriend and the mother. And I spent all that evening sitting vigil on the back of the couch and watching.

And I remember the girlfriend lying beside him for a long time on her own, and she was just stroking his face so tenderly. It was so much affection that really transcends the kind of young love that you expect. All I could see was the top of his head all that time.

And I remember later seeing her standing by the bed with the mother on the other side, and they were just all talking. And she put a hand on his forehead, she put the back of her hand on his forehead, and then she was wiping at her eyes. And you could tell that there was this sense that it was getting closer.

Then I could see this reckoning where she was wiping at her eyes and touching his forehead and wiping at her eyes. And there were candles lit, and this young woman was on one side and his mother was on the other side.

And they just were lying there for a really long time and they had their hands just resting on his chest.

And so I watched it for a long time.

The mother and the girlfriend were lying on either side of him and you could tell this was the end. I thought, now all that's left is the girlfriend and the mother, and, inexplicably, me.

Me, like, I am one of the three people at the deathbed and they lay there for a long time. And then they just got up and they went into the other room and I realized that must have been the moment.

And all this time, you know, I always had this sense that, you know, they're going to break up, they're going to move out. Nobody that age stays together very long.

And I had no idea it was just like this beautiful love story.

So the next day, the next day, I got up and I went to the window first thing, and they were folding up blankets and stacking them on the bed. And I figured that he had been taken away. And so I was in the kitchen and my husband called because he had. He knew how obsessed I'd gotten with this situation and he said, there's activity over there. And I came running and I got my binoculars and I looked and realized that he was still there, he was still on the bed.

His body was still there and it was the coroner, so the coroner and his assistant came and they had these white plastic gloves on.

And they pulled his body to the edge of the bed and onto this white sheet, and I just remember the lifelessness of it. It looked so shrunken, it almost looked like a shrunken rubber proxy of a body so incredibly dead. They wrapped him in the sheet and they zipped him into a vinyl bag and they put him on this kind of gurney.

They took the gurney out. And I just had this very strange impulse. And I ran and threw on my coat kind of over my pajamas and ran out to the street. Ran to the corner and I got there. Just as they were hauling him out, they were carrying him out and the girlfriend was there. She was talking to one of them in the doorway and they loaded him into this van. And I realized that they didn't know me at all. I had no place to be there and they looked at me. I remember the coroner's assistant looking at me like, I was sort of like a rubbernecker in the street, you know? Looking at this grisly scene and I realized that's what I was.

I had no place to be there and suddenly it all felt so perverse and so I went home and I felt very strange about the whole thing.

And I tried to tell myself that, well, I never wanted to be part of their lives. I was the one that wanted them to put up curtains, I wanted them to shut the intimate stuff out. I was uncomfortable with it, I was the one that wanted out.

And I started remembering all of a sudden when I moved to that apartment so many years ago. And I was in my mid-20s that I had to share the apartment with a roommate because it was too expensive. My bedroom was in the living room. And I remember how, when I first moved in, I pushed the head of my bed up against the three bay windows so that in the morning I could see the sky.

And I remember that I had no clue, it never occurred to me that anyone could see me.

I remember that I felt like whenever I looked out the window, I never saw anyone and I never closed my curtains either. Did you ever find out either of their names?

I never have found out their names, and I looked through the local obituaries obsessively for weeks. And there was never anyone that fit his description. There was never anyone young enough or that looked like him.

So no idea. I walked by their place several times and there are only numbers on the mailboxes and the buzzers, and there are no names. So I can't look up anything. I don't know, I have no idea who she is.

I have no idea who he was, no idea what he was sick with.

Just a couple days after it happened, she was up on the roof with a friend doing yoga, and I've watched her lying around a lot. She went out of town, I think, for a bit.

And she's still there. I have been watching her recovery.

And instead of being this young woman, she looks totally different, she looks so changed, she just looks like this very experienced, world-weary person. She has a job now that gets her up very early because I get up at 6 and she's already dressed and heads out at like 6.15. And the other night, I saw her and she was in her bedroom and she was wearing this baggy t-shirt and all the lights were on and she was dancing.

Just dancing around her room.

So, yeah, I want her to move on. This young woman that I was so cranky and bitter about. Now I feel so protective and kind of maternal. If you ran into her at the corner market or something, do you think you could ever say anything to her?

Yeah, if I ran into her, I wouldn't say a thing. What would I say? I've been watching you through your window. How creepy would that be?

Yeah, no way.

She doesn't know that there's this person that.

I don't know, that's this complete stranger that's out there really rooting for her, you know?

Our senior producer, Simon Adler will be dressed on the stage in a snappy white suit. Leading you through live music and interviews and stories and images from space. And an even stranger place called the 1970s. Again coming to Seattle on Thursday, February 15th, at Town Hall, Seattle. Find out more and get your tickets at kuow..org Slash events.

Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.