Everyone is Watching (2 page)

Here, spring is passing. A sunny haze lingers over Columbus Circle and the entrance to Central Park. Here is the willowy lightness of London plane trees. People sit by the fountain, watching a
man play a saxophone that shimmers in the sun – golden. They lounge, limbs outstretched, easy.

Edmund stands outside an apartment block on West 30th Street. He turns to see his reflection in the glass foyer door. He is wearing a crumpled cream suit and a blue tie. The
tie is crooked. His cheeks are flushed; he looks as though he has been dragged here against his will. He taps the glass door with his finger. He has a headache. His headache may be because of the
sun. He lived in New York many years ago and he knows a New York summer gets inside of you. His publisher’s assistant, when she comes, will show him this apartment. He waits on the sunny side
of the street. He cleaned his shoes back in Paris. Here, the leather shines. Perhaps it is the pressing-down of time he feels and not the sun.

He used to spend his summers on Fire Island. The parks in Manhattan have always been contrived while the dunes and beaches of Fire Island are wild and natural. Back then, he wanted to strip off
his clothes, walk freely in the sunshine, and bathe in the ocean. He was relaxed and calm, a young man with a future. His whole life seemed as clear as the water, as inviting as the warm sand. Fire
Island was his island. A solitary land mass filled and then emptied of people. Men shielded their gazes with hot brown hands.

Long Island is growing large from an accumulation of sand caused by moving tides. This new land changes the context of what is already there. He doesn’t know what to make of a place that
keeps expanding.

Every year American beach grass has to be planted by hand to keep the dunes from washing away. He doesn’t know what to make of a place that, if left to itself, would simply disappear.

This is always what it is, thinks Edmund. Despite memories of free abandon, it was really rules that held everyone in place. He knew it then and he knows it now, that, besides sex, what lurked
behind those sand dunes was time. We’ve all had our experiences, an interviewer once said, though I can’t help thinking Edmund White is still right in the middle of his.

Edmund White?

He turns around to see a woman with a clipboard and an outstretched hand. I’m sorry to keep you waiting, she says. Shall we go inside?

They enter the cold-blasted, air-conditioned foyer.

I like the name White, she says. It’s like the beginning of something fresh, like clean sheets.

She presses for floor number five.

The reflective surface of the elevator door shows a distorted Edmund White. The assistant beside him is reading his vital statistics on a piece of paper, secured to the
clipboard by a shiny metal lever: Edmund White; one-bedroom apartment with easy access to subway and mainline transportation; Monday; lease tbc.

His apartment in Paris had doors that opened out onto a balcony overlooking the roof of a church. Chilly breezes rustled papers. The sound of gentle rain. Conversations. French flowing in like
the breeze. Edges, rough and unfinished. History, one he didn’t know. Language, something he didn’t understand. Breathing, shaky and uncertain. The bulk of a lover, warm and alive. Time
stretched out, delicious and permanent.

This L-shaped apartment is only temporary. Its position on the block is determined by its hard, straight edges, its squareness, the angle of the floorboards as he stands here, the hard edge of
the window with its black frame and sill. Nothing can come in or go out. The windows are sealed shut and the air-conditioning unit is whirring. The towels in the bathroom hang neatly in a line. His
stomach is as tight as a nut.

Soon, he will pick a nice place in Chelsea or the Upper West Side. It will be a place that suggests a future. It will contain many things to do, fix up, put right. He will go out and buy new
furniture, art, paintings, bookcases and books. He will have his old belongings delivered there. He will get right back down to work. He will set out all of his notebooks on the table. He will read
every page. He will organize his life into chapters. He will examine a map of the city. He will write about what things were like in the past. He will remember the city’s dirty streets. He
will remember himself. He will remember when it all began for him, in the 1960s, when he arrived in a city that was on the verge of collapse, the city and him. He will align this theme of the end
of the city with the notion that, for him, things were just beginning, like someone had switched on a light for Edmund and he could finally see the world.

The assistant switches on the kitchen light and opens the bedroom door. The temporary bed is pushed up against the wall. There are grey marks on the surface of the mattress. Edmund possesses no
sheets. He will have to go out and buy sheets. He will have to go out and buy a good many things – clothing and kitchen utensils. They will all be new and unused. He will unseal the window to
let the air in.

I have papers for you, the assistant says, laying her briefcase on the couch.

She opens the briefcase and takes out the papers. There is a run in the back of her left stocking. Her stocking is a veil. I cannot touch you, Edmund thinks. He watches how she handles the
paper. Pages flick. She is not in any hurry. She has no other place to go. She likes to be here with Edmund White. Edmund White is a famous author. Edmund White has written many books. She will ask
if his signature is the same as the one he uses for the inscriptions in his books and he will say he cannot remember. He will say that he is not a machine, that he cannot simply sign book after
book without consequences. He will say that he is not the same as his author photograph, which was taken many years before. He is not that man. That is another Edmund White. You think that man is
me but that Edmund White,
that
Edmund White, is a stranger, a man from the past. That Edmund White is just a man in a photograph.

Robert Moses is looking out of the window of a train at the towns and villages of Long Island. It is 1922. He is catching glimpses of the ocean, the glittering sun reflected
across it, boats sailing there. As they come out of a town, he sees woodland in the distance that covers many acres. He doesn’t know what this land is used for. Then it’s gone.

Moses loves the town of Babylon on Long Island where he is renting a bungalow with his wife. He can stroll through the quiet streets and down onto the beach. He can swim alone
in the ocean. He is forceful yet elegant when he swims. He cuts through the water without a splash – he glides. He likes the ocean best when it is rough. He likes to work against a strong
force. To watch him from above would be to watch a machine, the direct line of movement through the water caused by his body, those thick, broad shoulders, the wide, defined back.

Robert Moses is busy working hard for the governor but there are many other things he wants to do. Most New Yorkers don’t get the chance to swim in the ocean. Children
play baseball in streets that are congested with traffic. They swim in the East River, which is polluted with waste. Families live in overpopulated tenement slums with no access to gardens or
public parks. Summers in Manhattan are unforgiving. People can die without relief. Those with automobiles drive to Long Island. But what looks like an hour’s drive on paper can, in reality,
become four hours along such inadequate roads. Everyone is trying to get somewhere else but there is nowhere to go and no way to get there. People sit in traffic for hours at a time. They slowly
pass the estates of the richest families in America, the Morgans and the Vanderbilts. They pass the columns and gated driveways, the turrets of castles, the lush manicured lawns of the rich.

As Moses walks home from Babylon station, he thinks about the patch of woodland he sees every day from the train. No land should be left unused.

Robert Moses pays a visit to the Babylon Town Hall and asks to see a map of the island.

That woodland out by the coastline, he says to the clerk, what’s it used for?

It’s the old Brooklyn water supply, the clerk says. A place to store water in case of a shortage. Never been used, as far as I know.

Robert Moses obtains the use of a car and a driver. He is driven through Long Island along Merrick Road. At the end of the road he gets out of the car and climbs over the fence
into the wood. He picks his way through the undergrowth, through the bracken and the wild grass, through bramble thickets. This is not just any wood but three thousand five hundred acres of forest.
He finds four reservoir ponds with lilies growing there, and pickerel and trout swimming. He finds a reservoir bigger than that in Central Park. He can see it all in an instant, recreational
parkland with tennis courts, baseball diamonds, and a golf course, picnic tables, hiking trails, lakes used for swimming, and enough space left over to build a road directed towards the ocean and a
brand new public beach.

Moses reads about the legends of the Great South Bay, about the shipwrecks and the fishermen there. He asks local oystermen about the island: which parts are unexplored? How
can he get to them?

Moses buys himself a small boat. His wife calls it the
Bob
. He goes out in the boat alone and scours the Long Island shore. He is looking for hidden coves, fjords,
dunes and forests.

There is a sandbar called Jones Beach just off the southern coast of Long Island that’s completely inaccessible except by boat. Moses lands his boat and drags it ashore.
He sits on the deserted beach, which stretches as far as he can see, snow-white sand reaching east and west.

Moses explores Jones Beach, walks up and down it. He sits and thinks. He walks through the undergrowth and wades in the ocean. He swims. Floating in the water, he looks back at
the sandbar.

Again, Moses throws his lunch into the
Bob
and heads out. It’s smooth sailing, just the glassy water beneath him and his own shadow cast across the boat’s
hull. Not another boat to be seen on the ocean. Not a cloud in the sky. He is heading east to Fire Island, the next barrier beach. He cuts the engine and pulls the boat onto the sand. He shields
his eyes from the sun. He walks through the sand dunes, the beach grass, the wild marshes. These things don’t appear on any of the maps he has seen. The place is clean and wild. Pure. Not
polluted and overcrowded like Coney Island, no bawdy barkers or scandalous sideshows. No freaks. It is a natural place. This is the perfect environment, a clean slate. And it is growing. He finds
himself in the middle of many acres of beach when, according to his map, he should be standing in the ocean. The tide has produced new land by doing what it does naturally. This is value produced
by the passage of time, he thinks.

Moses struggles against the powerhouses of City Hall, the institutions, the go-getters, the populists and idealists, the moneymen, the landowners, the engineers, the governor
and the mayor. They all tell him no. They tell him there’s no money for this. They tell him nobody wants the roads and the bridges, and nobody cares about public beaches. The Governor Al
Smith isn’t one for sports and recreation. He doesn’t like to watch baseball. He would never run. But this is the man Moses must convince.

Al Smith was born in the Lower East Side in 1873. He learnt to swim in the East River by diving off ramshackle piers into the polluted water with his friends. The trash
floating in the water was just part of the scenery. Smith’s whole world existed in the Lower East Side, for this was where the whole world lived, the greatest concentration of different
nationalities in America. The streets were his playground, his recreation yard, the dark alleyways the running lanes, burst drains the waterholes, loose sidewalk stones the obstacle course. He
witnessed the completion of Brooklyn Bridge from his tenement window. His family were Irish and Italian. He understood what it was like to be an outsider and to take advantage of opportunities when
they came. He wasn’t educated like the other politicians. He didn’t understand the politicians when they spoke. He did not know the process of drafting a bill. He took the bills home
and he read them all. He read everything he could to help him understand. He was not privileged but people liked him. He had a certain way with people. He could look a fellow in the eye. He told a
man straight what he knew. He knew everyone in the neighbourhood. He knew what life was like for them. He lived, not in wealthy uptown housing like the other politicians but downtown.

So why take a shine to Robert Moses? This Yale-educated, professional, literary young man? Did he see the makings of a good human being in that sparkle in his eye? Was it Moses’ ideals
that he approved of? In the beginning, Moses had many.

Moses makes Al Smith get out of the car and he points to where the parkway will go. He explains the layout of the bridge approach and the crossing to the sandbar off the coast,
which will be Jones Beach.

Moses says, This is where the central parkway will come over and the entrance to the east bathhouse will be here, and on either side of the causeway will be parking lots, and
just there will be the refreshment house with a boardwalk running along the outer edge, and the beach beyond that. Lifeguards will be stationed at regular intervals, and we will put the locker
rooms beside the first-aid booth, and there will be services inside those locker rooms: lavatories, showers, lockers and diaper-changing rooms. This is where the theatre will go, a curving outer
wall and stone benches, and there will be bathrooms and dressing rooms back stage. There will be swimming pools and diving pools, sun loungers, chairs and tables, and a restaurant beside that.
Further along will be the games area, shuffleboard, table and paddle tennis, roller-skating rinks and a pitch-and-putt course. And here, an area for additional shade. Beach grass will be planted by
hand to keep the dunes in place. Can you see it, Governor?

My God, says Smith.

In 1924 Al Smith appoints Robert Moses the head of the Long Island State Park Commission. Moses takes his security and the chauffeured car and he walks through the back gardens
of the properties on Long Island, flashing his new City Hall credentials. He notes down the dimensions of the land. He measures with tape and takes photographs. He instructs his men to do the same.
When he looks at the stately mansions, he is looking right through them. He does not see the protests from the owners at all. He is seeing what this land could be without these houses, without
these men standing in his way.