Visible City (8 page)

As she’d hoped, Leon was still inside with his daughter and wife, their faces bisected by the white grids of the windows. She looked more closely and saw that she had been right. His daughter was the one she’d seen in the window. Leon and his wife were the couple whose quiet contentment she’d watched and envied.

But now that image came apart. In the daylight, their expressions didn’t match what she’d envisioned. The wife, whose back was to Nina, was talking but no one was listening. She reached for her daughter, who pulled her hand away. Instead of appearing bold and unabashed, the daughter looked small and uncertain. If Leon noticed the tension in the exchange, he showed little reaction. Glancing at his watch, at his phone, at the people next to them, he seemed so distant he may as well have been sitting at a different table.

From the privacy of her apartment, Nina felt entitled to watch: flip off the lights and they were hers. Outside, in public, people would wonder why she was standing here for so long. But curiosity trumped self-consciousness. She needed to know why Leon had told her that his wife was the one screaming. She needed to match the wife’s face to the enraged voice, needed to look at their daughter’s eyes and see if that glimmer of freedom was still evident.

Nina busied herself with the kids, dispensing snacks, wiping imaginary crumbs from their cheeks. It took patience and luck. A passing bus backfired, Max screamed, and the wife turned around. Through the window, Nina recognized her former professor, Claudia Stein. It was no longer a stranger she’d been watching but someone she knew.

Ghost stations were in existence throughout the city, ten of them in all, sealed off but intact. The old 91st Street station, once a stop on the 1 train, was fleetingly visible from the window of a passing train. The tiles of the Worth Street station could be briefly, faintly seen. But City Hall, the station that Jeremy had caught sight of the week before, was the most majestic of all.

Designed by George Heins and Christopher Grant La Farge, it was used until 1945, when the trains became too long to fit into the circular station. Though it was closed to the public, it continued to serve as the turnaround for the 6 train, the vaulted ceilings and intricate tile work a testament to the grandeur that once was.

Instead of drafting the documents Richard needed, Jeremy spent the week reading about this former crown jewel of the IRT. The management of the firm had blocked many non-work-related sites, but not even the most demanding of partners would think to block the website of a man who drew the subway in immaculate detail, every inch of station correct, every tile of mosaic in place. Instead of paying attention on a conference call, Jeremy found an article about brakemen who hid old train cars in unused tunnels so they wouldn’t be scrapped. He found a support group for so-called foamers who rode in the front cars of the subway, their faces pressed to the window for the best view of the tracks.

He read the blogs of urban explorers in Portland and Boston and New York who traveled through underground drainpipes and subway tracks in search of infrastructural treasures. On one blog he came across, an underground explorer who called himself Magellan claimed that he and his band of explorers donned black trench coats and sunglasses to navigate abandoned New York City subway stations and scale the walls of condemned buildings, planting black flags once they’d reached their destinations.

At first this account sounded little different from the other blogs, but he startled at the bio Magellan had posted. When he wasn’t leading his clandestine group on surreptitious missions to the hidden parts of the city, he worked a mindless job in a New York City skyscraper, which had inspired him to begin his explorations. On the blog, Magellan recounted the story of the structural defect in his office building which, upon being discovered in the 1970s, required workers to stabilize the skyscraper, secretly installing metal rods in each of the offices and adding a massive weight to the roof. Magellan claimed to have bought a hardhat at a costume shop and sneaked onto the rooftop to see the contraption on which their lives depended.

Recognizing the building as his own—everyone who worked in the Citicorp building knew this disturbing fact but tried to forget it—Jeremy e-mailed Magellan and skeptically asked how he’d made it past the security offices housed on the top floor. Magellan was probably a fifteen-year-old in Idaho with Internet access and an overactive imagination, but even so, Jeremy kept reading his blog, hoping it was true. He became newly curious about his coworkers; each person he passed in the hall harbored a similar longing to be somewhere else.

“Do you know when he’s going to be back?” Jeremy asked Richard’s secretary when he finally finished drafting the first of numerous documents that were so urgently needed.

“He used to tell me everywhere he was going,” the secretary said. “Now I have no idea what he’s up to. Every afternoon, he puts that vest on and runs out of here as though his life depended on it.”

In his mind Richard was also donning a trench coat, holding out the black flag. But it was impossible to believe—Richard was probably at the dentist, getting a root canal. Even so, Jeremy felt newly free. He told his own secretary he had a meeting and he left the office. Richard liked to tell stories of the irresponsible associates he’d encountered in the course of his career: the one who went on vacation in the middle of a major deal and never once checked his voice mail, the one who left a closing unfinished because her cat was sick. If Jeremy was caught, future associates would hear about the lawyer who had an urgent need to learn about an abandoned subway station. They would hear about someone who had seen a fleeting image from a train window and was consumed with a desire to stand inside that sealed space.

Jeremy escaped into a day that was warm and bright. Except for a few blocks at either end of his commute, it was rare for him to be outside. Squinting from the excess of visual stimulation, he jumped at the sight of a police car, as if an unsanctioned afternoon off was an actual crime. In front of the New York Public Library, he pulled out the
Michelin Guide to New York City
that Nina had bought him long ago, which they were still waiting to use. If he really were a tourist, he’d walk around the building, studying every detail. He’d ride by his office on the upper deck of a red sightseeing bus; the partners at his firm would spot him among the camera-wielding tourists, and for the moment before the bus turned the corner, they’d wonder,
Don’t we know him?

In accordance with the library’s rules, Jeremy turned off his BlackBerry but wished they’d confiscate it at the door. In the main reading room, he searched for “City Hall Station.” He brought call numbers and titles to the librarian, who sent his request in a pneumatic tube to the miles of stacks underground, in what used to be the underground water system of the Croton Aqueduct, another relic Magellan claimed to have explored.

In front of him, call numbers flashed across the screen like the ticker of the stock market. As he waited for his books, he glanced at the people around him, to see what they were so fervently studying. A man across from him took frantic notes in a tiny notebook as he read. Jeremy tried to meet his eye, but the man noticed nothing around him. The woman sitting next to him had a pile of books on her lap. On the spine of one of the books, he caught the name La Farge.

She noticed him staring and looked up in surprise. “Are you studying La Farge?” she asked.

“Actually, I’m interested in City Hall station,” he said.

“Oh, then you’re interested in Christopher Grant La Farge. I thought you were interested in his father, John La Farge,” she said. “John La Farge was a brilliant stained-glass artist,” she explained, and described the artist’s use of imperfect glass in whose unpredictable lines and fractures he saw immense beauty. He embedded jewels along the borders, creating a dappled, rough texture that to her mind was superior to Tiffany’s smoother, more perfect surfaces.

“La Farge was also a mural painter and textile designer, though he was a lawyer by training. His father was dead-set against it, but eventually he ran off to Paris to paint. John was notoriously difficult but he knew his own mind.” He listened as she told him how John had had tensions with his father but had helped his own son launch his career. “If you want to understand the work of Christopher Grant, you should begin by researching the influence his father had upon him.”

He was lost in her words until, for a moment, his mind found its way back. He would get caught being away from the office. Richard would demand to know his whereabouts. The firm would send search parties.

“I’m taking up your time,” she apologized.

“Actually, I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”

“I assume you’re a grad student?” she asked.

“I’m at Columbia. I’m studying with Marc Shultz,” he said, pulling out a name he’d come across online.

“I used to teach at Columbia. I do nineteenth-century American decorative arts. Marc is wonderful. I know him well. What’s your name? I’ve wanted to call Marc anyway. I’ll tell him I ran into you.”

“Maurice,” he said quickly.

Seeing the call numbers of the books he’d requested flash across the librarian’s screen, he stood up. Before he walked away, the woman grabbed his arm, though she seemed as startled by her gesture as he was.

“I don’t know if you’d be interested, but this is something I wrote about John La Farge. It was just accepted by the
American Art Journal
for their fall issue,” she said, and handed him a manuscript copy of her article. He thanked her and put it in his bag for later, then took the pile of books from the librarian.

He began to read. In the pages of a book called
New York Underground,
the city expanded. The Croton Aqueduct. The labyrinths beneath Grand Central. The steam pipes and atomic tunnels beneath Columbia. The unused Amtrak tunnels under Riverside Park.

Not even in his mind could Jeremy stay away for long. The impetus to check his BlackBerry was instinctive. Outside the library and once again reachable, his dread descended. He had one message from Nina, four from Richard. He’d call Nina later, but Richard couldn’t be put off so easily. Afraid that the sounds of the street would give him away, Jeremy waited to call Richard until he’d snuck back into his office.

“Where were you?” Richard demanded when Jeremy reached him. “You can’t be out of touch like this. The client has been waiting all afternoon. The neighborhood activists convinced the local community board that there’s support to block the project. There’s an emergency meeting of the Land Use Committee tomorrow. The client’s already in a hurry, and now these reactionary groups with no sense of financial realities are determined to create a series of roadblocks.”

It was a speech Jeremy had heard countless times, and until now he had agreed without thinking about it. But the words remade themselves. Richard was speaking a language he’d ceased to understand.

“Some of these old buildings really should be landmarked. They’re beautiful,” Jeremy said.

Richard laughed, though it sounded more like he was choking. “No one has touched this building in forty years. Are we supposed to save it just for the sake of saving it?” he asked, and rattled off a list of what needed to be done. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Jeremy, but your heart isn’t in your work.”

Jeremy was afraid to say anything, except to promise that he would get started right away. He followed Richard’s instructions but did the bare minimum, producing the kind of sloppy work he’d always derided in other lawyers. He’d once worked so slavishly, paying attention to every last detail, in order to see another Royalton building fill in the skyline, to reap millions for clients who didn’t know his name. All those nights of never coming home when he said he would, of forgetting he was anything other than his work. If the deal fell apart, all he’d feel was relief.

He printed out extra copies of the documents he had drafted and put them in his briefcase, not yet sure what he was planning to do with them. Taking newfound pleasure in defiance, Jeremy read Claudia Stein’s article about John La Farge’s work for Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s mansion, which had once stood on the corner of 58th Street and Fifth Avenue. Cornelius died unexpectedly in 1899, and in 1926, with commercial buildings encroaching all around, his wife sold it to make way for what would eventually become Bergdorf Goodman. Knowing what the house and its art meant to her husband, she tried to preserve many of the great works contained inside, dividing them among museums and family residences.

Many of La Farge’s murals and windows were moved either to museums in the city or to the Breakers, the Vanderbilts’ summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. But not everything could be accounted for, and while most scholars believed that any missing works were of little consequence, Claudia Stein had become convinced that there had once existed inside that mansion a stained-glass window as important as any others La Farge had made.

Jeremy kept reading, no longer caring how late it was. She had identified several cartoon paintings that were studies for figures that didn’t correspond to any La Farge creation that existed. In his studio records, she found expenditures for orders of glass billed to the Vanderbilt family that didn’t correspond to any known project. She detailed an interview with a Vanderbilt descendant who remembered a striking window in the house with a blue background unlike any he’d ever seen. A relative’s photo album produced a grainy image in which, she claimed, the outline of an unidentified window appeared faintly in the background.