I don’t know when she moved in, but it was a long time ago now. You’ve got to understand, I’ve been driving the tram four nights a week for 34 years. Back and forth, back and forth, eight hours a night. Her building went up in the late ‘90s. Lots of construction over there then. It was probably another 10 years before I noticed her. Maybe she was there the whole time. I couldn’t tell you.
I’m not a pervert or anything. It’s just a funny sort of thing that happens in New York City sometimes – 10 million people, usually you don’t pay anyone much mind, you know? But sometimes when you notice someone, then all of a sudden, you keep noticing them.
Years back I got into a fender-bender outside my building with a guy who, it turned out, lived around the corner. I said I’d been there 10 years; he said he’d been there 14. I swear, I’d never seen this guy before in my life. Next thing I know, I see him at the supermarket. The week after that, he’s at the bank. The next day, he’s smoking a cigarette in the parking alley near the subway. He even drank at the same bar as me. These people, maybe you pass them on the street a thousand times, but it’s like your brain just erases them when they’re out of sight. Poof. You don’t even recognize them ten minutes later. But then once you register them, now they’re always there, and it’s like they’ve always been there, like part of the scenery. He dropped dead, that guy. Heart attack. This was years back.
I noticed her big flatscreen TV before I ever saw her. That’s most of what you can see from up there, if you’re looking at the apartments. If one whole wall is a window, you’re not going to put the TV on the window. So all the TVs are on the walls that face out. Time was, when there was a big show – the last Seinfeld, Monday Night Football – you’d see everyone was watching the same thing.
She watched business news. CNBC, FOX Business, Bloomberg. Always something with a ticker running along the bottom of the screen. Her building was the third one you pass when you’re coming into Manhattan, and I know she was about 250 feet up in the sky because her place was right at eye-level from the tram. High-floor apartment, Upper East Side – I figured it was a Master of the Universe type, one of these guys you see going to play tennis with their hair gelled. First time I saw her walk in front of the TV, I thought, “that must be the wife.” Sexist, I know. I’m 65. These things are hard to unlearn.
Before this, I drove a city bus, believe it or not. That’s not an easy gig to get. You know how many people I noticed in five years driving a city bus? Not one. Those are big vehicles, understand. People were friendly; people said hello, but you need to stay focused. Someone will step out in front of the bus like it’s a squirrel or something, like it’s just going to stop and scoot the other way. This thing weighs 16 tons! It wasn’t for me. After five years, my supervisor said, “You’re a good kid; I can tell you’re miserable. I know a guy looking to hire operators for the Roosevelt Island tram.”
I’d never been on it, to be honest. Lived in Queens my whole life, knew about it; it was one of those things – “oh, we’ve got to do that someday,” never did. Aced the test, took a pay cut for the job. My ex was pissed about it. But good benefits. And the work – it’s not the bus, I’ll tell you that. You just need to know which button to push when. A little crowd control.
You get commuters at rush hour and tourists at sunset, and big crowds when they’re at the same time. Around 10 pm you sometimes get groups of young kids – I mean kids in their 20s – all dressed up for the nightclub they’ve got on the roof of the new hotel over there on the R.I. side. But 11 pm to 2 am? Forget it. Those kids at the club take Ubers home. Sometimes you get four or five rides in a row, completely empty. You’ve still got to make the trip. There’s a schedule.
Louie, the young kid who runs the other tram on Thursdays, hardly takes his eyes off his phone the whole night. I’m old-school. I look out the window. I mean, people come from all over the world to see that view. Denmark, Korea. Everywhere. Nowadays a lot of the tourists just film the whole ride, but if you listen, you still hear people gasp when you come past the 59th St. bridge stanchion and the Empire State Building pops out at you. All of a sudden it’s just there. Boom. You live here long enough, you don’t pay it much mind, but for most people the Empire State Building is the thing they picture when they picture New York City. And you only see it for a few seconds, but then you get the Chrysler Building, and all the new ones, Billionaire’s Row. It’s like you’re Spider-Man, or something, swinging from skyscrapers. I do appreciate it. I drove the bus for five years, bear in mind.
Her building, it’s far enough off that you can’t see people’s faces. But it was like I said, once I noticed her, I kept noticing her. She got home around 6:30 every night and put the TV on. She had short red hair, and she always wore skirt suits in light colors, and when she sat down for dinner at her breakfast bar at 7 pm, she’d hang her blazer over one of the barstools and leave it there while she watched business news until the lights went out a little before midnight.
And she was all alone. I never saw anyone in there with her, not once. We’re talking 15, 20 years, four nights a week, and every Monday night, every Tuesday night, every Wednesday night, every Thursday night she’s in there alone, watching business news and eating takeout at the breakfast bar at 7 pm. Maybe a few times a year the place would go dark, TV off, but then a week or two later she’d be back at it. Like she went to visit family, or to a spa with her old college roommates or something.
Understand, there’s a lot of apartments you can see into from up there. Like I said, mostly you see their TVs. Enough distance, you can mistake a person for a floor lamp. You’re moving quick. There’s someone in the building next to hers that watches Australian football in the middle of the night. Years back, there was a couple in one of the other buildings, right at eye-level also, who used to make it in front of the window while the tram was going by. Exhibitionists. It’s New York, you know? You get all sorts of people.
There was something different about her, though. In 34 years, I never picked up on anyone else’s schedule like that, so regular. You could set your watch to this woman. There was something nice about it. Sometimes you have rough nights – big crowds, people pushing for seats, tourists shoving each other for photos. It can get chaotic. But there she is, blazer on the barstool, eating her dinner at 7 pm. She was like my own private lighthouse. Her business news.
If the tram ran past my apartment all night long, I like to think I’d ride it sometime, just out of curiosity, you know? But she always kept all the lights on, so I guess it’d be hard for her to see out. Strange to think about. The kid Louie sometimes leaves the lights on in the tram car if the tourists annoy him. When it’s light inside and dark out, a big window is mostly just a mirror. She must have been missing out on a hell of a view.
Then one day, it felt like her place had been dark for a long time. I figured it had been at least a week, maybe two, so I started checking, and two more weeks went by with no sign of her. That was unusual, you know. Like I said, she was a very regular person. I thought maybe she finally moved, after all those years, except her TV was still there, and her big brown leather sofa. She even left a blazer on one of the barstools.
Then after a couple of weeks of total darkness, it looked like there was a light on in her apartment, but just one dim light coming from somewhere I couldn’t see- the bedroom or the bathroom, maybe. And that wasn’t like her, either. I hadn’t thought about it, but she never had it halfway. A couple of days later, I go by, and all the lights are off, but now the TV’s on, and someone’s watching SpongeBob SquarePants. I thought maybe it was a break-in, somebody turned on the TV to cover up the noise. But what am I going to do, call the cops? “I’m on the Roosevelt Island Tram; someone’s watching cartoons.” And I couldn’t see anyone inside. Like I said, the lights were down.
Maybe two trips later, back and forth, back and forth, and her place was dark again. Two hours after that, the kitchen lights go on, TV’s on one more time, more cartoons, just for one trip back and forth. Then dark again. I was thinking, “What the hell is going on in there?”
That was a Thursday. They only run one tram at night Sunday to Wednesday, but Thursday to Saturday they run both cars up until midnight. Monday to Wednesday I’m on from 6 pm to 2 am; Thursday I work 4 to 12. My early night. Louie does the late shift. I leave the tram off on the R.I. side, so usually I take the subway home from there. But that night I got on Louie’s tram for a ride over to Manhattan. Figured I’d putt around a little. My body clock, how it is, I’m not falling asleep before 3:30 in the morning no matter what.
On the ride over, I said, “Louie, I got a funny question.”
I asked him if he paid any attention to the people in the apartments. He said he knew what they all liked to watch on TV, and he made up names for a bunch of them. PJ Sportsman, Jeopardy! Jane, the Lord and Lady Zumba. I pointed to her building and asked him when he last saw the women who lived at eye-level there. He asked if I meant “the Business Fox.” He said it’d been a while since he saw her, now that he thought about it, but she was always gone a lot.
I told him he only thought that because he was always on his phone, that she hardly ever left the place. He said he multi-tasks, and that if I was talking about the red-haired lady who watched business news, then he could promise me she was gone a lot of the time. He asked if this was because someone was watching Bluey in there earlier. He thought that was weird too. We pulled into the Manhattan side, and I told him I’d see him next week.
I hate to admit this, but in 34 years driving the tram, I never matched the buildings I see from up high with the street grid in my mind. I know we come over 60th St. and come in at 2nd Ave., so of course I know where all those buildings are. But up there, when you see these people in these big, fancy glass apartments on high floors, you imagine them stepping out onto a quiet tree-lined street with a chauffeur pulling up in a town car to take them to work. If I ever thought about where her building stood, I would’ve known it was at 61st and 1st, and I’ve been on that block a thousand times. If you asked me what’s at 61st and 1st, I could give you the whole history, you know? That flower shop used to be a great little pizzeria. The Home Depot was a movie theater for years and years. And so on.
But until that night, I never once made that connection, never thought about how when she came in from work, she was coming in from the same intersection as the Home Depot and a big public storage facility. It’s fine, don’t get me wrong. It’s safe over there and everything. But there’s not a lot of character in that area, tucked up against the bridge and the FDR Drive. Tall buildings and busy streets. Lots of hospitals. No charm. It wasn’t how I pictured her.
The entrance to her building was between the Home Depot and a Starbucks. You would never see it unless you were looking for it. Just a glass door with the address on it, then a long, narrow hallway leading to a big lobby with a security guy sitting at a desk in the middle. It wasn’t the type of place you could go in by accident, or someplace you’d just sit and mill around, and I didn’t have cause enough to be asking about her. I didn’t know her name, her apartment number, nothing. And it was the middle of the night.
I sat on a bus stop bench on 1st Ave. and waved along the bus when it came. I tried to collect myself, you know? Put the pieces together. She was gone at least three weeks; now someone was watching cartoons in there. A building like that, there must be cameras all over the place. There was no way a burglar would just go walking right past the security desk. I got half a mind to go looking for a side entrance, then I thought, what the heck am I doing? Acting like I’m Humphrey Bogart. That’s what the police are for, dummy.
It was none of my business. But part of me felt like it was only my business, like something was wrong, and no one else in the world besides me and her knew about it. From the bus stop bench I could see the tram float by. I could even make out the outline of Louie against the lights on the bridge.
I got up and started walking. Did a big loop of her block. There was a parking garage attached to her building, which might have been another way in. I looked at everyone I passed on the street, looked real close like I usually wouldn’t. I spotted someone down 1st Ave. with short red hair like hers, but when I got nearby I could see it was just a young girl, out for the night with her friends. Her hair wasn’t even red; it just looked that way in the streetlight. I saw one guy twice, a guy in a green jacket. First I saw him coming up 61st and turning onto 1st heading south, then five minutes later I saw him walking north on 1st. I stopped to watch where he was heading, but he just looked something up on his phone, crossed the street, and went into one of the buildings. I don’t know what I was looking for.
I’ll admit, that night I even thought about going into the strip club that’s right on 60th, under the bridge overpass there. I was out of sorts. I thought maybe I’ll get a drink, get a dance, take my mind off it, like I might have done 20 years ago. But those girls in there have got to be young enough to be my daughter, if I had kids. Some young enough to be my granddaughter, probably. What the hell do they want with me?
There was no place to go. I could see the tram coming back over the river, so I figured I’d take it over to R.I. and take the subway home from there after all. Less walking that way. And I could take one more look.
Louie was surprised to see me waiting on the platform. Like I said, 1:30 am on a weekday, you’re surprised to see anyone there. He said he was glad he caught me; he needed to show me something. I figured it was a new high score on his video game or something.
He said, “You know the lady you were asking about, the Business Fox?” I said Yeah, the one in the building on 61st and 1st by the Home Depot.
“She’s dead,” he said. I asked what the hell he was talking about. Could he see her in there? He said she’s not in there; she’s buried. He told me to hold on while he closed the door and started the trip, then he pulled up something on his phone.
He showed me an obituary. Viola Caprara, age 71. Hospital administrator, widow of Joseph, mother of two. Photo of a red-haired lady in a fancy black dress. I said I could see how the hair was similar, but that wasn’t her; why would he think that? Besides, it said she died after a short illness surrounded by family in her beloved home in Briarcliff Manor. That’s Westchester. And I never figured her for Italian. I said, Louie, I’m sorry for Viola Caprara here, but this just ain’t our girl.
He said he found out the address on Google Maps, then he looked up apartments for sale in the building to see which line she was in, then he counted floors as he went past. Then he looked up records for Apt. 22E and found out it was bought by Viola Caprara in 2004. I said maybe it’s another Viola Caprara, or maybe Viola Caprara bought it for her sister, which would explain the same red hair. This lady obviously didn’t live in Briarcliff Manor; she lived on 61st and 1st.
Louie said, “No, check this out,” and he pulled up an Instagram of a lady and three red-headed kids sitting on a brown leather sofa in front of a big glass window looking out on the 59th St. bridge. No kidding. I’m telling you, if they took it a minute later, you might have seen me passing by in the tram car in the background.
The caption said, “Can you believe my 71-year-old mother had a 22nd-floor pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side????” Then it went into a whole long sob story. Husband died young when the kids were in college; she got the place because she hated commuting alone. She was a strict mom but softer with her grandkids. A role model and a power woman. A dedicated gardener. On and on. Louie swiped for me and showed me a picture of the same woman from the obituary smiling on a daybed by a sunny window with the three red-headed kids.
The apartment was dark when we passed by. What a fool I was.
It’s quiet on the R.I. side, especially that time of night. It’s a little eerie, even. You hear your own footsteps. You’d never know you were in New York City if you weren’t looking out across the water. There was traffic on the northbound FDR Drive, bumper to bumper. Must’ve been construction, or an accident somewhere. I could see taillights lined up for miles, all those people not getting to wherever they needed to go. Like someone drew a glowing red border around all of Manhattan. I couldn’t picture her as a gardener.
At 2 am on Roosevelt Island, you’ve got the whole place to yourself. There are benches down by the river where you can sit and look out at the skyline, and I had a mind to take a seat for a while and listen to the water smack up against the rocks. That river is deadly, you know. There’s an undertow so strong, I’ve heard stories of people just trying to dip their feet in and getting sucked away. You’d never guess that from looking at it in the dark, though. At night, the current just makes the reflections in the river twinkle a little: the taillights and streetlights and lights from all the buildings.
