Now that it’s warmer, I’ve taken to reading on my fire escape. The view, facing the southern alley of West 138th Street from six flights up, is vertiginous—but I’m usually not bothered by it, engrossed, as I am, by whatever I’m reading. The early evening routine I’ve enjoyed this past week has entailed making a cup of coffee and, after laying a woolen blanket down in thick bunches, nestling myself (with my back to the Hudson) into a comfortable place, where I can slip into the ivy-clad and crumbling world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast with relative ease.

And that’s where I usually stay until it gets too dark or cold to continue. Two days ago, however, my mind was restless. (Channelling other places has become my preoccupation of choice this spring.) Last month, I spent four idyllic weeks in Copenhagen and Prague; I’m also busy these days planning a return to Honolulu, a summer’s sojourn, where I’ll teach at my alma mater and reconnect with my parents.

So, it was easy to set the book down, good as it is, and listen to the pods of starlings echo each other in pockets of birch between the street and the alley below. As I sipped my coffee, two hours must have slipped away—and the sky went from bright grey to ocher-tinged navy. My back, by that time, was sore. I had thrown the fat tome of Peake’s trilogy onto my bed and was about to follow it back inside, when my peripheral vision caught movement in the window across the alley.

Lighted in a way that Rembrandt would have approved, a woman in her twenties had drawn a black curtain open for more light. She sat, nude, in front of a mirror. Her pendulous breasts swayed as she athletically applied make up to her face. She studied herself assiduously between applications. It was a privileged moment. Sensing that the purity of her privacy was otherwise unadulterated, I felt guilty. Even so, I was transfixed. And, as I wondered whether she’d notice me, she looked up.

She smiled, to my relief. When I picked up my cell phone and motioned with it—asking, in effect, for permission—she smiled, without nodding, and faced the mirror again. I took the shot. The music in my living room changed at that moment: Patty Griffin’s “Making Pies” led into the Glen Gould interpretation of Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words.” As if in assent, the wind picked up, and the starlings took flight.