Hypotheses

On my morning walk the other day, I passed a woman standing near the entrance to a shop. She was talking passionately into her cellphone. “What do you care about” she asked. “You don’t care about me. You don’t care about [muffled]. What do you care about?” Totally engaged with the person to whom she was speaking, she seemed divorced from the world around her. I was intrigued, of course, by her question. To whom was she speaking? To whom or what did the muffled noun or pronoun refer?

I was tempted to stop in my tracks and eavesdrop, but that would have been rude. Besides, she might have awoken to her surroundings, noticed me listening, and moved away. As it was, she continued speaking in a loud voice, which carried for at least a block as I walked away. Alas, I could no longer make out what she was saying.

At night, when you walk past a window whose shades are not yet drawn, past a window that lets you look into a lighted room, don’t you wonder who lives there and what kind of life they lead? Through that window you can glimpse another life, just as you can glimpse a bit of the life of the people who are talking on their cellphones.

New York has eight million people and at any one time it seems that one-tenth of them are outside talking on their cellphones. If you walk the city streets, as most New Yorkers do, in any one month you can observe hundreds if not thousands of different lives through the momentary revelations that pedestrians offer in their cellphone talk. You may not learn much about them, just as you don’t learn much about the lives within the lighted room you pass, but you learn more about these people than you would have learned in the past, before cellphones became ubiquitous. And their talk provides fodder for your imagination, allowing you to construct a story around what you’ve heard.

That woman, for example, who asked so emphatically what her interlocutor cared about, was, I imagined, talking to her husband, and the muffled word I heard referred to their child. I imagined that the husband had moved out after it was discovered that he was carrying on an affair, that he had told his wife that the flame from their marriage had died out, that the thrill was gone, and that there was no use pretending any more. No wonder the woman was angry. Of course, for all I knew she was talking to her mother.