The Nude Vacuumer
by George Held

When I moved in to my third-floor Greenwich Village corner apartment, on an August day in 1982, I arranged my furniture so that my favorite chair for reading allowed me to look out a window at the red-brick townhouse across the street, where ivy grew up between the third-floor windows.

Early one evening a few days later, I was reading the day’s Times and took a break to look out the window. My gaze settled on the ivy for a moment before movement in the left window caught my eye. I saw a woman vacuuming, assiduously pushing and pulling the wand. She soon went out of view, only to emerge at the other window of her flat. Her wavy black hair fell just below her ears. Judging from where her shoulder appeared in the window, I figured she was about 5 feet 2. And then it struck me that she was nude.

I pulled the paper up before my face, a blush burning my cheeks. The last thing I wanted was for the woman to think her new neighbor was a Peeping Tom. She was obviously used to coming home from work of a hot summer day, stripping off her clothes, and vacuuming in the buff. Even a glance left the impression that she was a bit fleshy, but her breasts were so small that they hardly interfered as she pushed and pulled the wand at a steady pace.

I supposed the woman had been used to vacuuming nude for some time before I’d moved in. Maybe the two women who’d preceded me in my apartment enjoyed the view as much as I would eventually grow to, or maybe they too were averse to peering at their neighbor across the street.

 In Oxford, Ohio, where I come from, it’s safe to say that no woman, even one of the wild students at Miami University there, would appear undressed in her window, vacuuming or not. Contemplating my new neighbor, I thought that Greenwich Village had exceeded my hopes, for I’d had no expectation of even the possibility of viewing nudity right across the street.

I sat in the same chair to watch TV, so out of the corner of my eye I began to sneak a look out the window to see if my neighbor happened to be vacuuming. She did this not every night but surely more often than seemed necessary. I vacuumed my place only once every few weeks, and fully dressed, I assure you. She used her vacuum cleaner two or three evenings a week.

I don’t know how long “Chloe,” as I came to think of her, had lived across the way and whether she liked our Village corner as much as I came to do. Besides the nude vacuumer, I enjoyed the chorus of house sparrows coming from the abundant ivy covering the windowless side of her building, and it pleased me to glimpse occasionally the famous blonde actress going up or down the stoop of the building cater-corner to mine.

In any case, my acquaintance with “Chloe” never moved beyond the window-frame stage, though I sometimes wondered if she was hoping I’d wait on her stoop for her to return home from work and introduce myself.

But I am probably too proper for my own good and would never have taken her cue, if indeed vacuuming nude in full view was that sort of cue. In any case, I watched as

fall turned to winter, and I supposed she had adequate heat in her flat, because she continued her nude vacuuming.

In January, after I’d returned from spending the holidays in Ohio with my parents, I noticed that in the evening her apartment remained dark. No one came home to turn on the lights, not to mention vacuum, until March, when I noticed a pair of young men there, and they soon installed curtains that they pulled closed in the evening.

I could then read my paper or watch TV without distraction after work.

*

One fine April Saturday as I walked down my stoop, I paused when I saw a familiar figure round the corner. It was “Chloe,” fully and nicely dressed. As she neared my stoop, I said, spontaneously, “Good morning,” and, pleased by this coincidental encounter, smiled broadly at her.

“Oh,” she said, breezing by, “I’m surprised you recognize me with my clothes on.”

“Oh, my,” I thought, my eyes following her as she flowed down the sidewalk while I was too witless to say another word.

I still think of her whenever warm weather arrives, but I never saw “Chloe” again.

THE END