rear window; When Thisbe Nissen and her family moved, they found Vladimir Horowitz and Wanda Toscanini right next door.

Byline: Thisbe Nissen

I often scour thrift and antiques shops for vintage magazines and have collected an enviable pile of old National Geographics and House Beautifuls. I once bought a stack of seventies Playboys at a farm auction, outbidding a throng of middle-aged men, and as I hauled off my booty-a milk crate full of collectable smut-one of the losing bidders cornered me. "I'm just curious," he said, "about how come you wanted those." I wish I were quick enough on my feet to have eyed him like it was the dumbest question I'd ever heard and said, "For the naked girls . . . why else?" Alas, I just beamed at the guy and said, "I make collages."

I collage everything: birthday cards, photo-album covers as wedding presents. I've been doing it since I was a teenager. I'm serious about this business of hacking up old magazines, taking the bodies of forties couture models with, say, my cat's head pasted atop a Van Cleef & Arpels diamond-draped neck.

Which is how someone born in 1972 comes to own an April 1, 1948, issue of Vogue. In this particular issue, my scissor-happy hands got arrested on page 147, when I came upon a face I knew, and I stopped, intrigued. The subject is seated, leaning on the table beside him, his head propped against one hand-just the thumb and forefinger pressed to his temple, as if to ward off some inevitably trying news. He's wearing a straight, striped necktie, not one of the bow ties from his renowned collection, and he looks more distinguished, less eccentric than the Vladimir Horowitz I remember.

y parents bought a town house at 16 East Ninety-fourth Street in early 1976 at rock bottom of the real estate market. It cost just about everything they had at the time and was in a near-tenement state of disrepair. They spent the first years there in paint-and-spackle-covered jeans as they renovated themselves what they could not afford to have done professionally. One evening as we worked on the house, hands sticky with ancient wallpaper paste, limousines began to pull up narrow Ninety-fourth Street with increasing regularity, stopping just in front of our house to unload their passengers. The neighbors-concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz and his wife, Wanda, the daughter of conductor Arturo Toscanini-were having a party. We peered out our windows like little children past bedtime, craning over the stair banister to glimpse the grandeur of their parents' soiree. As we watched, another black limousine pulled up: Henry and Nancy Kissinger stepped out onto the wintry New York sidewalk, and out of another came Woody and Mia.

About twice a year a huge truck pulled up the street and blocked traffic for hours. Horowitz played only his own piano when he gave concerts, and thus it was necessary to extract this piano from one of the French windows of 14 East Ninety-fourth Street and lower it, via crane, to the sidewalk below. Sometimes my grandmother took the train in from Yonkers to witness the moving of the piano, but she liked even more to come in on an ordinary afternoon to hear Horowitz practice. When the weather was nice, ...