Visible City

by Mirvis, Tova

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  VISIBLE CITY

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 by Tova Mirvis

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Mirvis, Tova.

  Visible city / Tova Mirvis.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-04774-7

  I. Title.

  PS3563.I7217V58 2014

  813'.54—dc23 2013036041

  eISBN 978-0-544-04554-5

  v1.0314

  VISIBLE CITY

  One down and two across, there she was again, a lone woman in the window, pressed close to the glass. For several days, she had been there on and off, standing in front of the window, on crutches, as if wanting to be seen.

  Inside her own apartment, Nina stopped to watch. She was disturbed by the young woman’s presence, proprietary on behalf of the middle-aged couple whom she’d come to expect in that window, reading contentedly on their couch. The couple rarely talked to one another, but neither of them seemed bothered by the silence. Sometimes the husband disappeared from view, returning with two mugs in hand. Occasionally the wife stretched her legs toward her husband and he absent-mindedly grasped one of her feet. But once Nina had looked out as the wife started to walk away and the husband stood and pulled her closer. Caught off-guard by the gesture, the woman had nearly stumbled, and to steady her, he pulled her into an embrace. To everyone’s surprise, he twirled her, and for a few minutes before resuming their quiet routine, they had danced.

  Nina’s living room window offered no sweeping city views, no glimpse of the river or the sky, only the ornate prewar building across the street. She and Jeremy had lived in this Upper West Side apartment for five years but still hadn’t gotten around to buying shades. Even though she looked into other people’s windows, she’d convinced herself that no one was, in turn, watching them. With two sleeping children, she couldn’t leave the apartment, but it was enough to look out at the varieties of other people’s lives. At nine in the evening the windows across the street were like the rows of televisions in an electronics store, all visible at once. Nina’s eyes flickered back and forth, but she inevitably returned to watching the same square, waiting for the couple to reappear, their quiet togetherness stirring her desire to ride out of her apartment into theirs. Hoping to find them there again, hoping that this might be the night in which they looked up from their books, she didn’t move, not until she was pulled away by a scream.

  The interminable cycle of sleeping and waking had begun. In his bedroom, her three-year-old son, Max, was thrashing, yet asleep. His eyes were open but he saw no way out of his nightmare, no path to outrun whatever pursued him. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she whispered into Max’s ear, and his crying subsided. An hour later, it was Lily. From the bassinet that was squeezed into her and Jeremy’s bedroom, Nina picked her up to nurse. As soon as Lily latched on, her crying ceased. For the moment, there was nothing more her daughter needed.

  Before either of the kids woke again, Nina went back to the window, hoping to see not just the outrageous or the extraordinary, but any truthful moment of small ordinary. During the day, every feeling came shellacked with protective plastic coating. The only language spoken was certainty. Outwardly, she was reciting the maxims along with everyone else: The kids were always delicious and she wouldn’t miss this for the world, and there was nowhere she’d rather be, and yes, it did go so fast. On the faces of other mothers, Nina sometimes caught the rumblings of discontent, but their inner lives were tucked away. Like theirs, her hands were always occupied, but while she was making dinner or bathing a child, while pushing one of them in a swing, rocking the other to sleep, her thoughts had begun to rove.

  In the window across the way, there was still no sign of the couple reading. Once again, it was the young woman on crutches looking out, and Nina was tempted to wave. But that would end the illusion. Curtains would be pulled shut, lights switched off, the city’s windows suddenly empty and dark. Instead, Nina stayed hidden, and from the shadows, she watched as a young man dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt emerged from another room and joined the young woman. Wide awake for the first time all day, Nina craned her neck, watching as the couple began to argue, their gestures sharp, their bodies taut. The man tried to hug her but the woman wriggled from his grasp, put her hands over her face, shielding herself from what he was saying.

  The woman turned away from the man, but he wasn’t dissuaded by her anger. He came up behind her and pressed against her. He took her crutches from her and she leaned into him as he entangled his hands in her long dark hair, ran his lips down the nape of her neck, cupped her breasts in his hands. Nina felt the woman’s resistance subsiding and she wished there was a way to draw closer to them still.

  Surely they realized they were before an open window; surely that was part of the pleasure. Could they see her breathing their every breath, feeling their every touch? The woman turned around, her back now to Nina, as the man carefully helped her to the couch where he knelt in front of her and pulled down her pants. As their dark clothes unpeeled, giving way to pale flashes of skin, Nina was inside her own body yet inside theirs as well. The woman’s earlier reluctance was gone. She wasn’t held back by her injured foot. Her thin body wriggled out from underneath and she climbed astride him. Her back arched, her body bare, she turned her face to the window, looking directly at the spot where Nina was standing.

  She saw the look of defiance and understood the bold exhibitionist plea. But it was something else that made her want to press herself to the glass pane and move closer still. This woman was trying to let her know, I see you, I know you are there. In response, she wanted to reach her hand across and loosen the constraints of her own life as well. The city had cracked momentarily apart, a slivered opening in the larger night. Nina might be home with her kids, another interminable night with Jeremy at work, but she was also outside, part of the thrumming city. Nina waited for the reading couple to emerge from some back room where they’d been hiding and join the younger couple on their couch. She waited to see everyone’s inner thoughts transmitted in flashes of light long and short. For every apartment in every building to light up. For neighbors everywhere to strip down, lay themselves bare. For the couples across the way to raise their windows and invite her in.

  The bedroom window faced the construction site next door, so close that on the loudest days, the glass rattled and a layer of dust covered every surface. The city had emerged from a harsh winter into a springtime of construction, the streets now blooming with the branches of cranes and metal vines of scaffolding.

  Claudia went to the window where she struggled to lift the heavy wooden sash.

  “Shut up,” she screamed. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up!”

  It was a strange pleasure and so unlike her, yet what harm could it do? How different was she from the opera singer who practiced every evening, from the trombone-playing teenager who lived beneath them? She was one more voice in the city’s cacophonous orchestra. In whatever form, whatever language, everyone had something to say.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Claudia screamed, harboring the fantasy that when she stopped, nothing would move, speak, rattle. The city would take on the quiet of North Easton, Massachusetts, where she’d grown up. The cars on Broadway, the hordes of pedestrians, would all stand still, the Walk signs commanding Don’t Walk,
the traffic lights turning red.

  “Do you feel better?” Claudia heard, and turned in surprise.

  Leon was watching from the doorway, staring with what seemed to be admiration. But before she could decode his expression, let alone enjoy it, his face darkened to bafflement: a crazy stranger had taken the place of his wife. It wasn’t the first time she’d screamed at the construction workers, but never when Leon was home.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Claudia joked, hoping to restore herself in both Leon’s mind and her own. She considered telling him how overwhelmed she felt by the noise, but he wouldn’t understand that in order to survive the emotional and physical saturation of living here, she had begun conjuring imaginary paths of escape: were she to walk deeper into Riverside Park, she’d arrive not at the highway or river, but at a bucolic green field. But with the noise, those pathways were sealed off. The walls closed in.

  “They’re building a thirty-story building outside our window. You should be used to it,” Leon said as she flipped through the blue pages at the front of the phone book to find the number for the local precinct.

  “I’d like to make a complaint,” Claudia said to the desk sergeant who answered. When she explained the problem to the person on the other end of the phone, she was told to call 311, the number for non-emergency situations. When she did, a recording informed her that she’d reached the City of New York and invited her to leave a message. Unwilling to give up, she called the local precinct again, and this time the officer asked for the location of the site. A rush of optimism: There were people to call when something was wrong. Someone out there was still in charge.

  “You’re going to wake Emma,” Leon said.

  “I don’t think so. She had a hard night. I heard her and Steven fighting.”

  “Did he leave?”

  “Yes, but I would think that he’d at least offer to stay for a few more days,” Claudia said.

  “It’s a broken ankle. She’s going to be fine.”

  “It’s more than that,” Claudia said.

  Their daughter, Emma, had called a week earlier to tell them that she’d broken her ankle jogging and wanted to stay with them until it healed. Her fiancé was going to be away for most of the summer at a writers’ colony, where he planned to finish a novel. Claudia was happy to have Emma home, but she was unable to allay her concern that something more was wrong.

  After giving her a few more baffled looks and offering further reassurances that Emma was fine, Leon left the bedroom. Claudia thought about calling him back, to talk more about Emma or explain her behavior, but having another conversation about their daughter would only make her feel more concerned; instead of feeling Leon had understood her need to scream, she would only feel embarrassed.

  Claudia went back to the window, which was now vibrating from the level and proximity of the noise. She screamed once more, though this time any feeling of relief eluded her.

  In the living room, Leon was talking to Emma, and Claudia strained to hear their conversation, both relieved and disappointed when they failed to mention her screaming. She went closer to the living room, standing quietly outside the entryway.

  “What time is it?” Emma asked as Leon opened the front door, surely trying for a quick escape.

  “The crack of dawn,” he said.

  “No, really.”

  “Were you out here all night?” he asked, and Claudia had to hold herself back from rushing into the room with her own list of questions.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Emma said.

  “Why not?” Leon asked.

  “My ankle was hurting. You wouldn’t believe how tight this cast is. It hurts worse than the break itself.”

  On the surface Emma’s voice was light and cheerful, and Leon fell for it. He might be the therapist but Claudia knew her daughter better than that. Leon walked out of the apartment as though nothing was wrong, in a hurry to perform the bizarre urban ritual of alternate-side parking. “You’d sit in your car even if you didn’t have to,” Claudia once quipped, and he’d had to agree. If there were no law requiring him to move his car to make way for the street cleaners, he’d need to invent one. Once she had asked him what he did while he sat in the car. “I read the paper. I watch people,” he had said. She’d always understood that he preferred to see people this way, from an observational perch, or else in his office where clear boundaries were in place. Though Emma had both their last names—hyphenated as though it were so easy to connect two people—Leon deftly stayed on the outskirts of any family issue. She had long ago accepted the fact that she bore primary responsibility.

  “So when did Steven leave?” Claudia asked, entering the living room where Emma was sprawled on the couch.

  “I was asleep. He didn’t want to wake me.”

  As Claudia scrutinized her daughter’s face, her worry flared once again. Her daughter looked uncharacteristically withered, pale and skinny even by Manhattan standards. She had been wearing the same black sweatpants for days, a departure from her typically colorful ensembles. Even the brightness in her eyes was dimmer, and her long curls, which usually haloed her head and boldly announced, Here I am, seemed deflated.

  “I thought we could go out later. Have you been to Georgia’s, that new café on Broadway? I’ll call Dad. Maybe he’ll come too,” Claudia said. She wanted to grab her daughter into a hug and tell her how much she loved her, but Emma would take this unexpected gesture as a declaration of overbearing concern.

  The prospect of a plan roused Emma. Sitting up, she shook off some of her weariness, and a glint of the old Emma peeked out. Claudia was used to her daughter full of action and energy. After a few post-college years spent finding herself, Emma had decided to pursue a PhD in French literature at Columbia, which Claudia took as an affirmation of her own academic work, as though by following in her footsteps her daughter had purposely paid her the highest of compliments. She had to restrain herself from asking to read the dissertation chapters Emma had written or offering too much advice about the best way to tackle so large an endeavor. But nothing could quell her pride in her daughter’s accomplishments. Claudia’s own career as an art historian had been marked with disappointment and struggle, but it was clear that Emma was destined for success.

  Feeling more hopeful as well, Claudia helped Emma to her bedroom where clothing was strewn on the floor. Unwashed plates were piled on the dresser, the kind of chaos that Emma’s presence had always generated. They had grown used to the way she swept into the apartment, in the throes of conversation, upending everything in her path. When Emma was young, Claudia used to go into her room at night and create order so that Emma awoke to her clothes and toys returned to the shelves, night the great restorer of all that had come undone during the day.

  “Did you and Steven discuss the possibility that he would stay home until you were better?” Claudia couldn’t help asking. Steven had been the latest in a long string of boyfriends, but this was the first whom Emma hadn’t tired of after a few months. She hadn’t been surprised when they announced their engagement—this was the first time her daughter was so visibly smitten. She liked Steven as well and was proud at the prospect of having him as a son-in-law. When Emma first told her whom she was dating, she had hurried to read his short story collection, published when he was only twenty-seven, because how often did you get such uncensored access to your daughter’s boyfriend?

  “I wanted him to go,” Emma said.

  “I would think you’d want him with you.”

  “Mom,” Emma scolded.

  “I was just wondering,” Claudia said, while folding two of Emma’s shirts.

  “You know that’s not what you were doing,” Emma said, but her expression clouded. Wishing to believe what her daughter was saying, Claudia had a moment’s yearning for the young Emma who always told her exactly what she needed. With her small hands on her face, Emma had looked her in the eye and said, “I love you the whole world.” By the time Emma was two, she sat with them
at restaurants, sampling whatever they placed before her. It had been hard not to treat her like an equal member of their threesome, Emma between them, a hand in each of their hands. Even years later, when she and Leon walked down the street with her, Claudia couldn’t hold back a stir of pride: This is who we are. This is who we have made.

  “Emma, honey, are you and Steven okay?” Claudia asked.

  “Of course we’re okay,” Emma said, trying for a smile but not meeting her eye. She pinched her mouth shut, and Claudia was certain that if Emma’s ankle had allowed, she would have jumped up and fled.

  In the morning, both couples had disappeared from view. The only signs of life were the sounds of jackhammering from the construction site across the street, then a voice screaming, Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up! Nina looked out the window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the face behind the rage. Once again, she was alone with the kids. Jeremy had come home sometime during the night and by the time she woke up, he was already gone for the day. Last night, like every night, he’d promised to leave work earlier yet was delayed for one reason or another. She had grown accustomed to a phantomlike figure coming into the darkened apartment, slipping beside her into bed when she was already asleep.

  She was pulled away from the window by an eruption of need, Max wanting his truck, Lily needing to nurse. One demand let loose a cacophony of other demands. Nina picked up Lily with one hand, while with the other she foraged among the pile of toys for the missing truck. Hungry now as well, Max began pinching Lily’s foot; Nina detached Max’s fingers from Lily’s toes and pulled the red battery-operated truck from under the couch. As Nina latched Lily onto her nipple, Max grabbed the truck and drove it across her lap, over her shoulder, into her hair, which became entangled in the mechanized wheels.