Visible City

by Mirvis, Tova

  “What time is it?” Jeremy asked.

  “Late,” she said.

  Leaving his work on the table, he groggily stood up to hug Nina. He held on to her as though she had arrived in the living room on a rescue mission. He allowed himself to be led to bed, where under their blankets, Jeremy’s hand found her thigh. “Are you too tired?” They were always too tired. They were destroyed, ruined, wrecked; they were exhausted, they were sapped, they were crazed. Even so, small, tentative feelings of desire peeked out. Her body made a compelling case to forgo the extra sleep, or, in Jeremy’s mind, the equivalent of four units of billable time. But desire was no match for fatigue. He kissed her, she curled toward him, they fell asleep.

  At his desk the next day, Jeremy studied the environmental issues, the neighborhood opposition, the historic possibilities. There were no easements, no reason to believe that construction would cause structural damage to neighboring buildings. From boxes of building department documents Jeremy pulled stacks of paper detailing the construction done since the building was built in 1897 as a townhouse and later subsumed into a larger structure. In 1963, an adjacent building was backed up to it with a party wall.

  Rereading these documents, Jeremy slowed down. The building inspector had made more copious notes than was customary. In a hand-scrawled comment at the end of the last page, he had recorded that on the building’s south façade, all the windows had been covered when the new building was attached. One of those, he recorded, was a stained-glass window which had been boarded up front and back before the new building was connected.

  Jeremy took a lap around the office. From his desk he retrieved Claudia Stein’s article and read it again, wondering if he’d fallen into a delirium brought on by sitting in one spot for too long. But if this was a dream, he’d rather stay inside it than return to the pseudo-wakefulness to which he’d been subjected for months.

  In this state, more potent than the best caffeine, Jeremy’s mind was newly alive with the possibility that somewhere inside the building his client had acquired, sheetrocked behind walls, sealed off by later construction, Claudia Stein’s stained-glass window was embedded, lost and waiting to be rediscovered.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Nina asked when Emma called and said she was interested in baby-sitting. What did it say about her, Nina wondered, that she was suspicious of an adult who wanted to spend time with children?

  Until now, she had been reluctant to hire a babysitter; if she was going to give up her job in order to be home with the kids, she wanted to actually be with them. Instead of rushing out as soon as Emma arrived, Nina was tempted to stay and talk. Emma was barely in the door, and already she was talking to the kids and laughing. Nina tried to reconcile this woman with the figure she’d seen out the window, a memory she’d replayed again and again in her mind and that now seemed as hazy as a dream. Standing before her, Emma laughed easily and seemed at ease with the kids, but in her eyes there was a hesitance that made her seem far more delicate, as though her outer cheer were simply a role she had been assigned.

  “So why baby-sitting?” Nina asked.

  “I’m taking some time off, from school, from my fiancé, basically from my whole life. My poor parents—they thought I knew exactly what I was doing, and now I’m taking everything apart. I guess it’s never too late to have a huge meltdown, is it,” Emma said, trying for lighthearted, but the pain in her voice was evident. “You probably don’t want to hear this. I’m sure you have places to go,” Emma said.

  “No, please, I want to know,” Nina said, envying the idea of every day wide open, Emma’s whole life, in fact, wide open.

  “When I first broke my ankle, all I wanted to do was come home. I thought that I would be able to put everything back in place. But I’m learning that the idea of home is better than actually being home,” Emma said. “You can’t go home again, right? I love my parents but they’re the kind of people who are content with things exactly as they are. I used to refer to them as brains on a stick. I used to think I could be like them, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “Do you know what you want to do instead?” Nina asked.

  “Anything but sit in a library all day. I hate my dissertation—I can’t stand the thought of writing one more word. If I even open one of my books, all I think of is what I’d rather be doing instead,” Emma said.

  “Can you talk to your mother about it?” Nina said.

  “I wish. She was thrilled when I first told her I was getting a PhD. You’d think that it was her own dream that had come true.”

  “What about your father?” Nina asked.

  “I never used to talk to him about anything. He was always the kind of person you could joke around with, but I always had the feeling that I had a limited amount of time. But now it’s easier with him—I don’t know if he’s changed or I have, but I can tell him more,” Emma said, only realizing belatedly that Max had stopped playing and was listening to every word. Nina glanced down at him, and Emma sensed her hesitance.

  “You know my parents so I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” Emma said.

  “I only know them from the neighborhood. I haven’t really talked to your mother since I was her student. Even then, I didn’t know her very well. You look so much like her, you know.”

  “People always tell me that. I used to look at pictures of her when she was young and think that she was me,” Emma said.

  “I want to do laundry,” Max interrupted. He had come over to where they were standing and instead of minding that his mother was going out, he was gazing at Emma with interest.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to the park?” Nina asked and explained that the laundry room had become Max’s favorite place to play. Loading the machines and waiting for the clothes to be washed was his new hobby.

  “Why not let him do laundry, if that’s what he likes?” Emma said.

  “It’s such a beautiful day outside. Don’t you think he should be at the park?” Nina said.

  Emma laughed. “He’ll have the rest of his life to feel like there’s something else he should be doing.”

  “Fine. Do laundry,” Nina relented.

  Three hours was as vast as a day. She could be like Emma and do as she wished: sit in the park, ingest a whole novel, see a movie, wander through the Met. Time alone was the most endangered of species. She’d forgotten that she could leave the house with less than half an hour’s worth of preparations, that she could walk the streets without narrating every car, bus, dog she passed.

  Nina was standing on the corner, still deciding what to do, when a silver Honda Odyssey pulled up alongside her.

  “Hop in,” Wendy said, from inside. “It’s my maiden voyage. I’m supposed to be practicing my driving. We just bought the car. I’m officially a soccer mom.”

  Nina got into the car, even though driving around Manhattan in a minivan wasn’t how she’d envisioned spending her free time.

  “Where are your kids?” Wendy asked as she pulled the car out among the line of oncoming cars, cringing when she was met with the honking of horns.

  “They’re doing laundry with the babysitter. Max is obsessed with the laundry room.”

  “I didn’t know you had a babysitter,” Wendy said.

  “She’s a family friend. And it’s just for a few hours,” said Nina.

  “It’s so beautiful out. Shouldn’t they be at the park?” Wendy said.

  “If Max loves laundry, why not let him do it?” Nina said.

  “Maybe that’s why your kids aren’t sleeping well. I always make sure to get Sophie and Harry outside for a few hours. Otherwise they have too much energy at the end of the day.”

  Her voice was confident but her body gave her away. Wendy gripped the steering wheel tightly, as though she were driving at the edge of a dangerous mountain road. Her eyes were glued on the rearview mirror, trying to anticipate everyone’s next move.

  “Are you okay?” Nina asked.

&nb
sp; “Of course I am. Why, do I not look okay?”

  “Are you excited about moving?” Nina asked.

  “Of course I am. We bought a beautiful house, with a huge backyard. When they’re older the kids are going to be able to walk to school.”

  Such a pleasant picture. So why did Nina want to press against it until it oozed something darker?

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Wendy asked. “I’m fine.”

  Instead of sitting here, Nina wished she had stayed home to play with Emma and the kids. Or else she wished she were inside a fantastically messy apartment where a play group was in full swing, the kids playing on their own, the moms on couches in the next room. Instead of assaulting one another with their tales of delight, they played a game of Truth where everyone was brutally honest and no one felt ashamed afterward.

  “You’re always fine,” Nina said. “No matter what the kids do, you’re fine. You leave a fabulous job and you’re fine.”

  “And what about you? You act like you’re always fine too,” Wendy said.

  “Is that what you think? Because actually, no. I’m not fine,” Nina admitted. “Do you ever walk around your apartment imagining all the ways you could escape? Do you survive hours in the playground by concocting alternate versions of your life? Have you ever squeezed their arms too hard, leaving the half-moon indentation of your fingernails, then when they accused you of hurting them, pretended it was an accident? Have you ever put them to bed angry, then felt so bad you purposely woke them up so you could do the night over again?”

  She hadn’t meant to say all this—she hadn’t even known she felt all this—but there was no denying the pleasure in speaking her mind. Wendy was staring at her as though she had gone crazy, but her face took on a starker expression than Nina had seen before. Gone was the beatific smile. Gone the scripted lines that 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.

  “Fine. Do you want to know what I really think? Do you know what it feels like to pour all of myself into the kids, to love them so much and want to give them every single thing they need, and yet even then, to worry that no matter how hard I try, it’s not enough? Do you know what it feels like to so badly want everything to be perfect but to worry all the time that I’m going to ruin it by getting angry at them?”

  After all the time they had spent together, maybe they were actually friends. “I think we all need to lose it once in a while. Maybe it would be good for them,” Nina said.

  “I never used to feel like I could lose control. In college, I played varsity ice hockey. Can you believe that? I was completely in control of my every move. Sometimes I try to get myself into the same zone I was in before a game, visualize myself flying across the ice, seeing only the other goal.”

  “Do you still skate?” Nina asked.

  Wendy shook her head. “Not since the twins were born. It’s like that person doesn’t exist. I thought that if we moved I would feel more in control. But I keep having this nightmare that I’m driving carpool and instead of dropping the kids off, I get on the highway and keep driving until the squad cars are chasing me OJ style, and all the headlines say ‘Soccer Mom Goes Crazy. Refuses to Get Out of Minivan.’”

  Nina laughed. “Should I even ask how your nightmare ends?”

  “According to my husband, it’s going to be much easier once we move. But I always thought we’d stay in the city. The only place I said I’d move to was Australia. Do you read your kids the Alexander books? Whenever I’m having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, that’s what I whisper to myself over and over—just the word Australia.”

  “When do you want to go?” Nina joked.

  Wendy laughed too, though she looked like she was on the verge of tears. “Do you want to know the other crazy thing? For years, I thought soccer moms played soccer.”

  Finding her father alone in the apartment, Emma circled, gauging his mood before attempting to talk. When Emma gave an especially exaggerated sigh, Leon put down his book.

  “Steven is coming home today,” she said.

  “Is that a good thing?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Emma admitted. “He’s been gone for almost two months and I still can’t figure out what I should do. I can’t even remember why I’m getting married in the first place.”

  “So why are you getting married?” he asked.

  How could she put into words the rush of emotion that used to come over her when she was with Steven, the feeling that in his presence, she had grabbed on to something deeper and truer than was available elsewhere? Someone else might compliment her, but it meant little; the same words from Steven, so whittled down to the bare-bones truth, carried her for weeks. He pulled her toward him, into their bed, or on the floor, or up against the wall, and stared her down. “You understand me,” he whispered in her ear, words that she assumed were an emotional palindrome, equally true when read in reverse.

  He had proposed to her on the beach in Montauk, the same week that a hurricane was brewing off South Carolina. The storm was far off, yet the waves in Montauk crested so high that no one dared to venture in. But she had stood at the edge as the water slammed against the shore. Despite the danger, she’d felt sure that if she walked into the waves, she would be buoyant, then emerge dry and unscathed.

  “At the time, it seemed so clear to me that this was what I wanted to do. When we got engaged, I wasn’t even nervous. I was so sure of how happy I was,” she said.

  “So what changed?” he asked, and checked his watch, as she was about to describe how every decision she’d ever made was now assaulted by a barrage of questions that tore into her. There was no part of her left whole and intact. She swallowed back her words, feeling embarrassed to have taken up too much of his time. How quickly his attention faded when she was still in need of so much more. I’m sorry but we’re out of time, she imagined him saying at fifty-minute intervals to her as well as to his patients, about whom she’d always been curious, their need for him seemingly more pressing and valid. But unlike her, they came to him with their problems. In order to get the same attention, she had to earn it with accomplishment. He was proudest of her when she needed the least.

  “Are you happy?” she said, turning on him.

  “It depends on how you define happiness,” he said.

  “Come on, Dad. What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “I’m not sure what you want me to say.” His expression shifted, something inside him breaking open, and for a moment he looked as lost as she felt. “I wish I had all the answers, but I really don’t know,” he said. “All these years, what I’ve wanted most was to be left alone. Is that happy? You tell me.”

  What strange hole in the wall had she passed through? She was used to her father, dispassionate and calm. Before she could ask him anything else, he pulled out a notepad and ordered her thoughts into columns of pros and cons. He listed for her all the reasons to stay with Steven, lined up next to all the reasons to leave. All the reasons to finish her dissertation. All the reasons to find something else to do. When she was a teenager, he’d occasionally made these lists for her when she was wrestling with a decision. Those were moments she had wanted to stretch out, adding reason upon reason, all so that he would continue talking to her. She’d never felt as organized, as listened to, as when the contents of her mind were written down with her father’s pen, in neat block letters that conveyed such sure-handed authority and were so eminently readable, unlike her own scrawl that was sometimes illegible even to herself.

  The door opened and Claudia walked in. Both Leon and Emma jumped as though they’d been doing something wrong.

  “Come sit with us,” Leon invited Claudia as Emma put the list in her pocket and stood up to leave.

  “No, it’s fine. I don’t want to disturb you. You look like you’re involved in something,” Claudia said. Though she acted unbothered, Emma caught sight of
pained resentment, and she understood that the hurt expression on her mother’s face wasn’t directed at her but at her father.

  Despite her parents’ pretense of normalcy, Emma was newly aware of the tension. As close as she and her mother supposedly were, she knew little of her inner life. She had managed not to know that her mother had one at all. Apparently she hadn’t passed the stage when it was impossible to imagine her mother as an independent being. Never had her mother confided in her anything about her marriage; rarely had she heard her parents fighting. Whatever more complicated dynamics existed between them took place quietly behind closed doors, if at all. Rather than think of their relationship as having its own oscillations, Emma preferred them to be entirely fixed and unchanging. She would always be moving while they remained firmly in place, markers from whom she could always measure her own movement.

  But now there was no denying that flash of pain across her mother’s face, no way to pretend she had not seen the way her mother’s eyes clouded and she drew more deeply into herself. Emma recognized on her face a loneliness she should have seen long ago. She was pulled momentarily from her own life into an unexpected view of someone else’s. As she understood her own nearsightedness, her mother changed shape in her mind.

  Baby-sitting was a way to exchange her family for another. It was a chance not to think about her own life. With the kids, she didn’t have to worry about what she would say to Steven when she saw him later in the day. She didn’t have to be anyone other than who she was. She could talk as loudly as she wanted; there was always something to laugh about and there was nowhere they needed to be. Max could spend hours describing the further adventures of Maurice; they could take thirty minutes to walk a single block. As soon as she walked in the door, Max launched himself in her direction and started telling her how Maurice had recently relocated from the laundry room to the Central Park Zoo.