Visible City

by Mirvis, Tova

  She thought of the loneliness on her mother’s face and the dissatisfaction in her father’s voice. Steven took her hand, but it was an empty casing. His face came into focus, and she understood. It didn’t matter what cracks and imperfections other people were willing to live with. Emma pulled away from Steven. A strong, clear voice was audible inside her head. The words at once so simple and so true: I don’t want this.

  In Hippo Park, under the dense cloud cover of distraction, Nina sat with Wendy and a few other mothers around the sandbox, all of them intent on enjoying what could be the last warm day of the fall. A few minutes before Emma was supposed to baby-sit, she’d called to say that she wasn’t feeling well. She had sounded uncharacteristically curt on the phone, but there had been little time to wonder why. With the kids waiting to be entertained, the day had quickly remade itself.

  “We haven’t seen you in a while,” Wendy said without meeting Nina’s eye and acting as though their conversation in her minivan had never taken place.

  “We’ve been busy,” Nina said.

  “He’s eating sand,” Sophie reported, pointing to Harry.

  “We don’t eat sand.” Wendy lifted Harry onto her lap where she tried to wipe the speckles off his tongue. “Come on, honey, spit it out. Do I have to give you a time-out? Okay, there you go. Good boy. The sand can make you sick. You know that dogs pee in here,” Wendy said as Harry shoved another fistful into his mouth.

  “The last time we talked, you sounded so unhappy that I thought maybe you’d decided to go back to work,” Wendy said to Nina.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Nina said. This wasn’t really true, but it felt good to say it.

  “You can’t go back to work until you help me with the fundraiser,” Wendy said. “I’ve scheduled it for October 27, and I think we should have a bake sale,” she said as the mothers around her nodded their agreement. “Why not give Georgia’s a little competition? I assume you saw the Times article. Everywhere I go, that’s all anyone is talking about. There’s a picture of a woman with her laptop—the same woman who shushed us, as though we were in her private office!”

  Wendy pulled the article from her diaper bag and handed it to Nina. “I was completely misquoted. I wrote a letter to the editor, but it doesn’t matter what I actually said. The reaction would be the same. I Googled myself and the article is all over the blogs. Everyone is talking about how terrible it is that kids make a little noise. But you know what I realized?” Wendy lowered her voice and, looking down at her children happily playing, decided not to take any chance of them overhearing. “It’s not the k-i-d-s they can’t stand. It’s the mothers they h-a-t-e.”

  “Why would they h-a-t-e you?” Nina asked.

  Wendy laughed. “Oh, it’s not just me. It’s all of us. You too. Don’t think that if you go back to work, they’ll h-a-t-e you any less. They’ll just h-a-t-e you for different reasons.”

  The word hate, so easily banished. And what of the other words that couldn’t be so easily erased, even if they were spelled out? Nina tried to follow the conversation, but she was continually disrupted by an image of Leon’s face. Was that really her, on his couch, in his car, and then the next day and the next day as well? It couldn’t possibly be, and yet in those moments with him, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world. When she was with him, she didn’t feel the press of thoughts, the ache of being alone. He had a way of looking at her, his eyes slightly narrowed in concentration as he leaned toward her, and she felt that he knew all of her.

  She expected Jeremy to question why she seemed so preoccupied; she had waited for him to start calling her during the day. Every morning she awoke to someone who had no idea of the content of her mind. When she was with him, it was hard to remember that this was the person she had married. He looked smaller to her as though the long hours had shrunk every part of him. He had always been thin, but now he appeared almost childlike in her eyes. Standing next to him, she felt irreparably taller.

  It had been three weeks, and every free moment was spent in Leon’s company, the two of them walking in the park, at his apartment when no one was there, in his car, driving with no destination in mind but no destination needed. What she was doing, what did this mean? There was no time, no space in her head to ask these questions. She didn’t have to think, didn’t have to know. She had Emma pick Max up at school and baby-sit both kids every afternoon; it was hard to remember a time when she’d taken care of the kids by herself. She called Leon whenever she had a free moment. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” she told him. When she was with him, she didn’t feel as though the person standing next to her were mere illusion, his mind and body both far away. He called her between patients. “Not in twenty years,” he had whispered in her ear, “have I felt this way.” She replayed each moment until Leon was displayed across a hundred screens in her mind, each one projecting a different combination of their bodies intertwined.

  “I think we should make cupcakes. I’ve been baking and decorating them every week and it’s not that hard,” Wendy said.

  She should care about this conversation, but her mind wouldn’t turn back. While she sat among the other mothers, she was knocking on the window of his car. While she listened to disparate beliefs about the best kind of cupcakes, she was k-i-s-s-i-n-g him in the front seat. While doling out snacks to the kids, she was s-t-r-a-d-d-l-i-n-g him in the back seat. The playground tilted—what was this new world?—and all the boundaries in her mind ceased to exist. She was here with the kids, she was here with Leon, with Wendy, all at once. Her thoughts were known to anyone who saw her. Her every move was visible to anyone who cared to see.

  But it’s not only her, not anymore. She had magically acquired Maurice’s x-ray vision and could see the other mothers’ inner terrains as well as she could see her own.

  “I don’t bathe them. I don’t feed them, I don’t watch them,” calls a mother who is now climbing to the top of the play structure.

  “I bake, cook, play, sing because I need to justify the fact that I am home,” says a mother who is flying high on a swing. “I want their childhoods to be perfect because mine was not.”

  “I am here but not really here,” Nina says. “I’ve found the way to both escape and stay behind.”

  But this confession, alas, is too much. Instead of attracting nods of agreement, there is only an embarrassed silence. On their faces she sees outrage. We would never do that, not us, not ever. Behind the deliberately crafted façade of contentment, they see her treachery.

  She has to escape from the stares, the frozen smiles. While one part of her sits here smiling, another part digs her way out of the sandbox. She grabs the kids and never comes back. She finds her resumé and searches for a job she will love. She passes Wendy on the street while she is on her way to one world and she to another, her months at home a strange blip apart from the rest of her life.

  “Shouldn’t we do something easier? Why not buy cookies from a bakery and have the kids decorate them?” another mother suggested.

  But she can’t flee so easily. All the well-behaved mothers are chasing her, their strollers clearing the crowds. Nina runs faster and ends up on Broadway, where her kids climb naked and barefoot out of the stroller and take refuge on the riding toys. She fills the slots with quarters, and while they bounce to “It’s a Small World,” she hails a cab and waves goodbye.

  “Last year the moms had the kids make these gorgeous quilts and they auctioned them off for charity. I would hate for us to do less,” Wendy said.

  At the airport, all the flights are canceled. An early fall snowstorm. An unexpected tornado. A midair collision. The trains too. Even the buses. She calls Jeremy to tell him where she’s left the kids. But Jeremy is in a meeting that will last another five years. He doesn’t take her call. He doesn’t remember her name.

  “We want the kids to feel like they’ve accomplished something. I was just reading an article about how self-reliance is lacking in our kids, and we need
to figure out a way to give them more,” someone else said.

  A different path of escape occurs to her. She hot-wires Wendy’s minivan, piles the kids into the back, straps the stroller to the roof, whips out the Benadryl-laced juice boxes, and they’re off.

  “If we really care about the kids, we should make the cookies ourselves,” Wendy said.

  There is yet another path of escape. She takes the kids home, dutifully bathes them, smiles sweetly as she tucks them into bed. She bides her time until the next morning when alternate-side rules are in effect and she knocks on the window of Leon’s car.

  “How about two weeks from today?” Wendy suggested. “Can we count on your help, Nina?”

  Nina heard her speaking, but the voice was coming from a distant place that had little to do with her.

  “Earth to Nina,” Wendy said.

  As Nina looked up, startled to hear her name, there was a commotion nearby and Wendy jumped up to see what happened. She returned, carrying Max in her arms.

  “I know you have other people you’d rather be with, but I would think you’d be interested to know that Max just vomited on the slide,” Wendy said.

  “I don’t feel well,” Max said, his face pale, his body shivering though it wasn’t cold out. He’d complained of a stomachache before they left the apartment, but in her distracted state, Nina hadn’t really heard him. Now he stood before her with beseeching eyes, certain she would know what to do.

  She scooped up the kids and made a run for it. They made it inside the apartment, but before Nina could race Max to the toilet, he was vomiting again. She stripped off his clothes and tossed them onto the bathroom floor as Lily began to heave.

  “Come home,” Nina begged Jeremy’s voice mail, but was no longer surprised she couldn’t reach him. Max had flushed the toilet so many times that the water rose ominously to the top of the bowl. Lily lay limp in Nina’s arms. Where was Emma’s knock at the door, then her cheerful entrance? And if not that, where was the panic button that would summon the cheery band of professional mothers carrying mops and pots of soup?

  With vomit all around, there was no path of escape. Her own skin growing clammy, Nina replayed what Wendy had said and tried to interpret the accusing look in her eyes. For a moment in Leon’s car, she thought she’d caught sight of Wendy but had pushed away the thought, because she hadn’t wanted it to be so.

  But now there was no spot of refuge to seek out in her mind, nowhere but the hard, pressing questions before her. Had Wendy seen her with Leon? And who else had? Was this why Emma hadn’t come, why Jeremy hadn’t called back? Until now she had managed to trick herself into thinking she couldn’t be caught. So many years spent caring what people thought, yet when she was with Leon, it had become shockingly easy to forget. Now, it was not just Jeremy, not just Wendy or Emma, but anyone, anywhere, who might have seen her, might know. Claudia appeared, screaming out her window, not at the construction workers below but at her. Wendy shook a chiding finger at her. Jeremy took up a belated presence there as well. On his face she saw his bafflement, but even worse, it was replaced by a look of pain.

  In an increasing state of delirium, she heard the phone ring, but through the haze of her newly feverish state, she couldn’t get to it.

  “I’ve tried your cell phone. Where are you? Did you get my e-mails?” a voice hissed into the answering machine. “I don’t understand, Jeremy. Nothing has been filed like it was supposed to. I need all the Royalton documents tonight and I have no idea where you are.”

  She dialed Jeremy’s cell phone but got no answer. She knew where she had been of late, but it hadn’t occurred to her that he might be anywhere but his job. She couldn’t even name the places he might seek out for his own refuge. How was it possible that you could be tied to someone by so much and so little?

  Now, her wayward husband, one more worry to add to the swaying pile as she sponged the kids’ foreheads, as she dispensed Tylenol and Pedialyte. When her body no longer accepted maternal duty as a valid excuse, she ran for the toilet. Crouched on the bathroom floor, she vomited as Max watched in horror, unaware until now that she was vulnerable.

  A scrawled note was left on Jeremy’s desk. “Your documents are ready. Dress in black and pick them up on the corner of 55th and Park at 11:00 tonight.”

  Before leaving the office, Jeremy checked his e-mail one last time. He had a message from Richard, but instead of concocting another excuse, he took off through the stairwell door, down thirty-five flights of stairs, dizzy as he emerged into the lobby and ran through the revolving doors. This time, he didn’t bother to think up reasons for his absence. The only excuse he could offer: he had finally become unreachable.

  At the appointed place, the appointed time, there were three of them, in sunglasses and black trench coats. Had Jeremy not known who they were, they would have been perfect ads for “If you see something, say something.” He considered telling Magellan that he’d changed his mind or just bolting outright, but Magellan clapped him heartily on the back.

  “Trust me, you’re not going to regret this,” Magellan said, and handed him his own pair of sunglasses and a trench coat, bringing to mind the games of dress-up Max liked to play, so serious about each of his disguises that it stirred in Jeremy the desire to bolster this imaginative part of his son. Jeremy had shared neither Max’s interest in dress-up nor his imagination—this, he must have inherited from Nina. At home, impossibly far away, she was no doubt furious at him. He’d received her message about the vomiting but hadn’t called back, lessening his guilt by telling himself that in the time it would take him to survey the scene, she’d have already bathed both kids and tucked them into bed. Instead he’d e-mailed Nina to say there was something he needed to take care of, but even if the kids hadn’t been sick, he wouldn’t have told her where he was going. If he were to describe his plans, he would abandon them. If he were to hear anyone else’s misgivings, he wouldn’t be able to evade his own.

  They took the 6 train to the Brooklyn Bridge station. On the platform, they waited for the last train to pass before the track work began. Magellan had up-to-date information about the schedule of repairs, having called MTA customer service to discuss how his “daily commute” would be affected. As they waited, Magellan told Jeremy that if you were going to really live in this city, you needed to see the infrastructure, the steel frames, the bare bones. If you wanted to build something, or destroy it, even if you just wanted to truly appreciate a place, this was where you needed to look.

  When the train passed through the station and came back into view on the uptown side, Magellan and company walked to the edge of the platform, looked both ways, and jumped onto the tracks. Despite a growing queasiness in his stomach and a tremor in his fingers, Jeremy followed, trying not to wonder whether Magellan had faulty information about the train being out of service at this station; he was trying not to wonder whether the firm’s life insurance policy covered a case of accidentally walking on the tracks’ third rail. A rat scurried nearby, more afraid than they were, but Jeremy jumped, sure they’d been detected.

  A few feet beyond the end of the station, the single set of tracks diverged, and safely out of sight of anyone in the station, Magellan switched on his flashlight, and Jeremy followed. The white beams illuminated the steel piping that snaked the walls. Posted signs advised DO NOT ENTER. DO NOT CROSS TRACKS. Jeremy’s every cell stood at attention. Except for wandering in the Ramble of Central Park, he didn’t know the last time he’d been unable to locate himself on the city’s grid.

  To attract as little attention as possible, they planned to walk calmly. But once they saw the lights of the abandoned station, Magellan began to sprint and Jeremy followed. City Hall station was a hundred yards away, and they hoisted themselves onto the platform and ran back and forth. Magellan’s laughter echoed through the station, creating the illusion that hundreds of them had swooped in and were stampeding back and forth. When they stopped running, they looked up at the chandeliers, t
he intricately tiled ceiling. In the station, Magellan became a nocturnal creature who’d simply been waiting to reveal his iridescent colors.

  “Notice the Guastavino vaults. The Grueby tile,” Magellan said, shining his flashlight. “And the skylights that lead to City Hall Park, blackened during World War II, though if you know where to look—and I do—you can see them in the park above us.”

  Jeremy too had read about these details and studied the pictures of the station, but that paled with how it felt to stand here. In this time capsule of a space, he felt not the New York of today, but one that had passed long ago. In Times Square, the Knickerbocker Hotel is two years old. Grand Central Station is under construction. So is the New York Public Library, though it won’t be completed for seven years. The Flatiron Building is standing, as is the Vanderbilt mansion, La Farge’s work safely inside. It’s October 27, 1904, and the first subway riders are assembled in their Sunday best. The city feels ripe with possibility. Finally, a way to escape the overcrowded, polluted streets, the daylight darkened by the overhead trains, the snarled intersections of too many people and not enough space.

  The next day, when the IRT officially opens, the city is decorated with festive bunting, and a rush of people descend the steps, holding paper tickets that cost five cents apiece. The train runs from City Hall to Grand Central, then along the West Side up to Harlem, transporting passengers at a speed that until now existed only in futuristic tales. On that first day, they rode the train not because they had anywhere they needed to be, but because they wanted to marvel at the means by which they’d arrive. Their excitement was so close at hand that Jeremy expected the metal gates to rise, the turnstiles to rotate, and those same people to come streaming onto the platform. They would board a train that bore no recognizable numbers or letters, that would take them not to their jobs but to locations that existed only in the outermost boroughs of their minds.