Visible City

by Mirvis, Tova

  It was as close to a religious epiphany as he’d ever come. Jeremy was reminded of something he was supposed to know: his life lay in his own hands. All the decisions already made, all the encumbering pieces in place, yet his life was still his to shape as he saw fit. No longer squelched, no longer silenced, he had the craving for something fuller, richer, his own. In this closed-off space, there was always more to be uncovered. In a city where eyes had swept over everything, here was the chance to claim what was still unseen, untouched.

  “You do the honors,” Magellan told Jeremy, and handed him the black flag, which he placed in a corner of the station, hidden enough that it wouldn’t be too easily detected, visible enough that it might one day be seen.

  Back on the tracks, they ran toward the light of Brooklyn Bridge station, though it seemed impossible that after where he’d been, he could board a train and eventually emerge a block from his apartment. Surely he’d have to blast through layers of earth in a specially equipped rocket ship in order to return home.

  They climbed onto the platform as though they, like the mythical alligators that lived in the sewer system, had simply come up for air. They exited the turnstiles and walked to the next station, where it was a normal night and the subways were running as scheduled. When the train came, they sprawled in the nearly empty car, and Magellan lost his sheen. Once again he was Jon, the sleepy guy from the word-processing center, debating with his cohorts whether their next mission should be to break into the dilapidated insane asylum on Governors Island or to find the still-existent passageway between the 42nd Street subway station and the defunct Knickerbocker Hotel.

  “How’s your long-lost window?” Jon asked.

  “I still think it’s there, but Richard thought I was crazy.”

  “Richard’s an asshole. You’ve got to sneak into the building. Maybe you can break down a wall. We can help you. You’ll be our next mission. You should come to our meetings—every full moon, by the base of the Brooklyn Bridge,” Jon said.

  In the light of the train, Jeremy looked more carefully at Jon. He was older than Jeremy had initially thought; streaks of gray were evident in his long hair, and around his eyes were small forked lines. These nightly adventures weren’t a youthful indiscretion that he’d let go of as he aged. They would always be part of who he was.

  As Jeremy was about to get off the train, Jon handed him a spare flag. Jeremy began to protest but Jon insisted. “Keep the sunglasses and coat too. You never know when you might need them.”

  When Jeremy entered his building, a part of him was still underground. Magellan was probably writing up tonight’s adventure for his blog, and for Jeremy, too, the only way to keep his euphoria from dissolving was to tell someone where he’d been. He resisted the urge to rouse the doorman and decided instead to wake Nina. An urgency overtook him, as though there were an emergency he hadn’t known about until now. This time he wouldn’t let the conversation get lost amid the noise of their lives; he’d shake her awake if he had to, he’d whisper under the covers if need be, pass her a note so as not to awaken the kids. Even though she had stopped calling him as often and no longer urged him to come home earlier, he hadn’t wanted to think about what it meant. And even now, when he was late not just by hours but by months, he wanted to believe that she would turn to him eager to hear about his adventure.

  Tiptoeing into the apartment, Jeremy was greeted by a terrible smell. His family was asleep on the bathroom floor. He carried Max to bed, and when he came back for Lily, Nina awoke and lurched toward the toilet. He crouched beside her, brushing her hair from her face.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” Jeremy said as he helped Nina strip down, then get into the shower, her eyes barely open as she stood under the water.

  “Lean back,” Jeremy said, sudsing then rinsing her hair. Somewhere under the official definition of love, there had to be an entry for showering your sick, naked wife. The only other time he’d taken care of her like this was in the hospital in the hazy days following Max’s birth, when Nina had barely been able to stand after her C-section and had been afraid to remove the massive maternity underwear she’d worn to cover the incision. Never had he seen her look so pitiful and never had he loved her so much. She’d leaned her weight on him and together they had inched their way back to the bed. It was so much responsibility, yes, but also so much love. He’d perched beside her and held her and their baby. They hadn’t yet endured a single night alone with their newborn. They’d had no idea what awaited them.

  After tucking Nina into bed, Jeremy looked around at the apartment and the piles of laundry and wasn’t sure what to do. Sleep begets sleep, they were told when each kid was born, and absence begets absence, Jeremy had learned now that they were older. Not thinking about the mess that awaited him at work, Jeremy left a message for Richard saying he wouldn’t be in the next day. He looked around, unsure where to begin. It was true that all these years the work had been endless, but he couldn’t hide from the fact that so many times, it had been easier to stay in his office than to come home.

  Following the scent of vomit, he wiped down the floors. Dishes were piled in the sink and he stacked them in the dishwasher. From underneath the couch pillows he pulled out a lost world of sippy cups. He dug deeper and pulled out a stack of kids’ books and, mixed in with these, a book called Painting in Air by Claudia Stein. Jeremy flipped through it, wondering why Nina was reading it.

  He took the book and all the dirty sheets to the laundry room, where he found Dog Man sitting in front of a dryer, the dog at his feet.

  “Do you always do your laundry this late at night?” Dog Man greeted him.

  “I never do laundry,” Jeremy said.

  “So what brings you down here?” Dog Man asked suspiciously.

  Accustomed to avoiding any conversation that would waste a moment of billable time, Jeremy didn’t answer, focusing all his attention on loading the sheets and towels into a machine.

  “You don’t want to put them in all together,” Dog Man advised.

  Jeremy had no idea whether this was true, but he didn’t want to take chances. In need of help, Jeremy relented. “My family is sick. It’s the least I could do. You live above us, right? I’m surprised you didn’t hear anything. I think there was a lot of commotion in our apartment.”

  “Actually, Churchill and I have had a very quiet night. Not a single disruption,” Dog Man said.

  “Apparently I missed the worst of it.”

  “Late night at the office?”

  “This might sound crazy, but while my wife and kids were vomiting, I was sneaking into an abandoned subway station underneath City Hall,” Jeremy said.

  “I imagine you could get into a lot of trouble for doing that.”

  “Probably,” Jeremy agreed. “But have you ever done something that you know is crazy, but you also know that if you keep going, you’ll discover something you’re meant to see? I’m in my office all day like every other associate and none of them have any idea how much I hate it. I have no idea how they feel either. We’re there all the time and I don’t really know any of them.”

  “I was married for two years and I loved my wife very much. I had no idea that I was the only one who was happy,” Dog Man confessed. The dog whimpered and stretched at his feet. From a shopping bag he pulled out a white bakery box and took out a piece of decorated cake. As the dog bit into it, Dog Man petted him on the head. He dipped his hand into the icing and let the dog lick his fingers clean.

  If Nina were here, Jeremy knew she would take Dog Man’s presence as the answer to some great mystery: he was on a stakeout, or he was destroying the evidence of a late-night crime. But really he was lonely, a mystery both easier and more impossible to solve.

  “I’ve seen you around but I don’t know your name,” Jeremy said, and introduced himself.

  “Arthur Grayson. And this is Churchill,” he said, extending his hand.

  For the next few days, Jeremy stayed home from work. The ki
ds started to feel better before Nina did, and Jeremy took them outside uncombed and unkempt, but it wasn’t her problem. Emma had called to say that she was still sick, but though Nina missed her, she didn’t need to rely on her alone. There was no greater sound than Jeremy cooking supper, bathing the kids, putting them to bed. He dressed the kids each morning and walked Max to school, as if he were making up for lost time. She’d arrived at that falsely promised future in which the kids were not hers alone. To her surprise, Max and Lily survived without her constant attention. They went to sleep without needing serial feedings and rocking. Only once they sensed that she couldn’t meet their every need did they finally stop asking.

  In a far-off region of her mind, Nina thought about calling Leon but felt sure her every move was being watched. Trying to return to the approximation of her life at home, she e-mailed him to say she was sick, but she didn’t say more, nor did she answer her phone each of the times he called. She would act as though this hadn’t happened. If she didn’t think about Leon, he would no longer exist. By keeping a tight rein on her mind, she wouldn’t have to worry that his name would announce itself when she least expected or that the look on her face would give her away.

  But there was no easy retreat. No matter how many times she tried to tamp down her feelings, she felt the shadow of a lie or omission. Leon took his place between her and Jeremy, an invisible presence. In Jeremy’s expression, she saw clues that he knew. She couldn’t say one word without feeling it was a lie; she couldn’t look him in the eye for fear of what he might see.

  Nina awoke one day later that week to find Max back home from nursery school, peering at her so closely that she could feel the warmth of his breath; he leaned closer still and she felt the graze of his eyelashes against her cheek.

  “Are you awake?” Max whispered in her ear.

  She hugged both him and Lily, her airtight alibis. In their presence, no one would look at her and know what she was thinking; no one would see on her face the signs of her duplicity, nor would anyone lean close and hear, beating inside her, a second heart.

  Jeremy was folding laundry at the foot of the bed, and she didn’t say anything as he struggled with the fitted sheets, bewildered but not willing to ask for directions.

  “I think I’m delirious,” she said.

  “I’m making dinner,” he said.

  “Now I know I’m delirious.”

  In his presence, the guilt that she had tried to outrun caught her in its grasp. There had been no unbearable unhappiness to justify what she had done, only the small sharp slivers of loneliness and discontent. These, it turned out, were the most dangerous of all. She wanted to give in to the child’s fantasy that to confess would make it all better. She wanted to hug Jeremy and console him; she wanted to wake and find none of this had happened after all.

  As soon as Jeremy fell asleep that night, Nina went back to her usual spot in the living room. How wrong she had been to think she could gaze out unaffected. How wrong to believe that you could always find your way back. When, she wondered, had her betrayal truly begun? Was it when she first kissed Leon, or was it weeks, months before, when she’d allowed her gaze to linger, her restlessness to swim toward the light?

  Tonight, as she looked out, all the windows were dark except for one. In a lit room she thought she saw someone in Leon’s arms, on his couch. Staring into that room with the same scrutiny she’d once turned on other people’s lives, Nina realized that she was looking at a version of herself, one that until now she hadn’t known existed. She had unrestricted access, yet she was looking at this person, supposedly herself, with the same curiosity and wonder as she would a stranger.

  Sitting in the back row of a community meeting, Jeremy clapped, even though the protest being planned would infuriate the client and cause him countless late nights. He would be forced to draft memos reminding the neighborhood groups of the developers’ legal rights. He’d be the ruthless lawyer who cared for nothing but the bottom line.

  He’d come to the meeting as Richard had instructed. Richard had stopped giving him substantive work, treating him as though he had come down with an unmentionable disease. The junior associate, whom Richard had recently recruited for the deal, would normally have been dispatched to cover the meeting, but Richard claimed that he was busy on a document that needed to be drafted right away. As far as Jeremy knew, the junior associate didn’t have a family, wasn’t yet jaded or used up. That he would be one day didn’t matter—there were thousands of billable hours to be wrung from him before this happened. And when, inevitably, it did, there would be other young associates to replace him. Jeremy was sure of this, because when he first started working for Richard, there had been an older associate whom he’d pushed out of the way. The defeat had been present in his eyes, though Jeremy hadn’t yet known how to recognize it.

  “Why don’t we get started?” said Barbara Kaufman, a woman whose name he recognized from the irate e-mails she wrote that the client forwarded to him.

  Barbara began her presentation by wondering aloud what would happen if every neighborhood looked alike. What if all the stores were identical, all façades the same towering glass, endless reflections of each other but of what else? Jeremy listened, hoping she would announce that they had unearthed the presence of a major work of art hidden in the walls of the building. But she admitted that she had found no rationale to stop the construction. He alone knew about the possible presence of the window.

  When several elderly people in the back shouted that they couldn’t hear her, Barbara spoke more directly into the mike, telling everyone assembled how, if the developers were allowed to construct this building, it would send the message that West Siders no longer cared about preserving their neighborhood. In the future, she would push to have the neighborhood rezoned, but it would be too late for this site.

  When Barbara stopped to take questions, a man with a nest of white hair spun a conspiracy theory involving MetroCards, transit police, and old cable car wires. It was easy for Jeremy to laugh him off as one of the crazies, the marginal people he walked past and thought little about. Richard portrayed all the local activists as rabble-rousers or gadflies, but at least they cared about their neighborhood.

  “Thank you, but we need to move on,” Barbara said in a voice firm enough to dissuade everyone except the owner of a persistent hand in the front row.

  “I’ve looked over the information you handed out, and it’s clear to me that if you want to put a stop to this building, you need to take action,” the man said, standing as he spoke. “You have to know how these developers think. They’ll let us have our meetings and hang our signs, but they don’t think anyone cares enough to fight. Hanging signs is nice but trust me, it’s hardly enough.”

  Jeremy recognized Dog Man, or Arthur as he was trying now to think of him. When Arthur asked for a show of hands for who would attend a protest, he was met with nearly unanimous support. When the meeting ended, Arthur was surrounded by people wanting to congratulate him on his speech, so Jeremy walked home by himself. In front of the building across the street, he noticed for the first time the grizzled gargoyles adorning the prewar façade. The lover with his curlicue mustache, flowing long hair, and soulful eyes. Next to him, the explorer whose face peeked out from underneath a triangular hat; the mercenary, decorated with gold bullion and crossed swords. Long ago he might have simply enjoyed their decorative presence if he saw them at all, but now he wanted to grab a crowbar from the nearby construction site and wrest them free.

  Inside his apartment, Jeremy sat on the living room floor, spreading out the documents he’d been bringing home in the hope that one day he would know what to do with them. They were supposed to be confidential, but he was letting go of all those years of hard work. He no longer wanted to pay the price, nor did he want the reward. He took the copies of the documents he’d drafted and added to them the piles of research he’d compiled. Using Max’s Magic Markers, he copied passages from Claudia Stein’s boo
k which he’d unearthed from the couch. He e-mailed Magellan asking for help and pulled from his briefcase the flag and sunglasses. He’d intended to give them to Max, but he had found someone who needed them more.

  Remembering his elation at being underground, Jeremy ran up the flight of stairs and left a thick envelope outside 14B’s door.

  In the basement of Grace Episcopal Church, in a suburb of Boston, six wood boxes lay covered with dust. They were in a back corner on the dirt floor, near a pile of discarded books and broken chairs where for decades they had been ignored. The caretaker of the church led Claudia inside and left her alone.

  She opened a box and held her breath at the cloud of dust. After all these years, her window might be here in this basement. Slowly, she removed the white sheeting covering the first panel. With a brush, she removed the layer of dirt. Cherubic angels. Garlands of flowers. Squares of bright blue glass.

  She released her breath and fought back tears. The handiwork was visibly clumsy, the glass dimmer, the color painted on. Claudia looked at each of the panels, trying to maintain hope. But she wasn’t fooled; she knew his work too well to mistake it for anyone else’s. This window might have been made by one of La Farge’s followers, an honest attempt at imitation, but it wasn’t the work of the artist himself.

  Claudia wanted to extract each piece of glass until the floor was a shimmering mess. She wanted to smash each piece into jewel-colored dust. The window was lost anew, as though it had already belonged to her. She thought about calling Leon, wishing he could offer her consolation. “I thought you didn’t believe that the window existed anymore,” Leon had said when she told him she was going to Boston. “I never said that, not definitively,” she had said, unable to hold back her anger. “You haven’t read my article. You don’t care about my work. How could you possibly know what I think about my window? You don’t know what I think about anything.”