Visible City

by Mirvis, Tova

  When they reached Times Square station, Max tugged on her arm, needing to pee.

  “You’re wearing a pull-up, aren’t you?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I have my practice underwear on.”

  Not only had she forgotten the diaper bag, but she’d forgotten to change him before they left. They could survive without snacks, but not without pull-ups. If he peed in his pants, she’d have to ride the subway with a kid who smelled like the subway.

  “Max, you can wear diapers for the rest of your life, but just this one time, can you use the toilet?”

  Emma looked around for anything that resembled a bathroom. Next to the Shuttle tracks, she pushed on a door labeled Knickerbocker Hotel, but it was locked, leaving her no choice but to look for a token booth and ask a clerk for the key to the nearest bathroom.

  “Okay, Max. Let’s do this as quickly as possible. And do yourself a favor and try not to touch anything,” she said. Holding Lily in one arm, she pulled down Max’s pants to the layer of Bob the Builder underwear, and he peed into the toilet as though he’d been doing it his whole life.

  “Are we all here? Do we have Maurice?” Emma asked when they were back on the platform, waiting for the train.

  “Maurice isn’t here anymore,” Max said.

  “Oh, God, where did we lose him?” Emma asked, envisioning a city-wide search for a missing imaginary friend.

  “He decided to move. He left a few minutes ago.”

  “I thought he was afraid to leave the laundry room. Last I heard, wasn’t he planning to live down there?”

  “He got over it. He moved to the country. And he took Hop with him. Don’t you think they’ll be happier?”

  She took his hand. “You know what, Max? I do.”

  “My car was stolen,” Leon said when Nina answered her phone. She couldn’t help herself. She told him she was home alone and waited for him to come over.

  When Leon came into the apartment, he looked around at what he knew only from her descriptions or had glimpsed from across the way. She wondered, briefly, how her life appeared in his eyes. But mostly she marveled at the strangeness of having him here inside her apartment as if until this moment, he was a figment of her mind. For the first time, she saw him in the light of her real life.

  “Maybe it sounds silly, but I love my car,” Leon said.

  “What are you going to do without it?” Nina asked.

  “Claudia has always said that if something happened to my car, I’d have to invent some other excuse to be alone.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I will but I don’t think anyone is going to help. I can’t even reach Claudia.”

  “Maybe she took the car,” Nina said.

  “Maybe she left me,” he said, trying to pass it off as a joke, but his voice faltered. “My family life is a mess. I tried to be more involved, but that only made things worse. I have very little idea what any of us really need. I know you went looking for a vision of a happy family, but I told you, I’m not good at this.”

  She shifted, excruciatingly aware of her body. Where should she put her hand, rest her gaze? There was no escaping the desire in Leon’s eyes and in her body as well. Once she had touched him, once she had felt the weight of his body upon hers, there was no other way to see him.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” Leon said.

  “Out the window?” Nina asked.

  “On the street. In the park. In my mind.”

  “In my mind too,” she said.

  His hand swam through the air to find hers. His fingers laced through hers.

  “I’ve tried to pretend that nothing happened. I told myself, ‘This is not really you, this is not really what you feel,’” she said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Look around,” she said, gesturing to the evidence of her already-made life all around them. “I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  He came closer until his forehead met hers, so close that she saw not him, but her own face in the reflection of his eyes. He came closer still, until she saw only a single distorted eye. Their bodies brushed against one other, so many points of contact flickering at once.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said. “Every day, you’re all I think about. What if we decided that we’re going to be together? What if we took a chance and changed our lives?”

  What if, a game she had played in her mind since she was a kid. What if every possibility could be brought into existence? What if no pathways were yet closed off? She listened to his idea. The two of them were trapped in the shells of their lives, but what if they pushed them open? They could leave their marriages and be together. It might seem impossible at first, but they could find their way to the other side. As improbable, as insurmountable as it sounded, it did happen that people discovered they were with the wrong person, in the wrong life.

  And then, what would she find on the other end? This imagined life where she lived free and unfettered, not just in the privacy of her mind. Would it be there waiting for her, finally real, attainable?

  The Leon of her mind, the Leon who stood before her. Her own life to think about, yet all she had wanted to do was hide from it. What would happen as she drew closer to Leon still: In her attempt to escape the press of her own life, would she end up in an all-too-familiar place? Was he, at least in part, a figment crafted from the rib of her longing? A mirage of escape that would vanish if she drew too close?

  What she imagined crashed up against what she saw. What she thought battled with what she felt. The life inside her mind beckoned her forward. Her real-world responsibilities came after her with nets, with hooks. All she’d felt was the urge to run. Nowhere in her mind was the thought of where she might arrive.

  At the end of the workday, Richard was waiting, and this time there was no way to avoid him. At his request, Jeremy went to the office in which he had spent so much time. Richard was joined there by Tom Markowitz, the head of the personnel committee, whom Jeremy had seen only in passing.

  As they motioned for him to sit, Richard gave him a surveying, critical look. Here was his chance for the grand rebellion—run naked through the halls, throw the documents in Richard’s face—which he and Nina had joked about on those late nights when they’d concocted impossible plans of escape.

  “Why don’t we get right to it,” Tom said. “You were due for your midyear review in a few months but given the recent circumstances, we decided to move it up.” He began to recount the filings that had not been done on time, the embarrassment Richard had suffered assuring the client that the deal was under control. “It’s become abundantly clear that you no longer have a role to play here.”

  “You should also know that we’re planning to get the disciplinary committee of the city bar involved,” Richard said, and handed Jeremy a copy of one of the documents he’d given to Arthur. At the bottom of the page was the client matter number which, in his haste, he had forgotten to cover.

  “I wonder who could have given this to the community groups. The client was very interested to know this as well,” Richard said.

  He startled though he knew he shouldn’t be surprised. At least in some part of himself, surely he had intended this to happen. It had been the only way he could make his escape, yet he hadn’t expected to see such betrayal on Richard’s face. He felt bad about what he had done, but somewhere along the way he had forgotten that he could have just quit; there might have been illuminated signs marking the exits but he had stopped believing he could walk through them.

  With one last withering glance, Tom left him alone with Richard. “I thought that you were going to be one of the few who made it to the end. I thought you had a future here. But you know what the trick is? You have to want it badly enough to be able to make it through all the hard work. You have to decide that this”—Richard held his arms out wide to take in his office and all that lay inside it—“is worth it in the end.”

 
“Worth what? My whole life?” Jeremy asked.

  He was about to leave, but remembering something, he turned back. Draped over Richard’s chair was the familiar swath of khaki. “What’s with the vest?” he asked.

  In response, Richard gave him a stony stare, a facial impasse. That was all he was going to get. With nothing left to say, Jeremy started to leave the office.

  When Jeremy was halfway down the hall, Richard stuck his head out the door. He checked to make sure no one else was in earshot.

  “Bird watching,” Richard called after him.

  Jeremy waited to laugh until Richard was back in his office with the door closed. Several months ago, he would have viewed this admission with shock; now it made him sad that in all these years of working together there had been no available language to speak of any outside interests. Like his father with his models of planes and trains, Richard had room in his life only for a costume that was small enough to be tucked away like an airplane’s life preserver under his seat, taken out and inflated in a moment of need. Jeremy had initially thought that this would be enough for him as well—he had hung the trench coat Magellan had given him on the back of his office door, planning to put it on when he needed something all his own.

  He had an hour to clear out his office, surrender his card key, return his BlackBerry. The reality of what he’d done began to sink in. Even more so, the fact that he would have to face Nina. How could he tell her that he had felt as trapped as she, consoled only by the fact that one day, this office, this building, would feel as distant as a dream? He would be missed by no one. He had worked so hard yet mattered so little.

  There was nothing he wanted to take except the trench coat. When he left the building, it was late afternoon, but the moon was already visible in the blue sky, full and hanging so low over the city that the peaks of skyscrapers seemed like they could pierce it.

  At the sight of the full moon, he remembered. He could go home; he should go home, and he would, soon enough. But first he got on the subway, in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The groups on both corners had dispersed, but the streets were still crowded with people enjoying the warm October day. The city was awash in color. Calves and elbows, cleavage, necks and waists sailed across Leon’s frame of vision. After leaving Nina’s apartment, he walked to clear his mind, but he could no longer ignore the press of faces, the bombardment of bodies all around him.

  “I don’t think I can,” Nina had said to him in her living room, even as she looked longingly at him.

  “I know,” he had said as they held one another. He felt her pull toward him at the same time as he heard her words taking her away. He considered what to say: the unknown future before all of them. She was in battle with herself, so much still unexplored. Eventually she would find a more definitive answer. Life itself was reckless. Despite all attempts to the contrary, no one made it through unscathed.

  “Can you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I can.”

  He had been about to leave Nina’s apartment, but before he closed the door, he stopped, because what would she do now—take care of the kids as though none of this had happened, live beside Jeremy with a part of herself sealed away?

  “Do you really think you can go back?” he asked her.

  She looked stunned, as if the question had never occurred to her. He saw the road ahead more clearly than she could. She might spend years, maybe her whole life, discovering what he knew. You couldn’t go back. So many tried, so many even stayed at least with their bodies, but in their hearts, in the widest, deepest parts of themselves, did anyone really go back?

  He’d left Nina’s apartment though he hadn’t wanted to. “Where are you going?” she’d asked, and all he could say was that he didn’t know. As he walked, he looked at the jigsaw of buildings above. He wanted to steal one of the bulldozers perpetually parked on his block, demolish every old building, every piece of stone and terra cotta, and replace them with a glass city built entirely anew. He didn’t want to let go of the feelings Nina had sparked. It would be easy enough to do what he decried as impossible, go back and let the days of his marriage pass quietly by. He would live as most people did, perched between acceptance and resignation. So much of life was behind them, so much already shared. To take it apart at this stage was to cling to the idea that enough still lay ahead.

  On a corner, Leon passed the two warring dog owners, and he expected a fight to break out. But they were working together, leaving him to wonder whether he’d misread the hostility of their earlier interactions.

  When Leon came closer and saw what was written on their posters, he stared in disbelief. It was impossible, yet here it was. Not just Claudia’s windows, but her name. Her work, out in the world. He’d formulated multiple explanations for why she so badly wanted to find the window, but he’d rarely considered the possibility that it actually existed. In his mind, she was someone who would always toil in vain, and he’d felt not compassion but pity at how long the work had taken her and how lost she was inside it.

  “Barbara,” he called. “Does Claudia know you’re doing this?”

  “I told you to have her call me,” she said. “Don’t you remember? I said that she might want to get involved, but I never heard from her so I assumed she wasn’t interested.”

  “I never told her,” Leon admitted.

  “Why don’t you give her one of our flyers. It’s her work, after all. We’d love to talk to her,” Barbara said to him, but her attention was on her fellow dog owner, both of them bearing the stance of shared purpose.

  His envy was aroused and he felt stabbed by loneliness, a condition to which he’d thought himself immune. He didn’t know what Claudia would make of these signs. The simplest of questions, yet it felt hard to imagine asking her, as though he would be prying too deeply into her private world. For how long had he and Claudia mistaken silence for companionship, how long had loneliness been dressed up to look like anything but? Now that he felt such loneliness, it was hard to bear for a single moment, yet he had borne it unknowingly all these years.

  He went home to an apartment that was as empty as he’d always wanted, yet he longed for distraction or disruption. He went into Claudia’s office where the window was open, and her glass bottles were gone. On the ledge, one bottle remained though it was cracked. He leaned out to retrieve it and tried to see the site as the impossible intrusion that Claudia had. When he’d come upon Claudia yelling out the window, he’d assumed that she was embarrassed to be seen, though now he realized that this was precisely what she wanted.

  He looked around her office for some understanding of what she was feeling, but there was nothing more legible than her Post-its. Leon tried to decipher what Claudia had written, but even if he could make out the words, he’d no longer know what they meant. Once, long ago, soon after they’d met, he’d asked her why stained glass mattered so much to her. Eager to discuss her work, Claudia had gathered photographs of her favorite windows. “Stained glass is an art form that’s never static,” she’d explained. “It’s entirely dependent on the time of day, the quality of light, the direction of the sun, and where you’re standing. As long as it’s exposed to light, the colors are in a continual state of creation.”

  When she’d said that to him long ago, he had been moved by the look on her face, so flushed with excitement and ambition. Once upon a time, he had enjoyed the fact that he was as comfortable in her presence as he was when he was alone. But how far past that point he was, and how late it was to recognize this. Only now, when he’d come to the end, did he wonder if she’d always made the connection between the windows she loved and the people around her. Had she always known that they were equally in need of having sufficient light cast upon them?

  It wasn’t simply that he had wanted to be alone. He hadn’t wanted to be with Claudia, not nearly enough. He had tried to protect himself, and her, from this knowledge. But after this gasp of dizzying wakefulness, he wouldn’t s
ettle again into the approximation of love, of life. It was far easier, of course, to leave with someone—to jump off while holding on to another hand. But he was willing to do it alone, because once you were aware of how else it might be, going back was far more terrifying than moving forward.

  Parked on a side street, Claudia contemplated what to do. She had been sitting in the car for what felt like hours, unsure of where to go. She pulled out of her space and drove through the neighborhood, aimlessly. She had once conjured a city that opened itself up, the streets leading to wooded trails that would take her into green pastures, but those had closed down not because of the noise of the streets but the sadness inside her. So many people stayed where they were because they thought that was the only option.

  When she could stand being in the car no longer, she found a parking spot near the construction site. She’d felt such hatred toward this site, but in early evening, with work done for the day, it seemed like little more than a ghost town, a harmless, dusty remnant of a place people had once lived.

  It took her a moment to see the posters. Taped to the scaffolding was the Welcome window, La Farge’s iridescent rendering of Andromeda, the mythological daughter punished for her mother’s sins. On light posts, pictures of The Angel of Help and Wisdom. The captions under each picture were drawn from her descriptions and attributed to her. At the bottom of each sign was information about the Committee to Save the La Farge Window, a group she hardly believed existed, unless it sprang from inside one of her dreams.

  She drew in her breath. The buildings, the sidewalk, tilted. Was it possible that the window had been located, that these neighborhood activists might have used her work to uncover what had eluded her? Without knowing it, her work had gone into the world, making contact on her behalf.

  Next to her, staring at the signs, was a man wearing a trench coat, and he smiled when he saw her.