* * *
—
After class, Nora thanked Mr. Fournier profusely and walked through the gallery to get to the elevators. At the front desk, a stack of exhibition catalogues nearly obscured the chubby young man sitting behind them. Nora paused to look at the catalogue’s cover: an impressive reproduction of a reclining nude.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
“Just looking,” Nora said, and realized that sounded odd, given the object of her gaze.
“That didn’t sound the way you wanted it to, did it?” the man asked.
Nora laughed. “You read my mind,” she said. She introduced herself. His name was Leon Forrester, and it was clear that not a lot of people stopped to talk to him. He was pale and nearly bald, and the shape of his body—from his large belly to his small shoulders—formed an almost perfect triangle. Loneliness and 4F seemed stamped onto his forehead. Nora would make a point of stopping to say hello after every class, and eventually that small kindness would lead to greater kindnesses from him.
For now, back in the hotel room, she changed her clothes, washed her face, and met her own smile in the mirror. No, nothing else had changed about her appearance. She had given up thinking she would ever age, but she took a bit of artistic pride in the bits of paint that speckled her hair.
Where was Joe? She knew there’d been a union meeting earlier in the day, but she was sure he would have mentioned it if he had a shift as well. She didn’t understand why he wasn’t here. Was it possible he had forgotten that they’d had to change rooms the day before? As she waited, she sang along with the radio, tidied things up, and tried not to let her excitement turn to impatience.
By ten o’clock, Nora had traveled from impatience to anger. Why was she supposed to leave a note every time she stepped out of her normal routine, yet Joe saw no such requirement for himself? By eleven, she was seething.
When Joe walked in and bent down to hug her, she could smell the sharp, sour odor of whiskey, and she pulled back. He looked embarrassed. He had come in holding a shopping bag, which he now put in the closet as he hung up his coat.
“How are you?” he said a little too loudly. Then he saw the look on her face. “Oh,” he said. “You’re steamed up. Really steamed up. Really, really steamed up.”
She had seen him tipsy before, but she had never seen him in quite this state.
“What’s in the bag?” she asked him, standing, arms crossed.
Joe was unbuttoning his shirt. He sighed.
“Do you not want to show me?” Nora asked. “I’m sorry if you think I’m prying. I know you’d be just fine with it if I’d walked in here, drunk, with no explanation and a big shopping bag—”
“All right,” Joe said. He went back to the closet and retrieved the bag. He sat heavily on the couch and started to pull things out: a plaid cap, a red plastic shoehorn, a deck of Coca-Cola playing cards with a smiling blue-eyed stewardess in front of a winged bottle, and finally a stack of birthday cards that he dropped on the coffee table.
He was thirty-eight years old. He had turned thirty-eight today, under Nora’s nose. Led by Big Sal at Bond’s Bakery, his best friends from all over the terminal had thrown him a birthday party. Nora stared at him, letting this sink in.
Joe looked sheepish, and Nora didn’t know whether she was more hurt or more angry.
He walked into the bathroom but didn’t close the door, so she followed. He turned on the hot water and used his hands to splash his face and the back of his neck, then to sweep the usual stray bangs from his forehead.
“Why wasn’t I at your birthday party?” she asked.
Joe said nothing as he reached for a hand towel.
“Didn’t Big Sal or Alva or anyone wonder where I was?”
Joe dried his hands. “You were taking a painting class,” he said.
“For God’s sake, Joe, why didn’t you even tell me it was your birthday?”
“Because,” he said, trying to refold the towel, finally balling it up and throwing it onto the sink, “I know you don’t like to think about our ages.”
Looking at him from the side, she noticed what she could swear were new lines beneath and beside his eyes.
“You turned thirty-eight,” she said.
Joe saw how Nora was looking at him.
“See, I knew it,” he said.
“Knew what?”
“Knew not to tell you it was my birthday. You hate this.”
“Of course I do. I hate this. Don’t you? There’s fifteen years between us, Joe.”
“I’ve done the math, Nora.”
Nora stared back at him with genuine distaste. “You’re really drunk,” she said.
He started to put his shirt back on. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s forget about all this birthday stuff. Put your coat on. Let’s go find an apartment.”
“It’s too late to go apartment hunting,” she said.
“It’s never too late!” Joe said, flinging his scarf around his neck and throwing his coat on as the door shut behind him.
Whatever joy was left from Nora’s painting class dissolved. Or rather, like one of the cats in M42, it scampered off, out of sight. No matter what time had done to her, no matter how hard she tried, she wouldn’t be able to escape what time would do to Joe.
* * *
—
Joe wasn’t really serious about looking for an apartment at this time of night. He walked north—past the Commodore Hotel, the Graybar Building, the post office. He had to admit that he was drunk, and he decided to keep walking, just trying to clear his head—of the booze, the fight, and the huge twin traps of time and place. Eventually he walked all the way to the East River. He found a bench and sat. He was sober now, sober enough to berate himself for thinking that hiding his birthday from Nora could come close to hiding the truth.
“But you’ll see, honey,” he whispered to her when, hours later, he came back to their room. “You’ll see what it’ll be like, after we get our own place.”
Not bothering to undress, he climbed into bed beside her.
“The years won’t matter,” he said, wanting to believe it, and then he fell asleep.
5
LEXINGTON AVENUE
AND FORTY-FIRST
1943
The search for an apartment began in earnest the next day, when Joe started exploring different routes and destinations, using a surveyor’s map he’d gotten from one of the engineers. Systematically, he marked off each path he tried.
Joe’s reports on his searches seemed to overcome, or at least to balance, Nora’s worries about the growing gap between their ages. On the nights when neither of them had a shift, they would eat dinner at one of their regular spots or pick up soup and sandwiches to have in their room. They might listen to a radio show, and after Joe checked the evening sports pages, the two of them would stretch out, end to end on the couch, and study the real estate ads in all the New York papers. As the evening wore on, they would take part in what became an almost nightly routine.
“It’d be nice if the dream apartment had a fireplace,” Nora would say.
“I don’t care about a fireplace.”
“It’d be nice if it had a view.”
“I don’t care about a view. But you’ll have to have light,” Joe would say. “Light for your painting.”
And Nora would snuggle her feet up beside him, allowing herself to be enthralled by his understanding and by the future it seemed to make possible.
They called each other “pal” and “honey.” They looked back at each other—sometimes two or three times—whenever they parted in the concourse. They teased each other and played. Alone with her, Joe sometimes did a silly walk or spoke in a bad foreign accent. She learned to appreciate the subtleties of a football game. He posed for her—once even nude.
She knew when his shoulders were hurting. He knew when she needed to stand outdoors. They took their coffee the same way—and never at Alva’s.
* * *
—
On a warm, purple evening in the last week of April, Joe went south instead of north on Lexington and found himself standing before a six-story brick building with a coffee shop on the ground floor and what looked—from the windows he could see—like a mix of offices and apartments.
He was between Fortieth and Forty-first streets, just a block and a half down Lexington. Remembering the awful night at the Cascades, when Nora had started to flicker out, he was conservative with his estimate of the building’s height: eighty feet tall, if that. The next morning, he borrowed the surveyor’s tape again and measured the route. About 650 feet from M42. Nora could make it here easily, with yards to spare. All he would need would be a vacancy in the apartment house, a rent he could afford, and an absolute promise from Nora that a two-block taste of freedom wouldn’t make a three-block or four-block taste become irresistible.
* * *
—
“Lexington Avenue and Forty-first!” Joe shouted when he got back to their hotel room. His arms were spread wide; his bangs were falling on his forehead like swipes of paint.
“You found it?”
“I found it!”
“How far away?”
“One block over and one and a half blocks down. And it’s only six floors. So even if you stood on the roof on your tiptoes, you’d still be safe.”
“Are you serious?”
“Don’t I look serious?”
“Well, actually, you look kind of goofy,” she said, but the way he really looked was handsome and proud. He lifted her in his arms the way he would have if there had been a threshold to cross. With one finger she scooped the bangs from his forehead and kissed him there, then on his cheek, then on his lips.
“And there’s an apartment for rent there?” she asked.
“Oh, that I don’t know yet,” Joe said. He put her back down. “But it just looks right. And it’s even got a coffee shop on the ground floor.”
“So I’ll have room to paint, and we’ll have our own furniture, and you won’t have to keep hunting down a Floating Key?”
“That’s right.”
“But what do you want?” she asked him for the umpteenth time. “What do you really want to have in the dream apartment? Other than me?”
“Hmm,” Joe said. “How about running water?”
“Really.”
“Or maybe electric light.”
“You do dream big, Joe Reynolds.”
He took her in his arms again. “Yes I do,” he said.
* * *
—
They were agreed, and they were giddy. Two evenings later, never mind that they’d each worked long hours on their separate shifts, Joe and Nora decided to take the walk to Lexington Avenue.
It was the last week of May. Nora reached for Joe’s hand, looking up at the cloudless sky, inhaling deeply, as if what she was hoping to smell was cut grass and roses.
“Come on,” they said at the same moment.
On her own, Nora had already made several short trips outside, but this was the first time she’d be going farther than one block. As she looked down the street, Joe saw on her lovely face an uncharacteristic pallor. He knew that she was scared, and he was too, and they were both struggling to hide it.
With Nora’s window still doubly blocked—by tar and by the servicemen’s lounge—they both knew that any misstep might keep her out of the terminal for years. They passed a woman walking a poodle, another with a little boy. When they reached the corner of Forty-first, they looked up at the building across the street.
“This is it?” Nora asked.
“This is it.”
“It’s wonderful!”
“I’ve counted out the steps,” Joe said. “But if it turns out I counted wrong—”
Nora said: “If it’s too far, you’ll pull me back, just like you did at the Cascades.”
Joe braced himself exactly the way he did in the tower on the busiest days, the days when the trains came in three a minute and his whole body was on alert.
“Walk behind me,” Nora told him, “so that way you can grab me.”
He nodded.
She took a deep breath. “Here I go,” she said.
It felt much the way it had during their first experiment, the one on the Biltmore’s low roof. Holding Joe’s hand, Nora went forward, taking each new step with her left foot, then bringing the right up behind it, as if she were leading him onto a narrow ledge. But she crossed the street without a hint of a flicker, and her hand never lost a bit of its warmth.
The building was red brick, with an entrance that sat under a high arched doorway.
“Another arch!” Nora said.
“I thought you’d like that.”
“Just like my window.”
She leaned against his shoulder and squeezed his arm.
It was too late to try to ring any bells or knock on any doors, so Nora and Joe just wandered slowly back to the terminal. The walk was magnificent: slow but not too timid, cautious but not too fearful. The sun had set, and the sky was turning pink. On Forty-first Street, defying Nora’s proper upbringing and Joe’s manly code, they kissed, right out in the open, as if they were any lovestruck couple out on a dizzy spring night.
* * *
—
After an owl shift, Nora would usually come back to the room to sleep, and if Joe wasn’t around when she woke, she would either sketch at the window or pore over a stack of magazines. That was nothing new, but whereas before she had read the articles to catch up on the past she had missed and the styles, movies, and plays that were current, now she turned the pages imagining the world she would build with Joe. After all, a dream apartment would need to be furnished.
In Cosmopolitan, she found an ad for electric clocks: twenty-five models in all different styles. In Harper’s Bazaar, she contemplated the colors and patterns of linens and linoleum tiles. Between those magazines and Life, Look, and Collier’s, she weighed the pros and cons of different paint colors, toasters, glasses, tablecloths, and lamps. She saw other things they would need as well: soaps and floor waxes, whisk brooms and mops, and, most appealing of all somehow, an upright Hoover vacuum cleaner “for every woman who is proud of her home.”
Home. Even in Nora’s childhood, even in Paris, even in the first years of Manhattanhenge bringing her back, the word home had never meant so much to her.
6
YOU CAN’T
MEASURE WORRY
1943
Home had a different, unavoidably worrisome, meaning for Joe. Out in Queens, home was still a bundle of obligations and memories, comforts and burdens. By mid-March, more than a month had gone by without a word from Finn, and Faye had summoned Joe to go to church and then help the kids plant a Victory Garden in the backyard. Sitting beside her in St. Anthony’s, he could feel how frightened she was. There was fear in the way she sat—straight and stiff—and even in the way her flat eyes only pretended to focus on Father Gregory. Meanwhile Mike, on Faye’s other side, slumped sullenly, jiggling his left leg on a restless foot, a habit of Finn’s that Joe had never noticed in Mike.
In the pews, the congregation’s many losses had become strikingly plain. Some of the worshippers wore black armbands. Others wore short black lace veils. Still others simply had the empty look Joe recognized as secret pain. Outside, the usual Lenten display had been set up beside the steps: the old jars of rocks, the purple cloth, and the just-cut pussy willows shuddering stiffly in the breeze. Joe looked on as the kids and Faye took out the small stones they had brought to add to the arrangement. Everyone was hushed. Standing in the church’s wide doorway, Father Gregory seemed to be depending on the frame for
support.
At home, as soon as the kids went upstairs to change out of their church clothes, Faye put her elbows on the table and her cheeks in her hands.
“So tell me, Joey,” she said. “Did you give up this Nora for Lent?”
Joe glanced at the backyard. “I need to borrow a pair of Finn’s work pants,” he said.
“What are you hiding?” Faye asked. “Is she way too old? Is she way too young? She’s married, right? Just tell me that.”
“We’ve got a whole garden to plant,” Joe said.
* * *
—
Joe could remember one long-ago spring—Finn must have been nearing his teens—when Katherine had insisted both boys help her with the flower garden that rimmed the brick-laid backyard. Joe realized now that their mother must have been hoping that the novelty would distract Finn from the rowdies down the block, the ones she always called “them maggots.”
Joe could recall Katherine showing them how to test the soil in their palms, how it had to be moist enough to hold together but not so moist that it couldn’t still crumble a bit when you opened your fist. And Joe could remember realizing, when the earth smelled like the potato drawer and the onion bin, that really it was the potato drawer and the onion bin that smelled like the earth.
Joe hadn’t planted a single thing since then, nor could he remember having had a chance to spend a whole day working outside. But the Department of Agriculture had issued a call for Americans to create Victory Gardens, and all up and down the residential streets of Queens, little patches of green were being coaxed up and along. The idea was that if people grew and ate their own food, then more farm-grown food could get to the boys overseas.
Showing the flag was only part of the point today, Joe understood. The rest was to distract Mike, just as Katherine had done with Finn so many years before. Faye had made Mike get the official garden planning booklet from the local home demonstration agent and had made him haul all the necessary supplies to the backyard. So when Joe, now dressed in work clothes with his sleeves rolled up, stepped outside, he found bags of soil and compost, a box of seed packets, some rusty trowels, a rake, a shovel, and a watering can.
Time After Time Page 24