by Brian Morton
Semi-perfect. That seemed like a cue for her to ask a question: What do you mean by that?
But she didn’t ask, because she thought she already knew what he meant. He meant that the only thing that was missing in his life was her.
She moved things around on the tabletop, which was composed of large black and white squares. The hot sauce captured the pepper, and then the ketchup put the mustard in check. “Are you still in touch with Meredith?” she said.
“Yeah. She moved to Texas.”
“Really? Why?”
Isaac started to explain why she’d moved, and Nora didn’t listen. Instead, she wondered why she’d asked. Meredith was a mutual acquaintance of no great importance to either of them.
“And then she decided Austin was more like New York than New York was, or something like that,” Isaac was saying. “Austin is what New York was in 1962. I think that’s what she said.”
Nora reached across the table and put her hand over his. “I’m sorry. I don’t really want to know about Meredith. And you probably don’t want to talk about her. I’m sorry for asking.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“It was like our conversation was getting too real. I was trying to hide out in small talk. But I don’t want to do that with you. If I can’t be real with you, then I’m finished.”
“I’m glad you’re not finished,” he said.
5
NORA LIVED ON 108TH AND BROADWAY. Isaac had parked near there, so they walked together.
“Do you like it up here?”
“I do,” she said. “It’s exciting.”
She used to live in the provinces—in darkest Brooklyn. She’d moved into Manhattan a year ago.
She loved living up here. She was telling Isaac a story about how she’d lucked into her apartment; as she talked, she was reveling in the day. It was a summerlike afternoon in the middle of May; Broadway was crowded with Columbia students, and Nora wondered about each one they passed: two fierce young men who looked as if they’d just been arguing about Trotsky; a woman browsing at the table in front of the art supply store, with a meditative expression and independent-minded hair; a Paul Bunyan type in a flannel shirt and overalls, who looked as if he’d been shipped in a box from New Hampshire. Isaac, though he was a photographer, trained to see, had his attention fastened to Nora so closely that he didn’t seem to notice any of it. A beautiful young woman on Rollerblades swept by—tall, long-legged, in a halter top and shorts—and Isaac didn’t even take a glance.
“Why don’t you come with me?” he said. “I only need to work for an hour. Then I can introduce you to the mysteries of New Jersey.”
“That sounds like every girl’s dream. I wish I could. But I have to see Billie tonight.”
Billie was Nora’s aunt. Isaac smiled when he heard her name. He’d always liked her; everyone did. Billie was the most lovable person Nora knew. If you didn’t love Billie, Nora sometimes thought, you didn’t love life.
“How’s she doing?”
“Not that great. They found a lump in her breast, and she has to go in for some tests this week.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Please give her my love.” He opened the door of his car. “How about tomorrow?”
She felt weird about the idea of spending an evening with him. She could do it; Benjamin was at a conference in Berlin. But still.
She sometimes thought that she and Benjamin abided by an unwritten law that held that both could retain the opposite-sex friends they’d had before they met but couldn’t make any new ones. Maybe most couples abide by that law.
She hadn’t seen Isaac in years. Did he count as an old friend or a new one?
And how about sleeping with him? Did the unwritten law permit her to sleep with guys she’d slept with before she met Benjamin?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll call you.”
She didn’t want to kiss him good-bye. In the old days, they’d never had a kiss that meant nothing. A Saturday-morning kiss on the street corner when he was heading off to do his laundry and she was buying the paper, and they’d be seeing each other again in half an hour—even when it was that kind of kiss, it never felt like a small thing.
But she didn’t know if she was prepared for something like that now.
So no kiss.
She took off her watch, dropped it into the heart pocket of his shirt, and patted him there.
6
ISAAC DROVE BACK TO New Jersey, thinking about Muhammad Ali.
He was excited. And upset. And excited.
When Nora had called him last week, out of the blue—but not out of the blue at all, because he was always thinking about her—he’d had a mystical feeling that life was coming full circle. He’d always believed that someday she’d see the mistake she’d made when she left him, and that she’d come back to him.
But she evidently hadn’t come back into his life to repair her mistake. It was impossible to tell why she’d come back. Or if she’d really come back at all.
He drove to his office, got some coffee, and forced himself to concentrate. He had to choose among sixteen photos of a town council meeting in Leonia; he had to choose all the photos for the sports section; and he had to put together a montage to illustrate an article on Disneyland. All in the next half hour.
He was mad at himself for asking her to get together. He should have let well enough alone.
It was disturbing to have Nora back in his life. It had taken him so long to wean himself, so long to let go of the longing. If he ever had. Which he hadn’t.
Not too long after Nora left him, Isaac had spent a few months with a woman named Clarissa. She was bright, interested in him, accomplished—she was a cellist—and she was lovely; some people would have considered her far more attractive than Nora. One Saturday night they were in a bookstore on Broadway—he was still living in the city then—and he ran into Nora. Clarissa was upstairs in the poetry section, Isaac was browsing through photography magazines, and Nora floated over to say hello. They didn’t say much—just exchanged a few superficialities—and they didn’t touch, but he felt as if she’d placed her hand on his skin. When Nora left and he found Clarissa again, leafing through the love poems of Pablo Neruda, he knew he couldn’t be with her. He didn’t know if he’d ever see Nora again, but he knew he couldn’t be with Clarissa.
In 1978, when he was in his teens, he had seen Leon Spinks, a negligible fighter, take the heavyweight title away from Muhammad Ali, who had grown listless and slow-footed with age. After the fight, talking with reporters, Spinks had graciously and accurately said, “He’s still the greatest. I’m just the latest.”
Nora, Isaac was thinking, was the Muhammad Ali of his romantic life. The women who’d come after her had had their virtues, but each of them had merely been the latest. And because of the memory of Nora, he’d been unable to give himself fully to anyone else. There wasn’t room in his heart, it seemed, for more than one person.
And now she was in some sort of crisis of the spirit.
It was hard to listen to her talk about her crisis of the spirit. It was hard to listen to anything that didn’t lead to him.
He sat at his computer, scrolling through photographs of Daisy Duck. From some angles Daisy was pretty sexy.
While Nora had talked about needing to change her life, needing to rededicate herself to her work, he’d been thinking, Do you really think that’s enough? Isn’t it fucking obvious what you need? Isn’t it fucking clear to you that the big thing missing in your life is me?
When had men become women and women become men?
It had happened at some point during his lifetime. When he watched movies from the forties and fifties, the men and women struck him as so different from the men and women of today that he sometimes felt as if he was watching science fiction. The wimpiest man of the forties was manlier than the manliest man of today.
Pining after a woman for years, resenting her because she’s more intere
sted in her career than in being with you—how had this happened?
He didn’t even know why he loved her.
Yes he did. He did know.
She excited him. She thrilled him. He’d never felt bored with her. He was always eager to hear what she had to say. In the old days, when they sometimes went to dinner parties where they had to sit apart from each other, the experience itself counted for nothing; what counted for everything was talking about it with her later. In the midst of the party, he’d sometimes watch her from across the room, watch the play of intelligence and humor in her eyes, and feel lucky to know that later that night he’d find out what she’d been thinking.
At the diner, listening to her story, he’d found it hard to believe that she was feeling so defeated. It wasn’t the Nora he knew.
Years ago, shortly after he and Nora had started seeing each other, she lent her laptop to her friend Helen, whose four-year-old son got hold of it and zapped out of existence a story Nora had been working on for six months. Nora hadn’t saved it to disk, hadn’t printed it out. After a night during which she looked seasick, and in which she watched the entire six-and-a-half-hour Godfather Saga on TV because it cheered her to see people blowing one another away, she calmly started afresh on the story the next morning. “This version’ll probably be better,” she’d said.
That was the Nora he knew.
The Nora he knew had a quietly ferocious tenacity that wouldn’t let anything stand in her way.
She was more beautiful than ever, in his eyes. This was maddening; it would have been easier, in a way, if she weren’t.
It was funny to think that when he first met her, he wasn’t even that attracted to her. He liked her immediately, but she looked too pure to have lustful thoughts about. She looked very healthy—that was his first impression. She had the glowing skin of an athlete: a runner or a swimmer or a rock climber. Her nose was slightly, interestingly, crooked—probably, Isaac assumed, from some challenging activity too zealously pursued. A kayaking accident, maybe, or a pole-vaulting mishap. She didn’t instantly stir up feelings of desire; she stirred up thoughts of hearty outdoor activities.
When he got to know her, he learned that she wasn’t athletic in the least. The freshness of her skin, the subtle muscles of her arms and legs, her swimmer’s shoulders—all this was part of her genetic inheritance, entirely unearned. She’d never been on a hike in her life, and she didn’t even know how to swim. She hardly ever left the city. Once he’d managed to drag her off to a weekend in Maine, and when they got back to Manhattan, after they emerged from Grand Central, as they stood in the twilight with the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building blazing above them, she’d spread out her arms and said, “This is God’s country, my friend!”
She liked to portray herself as a neurotic writer, housebound, averse to natural light, but that wasn’t the way he saw her. He still saw her as a mountain climber, or as the moral equivalent. Confident and strong. She was a small slim slight woman, but he thought of her as the person who, if you were pinned beneath a car, would be the most likely to be able to free you.
After she broke up with him, one or two of his friends had suggested that his estimate of her—her brilliance, her beauty, her force—was exaggerated, and that he’d soon be able to see this, soon be able to downsize her in his imagination. But, for better or for worse, he never had.
He wondered whether she was really going to call him again. She’d always been impulsive. She was always getting in touch with people she hadn’t spoken to in ages. She’d call up to apologize for something she’d done years earlier, usually something the other person didn’t even remember. And then, after that, she might not call again, and if the other person called her, she might forget to call back.
He wondered whether he was going to have to wait another five years.
Didn’t some guy have to wait seven years for a woman in the Bible—and then have to wait another seven years? The guy who wanted to marry Rachel, but ended up marrying Leah by mistake? He tried to call it up, but he couldn’t quite remember the story.
7
NORA STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK, waiting to catch the keys. Her aunt Billie lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on West Fifty-first Street, in the neighborhood that used to be called Hell’s Kitchen. Nora couldn’t remember what it was called now. Billie couldn’t buzz her visitors into the building, so she’d stand at the window and toss them a set of keys.
When Nora was a girl, she and her mother would come to New York to visit Billie two or three times a year, and she was always thrilled by the sight of Billie throwing down her keys. It seemed like something from a fairy tale—Rapunzel letting down her hair. It made her aunt seem magical.
Billie’s head appeared in the window.
“Hello, my dovecote,” she said. “Could you pick up my mail in the lobby? It’s the tiny key.”
She lobbed the keys down to the sidewalk. They were on a chain with a lucky rabbit’s foot.
Nora let herself into the lobby, got Billie’s mail, and made her way up the stairs, thinking she needed to exercise more. The stairwell smelled like boiled potatoes.
As she climbed the stairs, she was thinking about how to cheer Billie up. Two weeks ago, Billie had found a lump in her breast. A biopsy had revealed a cluster of irregularly shaped cells, and she was going in for a lumpectomy in two days.
She’d had breast cancer four years earlier; during the last six months she’d been starting to believe that she might have “beaten” it. But now there was this.
Nora tried to be cheery on the first two flights; on the next two she tried to be resolute. She was telling herself not to cave.
In three days, Nora was leaving for a month-long stay at MacDowell, the artists’ colony in New Hampshire. She’d never been to an artists’ colony before, but it sounded like paradise. She would get her own private cabin; a silent ghostly butler would leave breakfast and lunch at her door; and she’d have no responsibilities other than to write all day. Nora had applied on a whim—she didn’t think she’d have a chance of getting in. But she did get in, and now she couldn’t wait. With a month alone, with nothing to do but work, she might finally find her way back to writing short stories.
She’d heard a rumor that Grace Paley was going to be there. Grace Paley, whose stories, when Nora read them in her teens, had made her want to be a writer. A month of writing all day and then having dinner with Grace Paley!
Ever since Billie found out she’d need to have an operation, though, Nora had been thinking of giving up MacDowell. She was thinking she’d rather stay in the city and take care of her aunt. Now, on the stairs, she was telling herself not to do that. She’d be in New York for a couple of days after Billie’s operation, and after that she’d be in touch by phone. That was enough. You can take care of your loved ones and still take care of yourself.
Billie was waiting at her door, in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. When Nora came forward to kiss her, she closed her eyes and offered Nora her cheek—receiving the kiss with a childlike intensity, as if she wanted to store it on her skin so she could recollect the sensation later. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said.
She put her hands on Nora’s shoulders, beaming.
“I always forget how tiny you are,” Billie said. “You’re like a pocket pal.”
She hurried ahead of Nora into the living room, picked up a lint catcher—a plastic rolling pin with a sticky surface—and ran it over the easy chair. She performed the task with great enthusiasm but little craft; when she was done there were still wide patches of cat hair left untouched. Nora sat down anyway.
“Would you like some soda pop?”
“Sure. Thank you.”
Billie seemed very excited. It was as if she was so happy to see Nora that she’d forgotten what was in store for her that week. She was humming to herself as she poured Sprite into a glass. She came out of the kitchen with the glass in one hand and a box of prunes in the other.
“Prun
es?”
Nora declined the prunes.
“They’re all I have to snack on. I tried to order cheese and crackers from the deli but they don’t give me credit anymore.”
“Do you need some money?”
“No—thank you. I got my Social Security check yesterday. I can cash it this afternoon.”
Billie received monthly checks from her pension and from Social Security, and she lived in a rent-controlled apartment, but she was always broke by the end of the month. “I’m not a balance-the-checkbook kind of girl,” she’d once explained.
When Nora was little, her aunt seemed to glide above the normal rules of existence. Life treated her generously. If she arrived at the bank at three, just as the guard was locking the door, she’d smile at him with a sort of hopeful helplessness, and he’d let her in. If she didn’t have the fare for a cab ride, she could charm the cabbie into taking her for free. When Nora was a girl, Billie’s life seemed to offer a glimpse of the magical possibilities of womanhood.
“Do you know they’re not called prunes anymore?” Billie said. “They’re called dried plums now. The fruit companies think prunes have a bad reputation.”
She removed one from the box and drew it toward her. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll still call you a prune.” Then she kissed it, and then she put it in her mouth.
Billie was the only family Nora had. Nora had no brothers or sisters, and her parents had died when she was still in her teens.
“Are you sure you want to come to the hospital with me?” Billie said.
“Of course I am. Of course.”
“You’re a state-of-the-art niece,” Billie said. She picked up her lint catcher again and ran it affectionately over Nora’s knee.
Nora didn’t feel state-of-the-art. She was feeling guilty: she hadn’t seen Billie in weeks.
“How have you been?” Nora said.
Stupid question, she thought, but Billie didn’t treat it as such.